Books

ldquo In its field it is the best book ever written rdquo That was the most enthusiastic of the many enthusiastic assessments that greeted MacCulloch rsquo s book when it appeared in Britain last year It is an assessment with which I agree The book is a monumental achievement that takes readers

Nobel Prize-winner Jos Saramago must have been thinking of Franz Kafka rsquo s The Metamorphosis when he wrote this his latest novel In Kafka rsquo s tale Gregor Samsa awakens one morning to find he has been transmogrified into an insect something utterly other than what he once was In The Dou

Imagine this Your teenage son has been tortured to death under the regime of a Latin American military dictator Imagine too that instead of quietly succumbing to your grief you publicly denounce the murder and speak out against the regime mdash that of the Paraguayan dictator Alfredo Stroessner

The urge to reveal ourselves to others is often stifled by prudence One of the rewards of writing novels is that the inner hidden self of an author can be mined brought to the surface and exhibited as fiction As the Joseph Conrad scholar Norman Sherry demonstrates in his authorized biography of

Czeslaw Milosz rsquo s last collection of poems is a thoroughly typical series of lyric exercises deepening and enriching the concerns that preoccupied him during his long career as a poet The 32 poems in Second Space dwell on the mysteries of the human predicament and the movement of history towa

ldquo Those who live for a time in Rome experience the church rsquo s age but also its youth They experience the church rsquo s breadth and diversity its religious and human wealth but also the limits and weaknesses of its representatives and members rdquo So writes the widely respected Germa

Charles Dahm a Dominican priest is more than qualified to write about parish-based Hispanic ministry Like many U S priests of the Vatican II generation his first passion was Latin America where he steeped himself in Spanish as a missionary in Bolivia On his return to the United States he comp

James Gustave Speth dean and professor at Yale University rsquo s School of Forestry and Environmental Studies has written a lively conversational and yet very substantial examination of the failures of global environmental governance to date and an exploration of prospects for the future of the

In The Thing in the Forest the opening story of A S Byatt rsquo s latest collection two young girls evacuated during the last war to the English countryside witness a monstrous creature in a sunlit wood Rolling toward them devouring everything in their path comes a grotesque worm that appea

Novels inspired by great works of art are hardly novel but in the past several years their number seems to be growing Tracy Chevalier can claim some credit for the increase since her Girl With a Pearl Earring proved to be both a best-seller and the inspiration for a successful film and her secon