Books

Nearly a century ago W E B Du Bois predicted that the problem of the 20th century would be the problem of the color line This was no less the problem of the 19th century But the contours of racism drastically changed in the 20th century as blacks moved north to Detroit and Chicago from the pla

Anyone who thinks that biblical scholarship is a dry academic discipline dealing with ancient texts whose privileged position has long been accepted and whose interpretation over the centuries is pretty well established should read this book The interpretation of the Bible is in fact in ferment m

I rsquo m always drawn to books that tell of people who step out of their comfort zones and live on the edgeespecially for the sake of the Gospel Spiritual passion is an amazing power and these stories of St Ignatius himself and his faithful sons in prison show that spiritual power at work We se

This short but worthwhile book takes its title from Franklin Delano Roosevelt rsquo s 1941 State of the Union address By the third freedom after freedom of speech and freedom of worship the president meant freedom from want But as George McGovernformer senator and Democratic presidential nomine

The tale begins in the spring of 1945 when a war-weary world began to prepare for peace and dream of freedom The delegates of 50 nations who gathered in San Francisco that April forged a charter for the United Nations that pledged each nation to promote the rights of all individuals No one had y

In novels such as Mary Reilly and Italian Fever Valerie Martin made her reputation balancing historical locations and characters with the social detail that we expect from comedies of manners She has excelled in tracing how undercurrents of emotion become visible flirting with the Gothic traditi

In our Amazon com Borders rsquo n rsquo Barnes amp Noble world we non-academics at least no longer pay much attention to libraries When was the last time you got worked up over anything connected with a library shortened hours confusing online catalogues Well for many Americans all that

Niall Ferguson is one of the leading mdash and almost certainly the most controversial mdash historian in contemporary Britain He last shocked his compatriots with The Pity of War which argued that Britain was as much to blame as Germany for World War I that the war could have been avoided and th

Historians and political scientists endlessly debate the sources of change in human societies What is more important in epochal transformation ideas or institutions personalities or power structures material or intellectual motives In the field of Russian studies the end of the cold war and i

Last Christmas a Canadian journal reported that a feminist scholar had attacked the prevalence of the image of Frosty the Snowman on seasonal cards and gift-wrap as an emblem of domineering patriarchy Frosty she grumped is a WEM White Euro-Male fat and overstuffed to boot Exceptional Not when