Books

If you like mysteries read this book Even if you don rsquo t like mysteries read itbecause it may save your life The world-famous epidemiologist Devra Davis tracks a killer responsible for millions of avoidable ailments like heart disease and cancer She explains for example why women with high

The comedian Steve Martin once quipped that the problem with studying philosophy in college is that later in life one always remembers just enough of it to make one rsquo s conscience uncomfortable In his new novel The Cave Nobel laureate Jos eacute Saramago hearkens back to perhaps the best kno

Chapters 6 through 8 of the Book of Genesis tell how God in response to human wickedness sent a flood to wipe out the human race sparing only the righteous Noah and his family and the animals they gathered into their ark The biblical account interweaves two versions an older one conventionally

In Stanzas From the Grande Chartreuse 1855 Matthew Arnold famously agonized over being caught between two conflicting worlds a beloved but dead faith and whatever unknown but no doubt chilling forces that would replace it Compared with the complex predicaments facing Yezad Chenoy and other ch

The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 signaled the end of the policy of containment that had guided American foreign policy during the cold war Some commentators declared the Soviet demise to be the end of history and faulted presidents George H W Bush and Bill Clinton as bunglers They missed an e

If history is bunk any history of the Oscars is full of it We all know designation as Best Picture hardly means a film was the best movie of the year As Emanuel Levy readily concedes in All About Oscar Hollywood rsquo s decision making has always been flawed and as he details in some excellent

Brennan Manning describes himself as a vagabond evangelist Author of 11 books he leads spiritual retreats in the United States and Europe His life story reads like a catalog of been there done that A former Franciscan a former Roman Catholic priest a formerly married man a recovering alcohol

John Haughey rsquo s m tier is giving new life to moribund theological terms or those worn threadbare by overuse He strips terms bare reconstitutes them and then often stuns us with the precision of a polished and sometimes newly minted vocabulary The starting point and purpose of Haughey rsquo s

After completing a story on the Catholic nuns rsquo pension fund in 1986 and being intrigued by the lives and contributions of American Catholic sisters John J Fialka began work on the book Sisters Catholic Nuns and the Making of America Fialka a reporter for The Wall Street Journal rsquo s W

In his foreword to Finding the Treasure Within A Woman rsquo s Journey into Preaching the spiritual author Ronald Rolheiser O M I writes We are forever caught up in situations that are less than ideal full of tension and fraught with potential for self-pity and bitterness So what can we