Arts & Culture

A dark joke about prognostication concerning the successor to Pope John Paul II is that he outlived many of those once considered most likely to succeed A new book on papal succession Heirs of the Fisherman was published not long before the pope took his precipitous turn for the worse While John-

Derek Walcott published his first book of verse Twenty Five Poems at the age of 18 then went on to a career that has produced 20 books of poetry as well as several dozen plays and a dozen works of non-fiction Now we have The Prodigal an epic from this postcolonial nomad who has drifted among Eu

The Rough Rider the Bull Moose the president who used his office as a bully pulpit the man who carried the big stick the asthmatic child who spent mornings on horseback the hunter of lions who nevertheless spared one teddy bearwhat reader cannot already limn the life of the 26th American presid

It has been 90 years since the beginning of the Great War in 1914 longer than the time between Fort Sumter and Pearl Harbor To write about it now is to do history not passionate political attack of the kind Erich Maria Remarque launched in his All Quiet on the Western Front when the war was fres

Sarah Vowell whose idiosyncratic voice in both senses is familiar to listeners of National Public Radio rsquo s This American Life expended a considerable amount of effort trekking to places associated with events of national tragedynamely the murders of Presidents Lincoln Garfield and McKinle

In the wake of the tsunami in the Indian Ocean as the death toll quickly climbed into the tens of thousands many religious leaders and op-ed pundits focused on a single question Where was God For nonbelievers the catastrophe while tragic was easily explainable Science tells us that a violent

David Plante was born in Providence R I in 1940 the next to last of the seven sons of Anaclet and Albina Plante French-Canadians who were called somewhat sneeringly in Yankee New England Canucks Anaclet was a stoical taciturn quarter-breed Blackfoot Indian who worked humbly for a manufactu

This slender but powerful book describes how an upper-middle-class parish in Lima Peru was transformed in concert with the poor people in its midst largely through the efforts of its founding pastor The pastor who is also the author of Birth of a Church Joseph Nangle O F M recounts how this