Naomi Klein’s new book serves as a kind of sociopolitical post-mortem of the Covid era, in which our social divisions and paranoias only grew more strident. It is also tragically timely.
Books
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Review: Peter Brown’s memoir details a life of joyful scholarship
Peter Brown’s ‘Journeys of the Mind’ presents a very attractive picture of one man’s life immersed in the world of books and arguments—one that also seems like a lot of fun.
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Review: Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s books continue to cast a spell over readers.
Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s novels ‘Silver Nitrate’ and ‘Mexican Gothic’ feature complicated heroines, compelling plots and supernatural elements solidly grounded in research.
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Contemplating eternity: Bishop Gumbleton’s life of witness
Bishop Thomas Gumbleton appears in ‘No Guilty Bystander’ to be an institutional “lifer,” resolved to remain part of a gradually evolving system but reserving the right to dissent when he sees fit.
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Review: Alice McDermott belongs among the great Catholic novelists.
The good news for anyone whose literary tastes have been strongly influenced by the Catholic novels of Graham Greene, Evelyn Waugh, Francois Mauriac, Georges Bernanos and more is this: The new Alice McDermott novel, ‘Absolution,’ has arrived.
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Fiction as a business—with a Catholic subtext
‘Big Fiction’ is a book full of cogent analysis, ambitious argument, juicy quotes from insiders and a demonstration of the central role of Catholics in American publishing.
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Review: The story of Thomas Merton’s forgotten brother
‘Remembering the Forgotten Merton’ is a brief biography of Thomas Merton’s brother John Paul, whom Merton fans know primarily through the powerful elegy that Merton composed to mark his brother’s death as a fighter pilot in the Second World War.
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Review: Contemplating death, eschatology and eternity
John E. Thiel of Fairfield University ventures to propose a “thick” eschatology based on the idea of a continuation of the human response to grace into an afterlife in ‘Now and Forever: A Theological Aesthetics of Time.’
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Review: ‘Escape to Florence’ is a refreshingly apolitical novel in our hyper-politicized age
‘Escape to Florence’ stays within the bounds of its own story: the intimate and historical particulars of dual love stories, and the rich Italian backdrop against which both are set.
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Review: August Wilson, a playwright of multitudes
In ‘August Wilson: A Life,’ an excellent new biography by Patti Hartigan, we read of the winding path that led Wilson to his ascendance, then delves into the tumults and triumphs of his two decades at the heights of achievement.