Books

One might not expect a book about Carthusians ldquo the Western world rsquo s most austere monastic order rdquo to be a page turner but this sensitively written volume is just that The author reconstructs the pre-1965 Carthusian way of life so vividly that the reader nearly shivers with the mo

For most people spring means warm weather the return of birds and the flowering of nature For serious baseball fans it means spring training the anticipation of a new season and time to read a book about the game A good choice would be former baseball Commissioner Fay Vincent rsquo s opening v

The award-winning poetry of Louise Gl ck former poet laureate of the United States is like the fiction of Henry James the more you reread it the more it entrances yet the more elusive it proves There are 17 poems in this slim volume a handful of them are multipart Thematically and in many ot

Interview with James Martin S J on WHYY Radio about his book Readers of spiritual autobiographies possess some inner verifier that helps them sniff out the phoniesthose who pose posture and pontificateand to affirm those who risk exposing their fumbling and bumbling their reticence and resist

Once upon a time all Francophones were taught to write clearly and distinctly la Descartes nowadays it seems they are trying their best to write obscurely la Michel Foucault And Abdellah Hammoudi a Morocco-born Princeton anthropologist with a Ph D from the Sorbonne 1977 succeeds onl

As if religion did not have enough problems Sam Harris in The End of Faith condemns the three great Abrahamic religions as the cause of violence and war in the world A little shocking and indeed offensive to people who try to get through life rsquo s daily trials in a moral and faith-filled way T

Jorge Luis Borges the Argentinian writer of short elegant metaphysical fictional pieces wrote in 1957 A Manual of Fantastic Zoology In 1967 an expanded version was published under the title The Book of Imaginary Beings Two years later a further expanded edition appeared an edition that Andrew

In his new short story collection T C Boyle has gone a step further than William Butler Yeats who conveyed in his poem ldquo The Second Coming rdquo the alienation and disconnectedness of 20th-century life with the memorable image ldquo the falcon cannot hear the falconer rdquo Boyle descr