Books

I wonder if there is a new fascination for books about books especially those books we call classics Recently a group of sketches by Italo Calvino was published as Why Read the Classics Not long ago David Denby offered Great Books My Adventures With Homer Rousseau Woolf and Other Indestructib

T C Boyle rsquo s collected short stories 1998 amply confirmed his impressive imagination and facility with language and narration In these 16 new ones nine of which appeared in The New Yorker in recent years Boyle again displays his ease in entering the minds of his principal characters and

John Cornwell rsquo s latest effort at faithful constructive criticism following his highly controversial Hitler rsquo s Pope focuses on the factions and divisions within Roman Catholicism that virtually every Catholic experiences to a greater or lesser degree In a brief first chapter A Catholi

William J O rsquo Malley S J has been teaching theology for the past 30 years and has written a score of books In the introduction to his newest Choosing to Be Catholic he identifies the audience he hopes to attract those considering or participating in the Rite of Christian Initiation of Ad

No lover of film could dislike this book No one will read it cover to cover at least at one sitting but you can take long ambles in it and come away deeply refreshed and richly informed Searching for John Ford is well researched and well written This is no small feat for often these two traits

Laurence Sterne was a novelist a clergyman and briefly a farmer in the rough-and-tumble 18th century an era when the remedy for cattle plague was thought to be a pint of gin for the cattle not for the beleaguered farmer In his letters sermons and above all in his comic masterpiece The Life a

Dry Bones Rattling is a study of the community-organizing work of the Industrial Areas Foundation I A F in Texas and the Southwest The title comes from the story of Ezekiel in the valley of the dry bones the broken and dispirited community of Israel As Ezekiel prophesied the bones rattled and

According to Archbishop Tarcisio Bertone Secretary of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith it may be heretical to hold that church teaching can learn from experience If so this collection of essays is filled with heresy In the Vatican approach one begins with Catholic teaching Exper

Gail Buckley rsquo s synopsis of African American involvement in the armed forces adopts as its thesis Harriet Beecher Stowe rsquo s declaration in 1855 that blacks have always fought magnanimously and heroically for their country despite its violations of their civil rights To demonstrate Stowe rs

You Americans I was once reprimanded in Paris have little spirituality todayyou have only psychology Americans should not dismiss this scolding too quickly Kevin Gillespie rsquo s informal history of American Catholics and their embrace of psychology helps to put this issue in some perspective O