Matthew Sutton’s ‘Chosen Land’ addresses American religious history as one of a luxurious pluralism—but he often crosses the line into a perhaps-overdone editorial voice that grates on the reader.
Books
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Review: The Big Apple in the 1980s
The New York that Jonathan Mahler describes in ‘The Gods of New York’ is unstable, vulgar and dangerous. But there is much more to the story of the city in the late 1980s.
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Review: Going nuclear—or not
Two new books—’Return to Fukushima’ and ‘Nuclear Is Not The Solution’—lay out the perils and ugly history of nuclear power.
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Review: Maritain’s artful scholasticism
Jacques Maritain’s thought can be intimidating to anyone without a strong background in theology or philosophy. But ‘The Christian Philosophy of Jacques Maritain’ can be a helpful introduction.
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Andre Dubus’s ‘A Father’s Story’: a short story with theological heft
For Andre Dubus, writing was a question of deciphering what was happening in the lives of his characters and translating that for others to see and understand—all of which can be seen clearly in “A Father’s Story.”
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Review: The joy of fandom
There are any number of excellent books about sports that shine a spotlight on particular teams or seasons or even players, but Michael Schur and Joe Posnanski’s “Big Fan: Two Friends, 82,490 Miles, and the Wild, Wonderful Sports We Love” is the new standard for celebrating the multifaceted nature of fandom itself.
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Bob Dylan and the Beatles: New book captures how music changes its makers
The musical and personal lives of Bob Dylan and the Beatles were intertwined in myriad ways, as author Jim Windolf teases out in his pleasurable new book, ‘Where the Music Had to Go: How Bob Dylan and the Beatles Changed Each Other—and the World.’
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‘Father, forgive me’: James O’Toole on Confession in America
In his artful account of American participation in the sacrament of confession, ‘For I Have Sinned: The Rise and Fall of Catholic Confession in America,’ James O’Toole offers a succinct analysis of when and why American Catholics partake of the sacrament.
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Review: Mario Vargas Llosa’s final book approaches the question of nationhood
His final work, published now for the first time in English, Mario Varvas Lloisa approaches the question of nationhood not in the abstract terms of a sociologist or philosopher, but obliquely, through a kind of literary ventriloquism, in a hybrid form combining the novel and essay.
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A history of British converts to Catholicism
In her new book, Melanie McDonagh gives us a rollicking account of a group of highly talented writers and artists as they make their way across the Tiber.