Books

This is an important book with much to offer but it is also disappointing Its importance lies in three converging factors The first and most obvious is the subject Martin Luther is a person of almost mythic proportions in the history of the West By his prophetic stance he almost single-handed

Invariably reviewers of writings by the Rev Andrew Greeley feel obliged to mention how much he writes which is a lot Few bother to note how certain basic themes run like threads through his work particularly when Greeley reflects on the mountain of data he has produced over a very long career a

This book takes its title from an observation made by Thomas Jefferson in 1816 ldquo Old Europe will have to lean on our shoulders and to hobble along by our side under the monkish trammels of priests and kings as she can What a colossus shall we be rdquo Niall Ferguson professor of financia

The insufferable anonymous narrator of Notes From Underground 1864 is the first great example of Dostoyevsky rsquo s genius for creating paradoxical witnesses to Christianitytwisted truth-telling unbelievers like Svidrigaylov in Crime and Punishment Ippolit in The Idiot Shatov in The Possessed

With these two books of translated sonnets one under its own label and one through a subsidiary Farrar Straus and Giroux tightens its claim to a place on the top rung of literary publishers The sonnet is about as much in vogue these days as the gavotte but we have to admire the great practition

In this richly documented and thoroughly engaging memoir Joseph A Califano Jr recalls his years in Washington as a member of several administrations and as a partner in a powerful law firm From this vantage point Califano observed and participated in the national crises and unsettling cultural c

One might approach this book as a field guide to the multiple species of church or early Christian assembly to be found in the New Testament The text remains rooted in the world of first-century Christianity The Rev Raymond Collins professor of New Testament at The Catholic University of America

The dean of the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University and assistant secretary of defense in the Clinton administration Joseph S Nye Jr coined the term ldquo soft power rdquo in the late 1980 rsquo s In Bound to Lead 1990 and The Paradox of American Power 2001 he developed the

While Ronald Reagan tagged Democrats with his tax and spend label it was his 1980 electoral adversary Jimmy Carter who while governing Georgia in the 1970 rsquo s pioneered zero-based budgeting in government the system by which each program rsquo s very existence must be justified every time spe

If Chinua Achebe and Wole Soyinka are arguably the grandfathers of Nigerian literature and Ben Okri and Buchi Emecheta are their successors Chris Abani Chimamanda Adichie and Helen Habila would appear to be coming into their own these days as the next wave Adichie author of Purple Hibiscus Alg