Books

Around Jesus rsquo time roughly from 20 B C to A D 70 Jews especially in Jerusalem developed the practice of a two-stage burial The corpse would first be laid out on a shelf cut into the wall of a burial cave and allowed to decompose Then a year later the bones would be gathered up and pl

Lest anyone forget a war is still being fought in Afghanistan Moreover the capture or death of Osama bin Laden does not signal victory in that campaign If the objective is to make that region a less receptive host to future terrorists then Afghans on the ground will decide success This will be

Those of us who knew Paul Dinter as the Catholic chaplain at Columbia University in the 1970 rsquo s and 80 rsquo s were presented with a personable intellectually rigorous and obviously virtuous priest in a crisp Roman collar and well-tailored black suit It was not that he was an unblinking spear

In a story carried by National Public Radio on Jan 2 2003 the correspondent Silvia Poggioli reported that 27 years after the death of Francisco Franco there is increasing interest in Spain in uncovering the brutal history of the Franco dictatorship It would seem then that the appearance of th

John L rsquo Heureux began his career as a novelist writing about leaving the priesthood in the 70 rsquo s in Tight White Collar and The Clang Birds I was then America rsquo s literary editor and the magazine published reviews of both of them The second book was reviewed by Doris Grumbach as I r

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

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

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