Books

Graham Greene has had a difficult time winning the title of ldquo Catholic Novelist rdquo mdash one that he never wanted anyway At the beginning of his career he was dismissed as a man who wrote about bad Catholics mdash the whiskey priest The Power and the Glory Sarah The End of the Affair

Many consider Karl Rahner one of the greatest Catholic theologians of the past century Indeed he has been deemed a contemporary father of the church Now Rahner has the honor of a volume in the prestigious Cambridge Companion series The Rahner volume has been edited most capably by Declan Marmion

Everything about this book is elegant Embossed printing on the book jacket fits exquisitely the beautiful rendering of a medieval painting of a youthful bejeweled Mary Magdalene Equally appealing is the typeset and book design Instead of footnote numbers cluttering the text scholarly notes appe

The distinguished social historian William H Chafe author of significant studies of civil rights the women rsquo s movement and liberalism considers in Private Lives Public Consequences how the personal becomes political Starting with the old-fashioned conviction that individual leaders make a

This year rsquo s hurricanes floods and earthquakes produced such unforgettable apocalyptic scenes of devastation that they may well have altered at least temporarily the imaginative context within which we read Wendell Berry rsquo s new collection of poems many of which celebrate the serene n

In an utterly captivating piece of historical fiction Julie Baumgold has crafted a multifaceted gem of a novel that chronicles the history of the R gent diamond the central piece of the precious stone collection of the French throne Spirited out of India in 1702 by Robert Pitt the son of Thomas

Readers of this absorbing book will learn a great deal about a politically ambitious English immigrant named Daniel Horsmanden who as a judge on New York rsquo s Supreme Court played a pivotal role in the transmutation of a sequence of robberies and suspicious fires in 1741 into a vast conspiracy

Man of letters Public intellectual Cultural critic Feuilletoniste Whatever he was exactly they don rsquo t make them like that anymore and the more rsquo s the pity Once upon a time writers like Edmund Wilson Mary McCarthy Irving Howe Alfred Kazin or even George Orwell armed only with the

Over 70 years ago in 1934 the prize-winning biographer and historian Matthew Josephson published an eye-opening best seller entitled The Robber Barons Through prodigious research reports of congressional committees and ldquo inquiries rdquo done by state legislatures as key sources and gifted

In Blessed Among All Women Robert Ellsberg publisher of Orbis Books has compiled another unorthodox hagiography The book records the lives of 136 holy women Their stories eloquently told in short entries are grouped according to the virtues of the Beatitudes an arrangement that reflects Ells