Some suggestions from the staff of America for summer reading: books old and new, long and short, funny and sad.
Books
Posted inArts & Culture, Books
Review: America’s two-front dilemma in World War II
Books about World War II are ubiquitous in the nonfiction section, but “Hitler’s American Gamble” is the rare recent work with a genuinely new contribution to make, not just to our understanding of the past but also to our understanding of the present.
Posted inArts & Culture, Books
Review: A heroine’s journey
Lauren Groff’s new novel inverts Defoe’s “Robinson Crusoe” by casting a girl—and only briefly, much later on in the novel, the woman—as its heroine.
Posted inArts & Culture, Books
Review: Integralism, liberalism and the future of Christendom
In “All the Kingdoms of the World¸” Kevin Vallier engages with Catholic integralists, but he opens a bigger question: Is there such a thing as a Catholic politics?
Posted inArts & Culture, Books
Review: Mary Beard on Roman imperial power
An account of “what it meant to be a Roman emperor,” Mary Beard’s new book is also a sustained exploration of tradition embodied by an individual ruler.
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How Graham Greene’s ‘Brighton Rock’ helped me become Catholic
‘Brighton Rock’ made me feel ready to become a Catholic after so many years of deliberately not being one. I, too, frequently felt lost and agnostic. The story of Rose and Pinkie—so similar, so different, both human—was like a piece I found that had been missing from my puzzle.
Posted inArts & Culture, Books
A tribute to Alice Munro, true master of the short story
This review by Andre Dubus III of Alice Munro’s short story collection ‘Open Secrets’ was originally published in America magazine in 1995. Ms. Munro, a Nobel Laureate and acclaimed author, died on May 13, 2024, at 92.
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Review: Patrick Leahy, Senate stalwart
In ‘The Road Taken,’ Patrick Leahy’s deeply personal new memoir, he writes lovingly about his family, his Catholic faith and his home state but seems focused largely on describing the Washington, D.C., that was—and what it has become.
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Review: Flannery O’Connor’s sacramental vision
Jessica Hooten Wilson builds ‘Flannery O’Connor’s ‘Why Do the Heathen Rage?’: A Behind-the-Scenes Look at a Work in Progress’ around the previously unpublished manuscript pages of O’Connor’s third novel, which was never finished.
Posted inArts & Culture, Books
Review: In his latest book, Christian Wiman looks despair in the face
In ‘Zero at the Bone,’ Christian Wiman offers a prismatic series of 50 chapters (52, counting the mystical zeros at the beginning and end) featuring essays, poems, theological reflections, personal reminiscences and literary analyses.