There are various ways to render the past in order to understand what has happened and why Some historians favor a scrutiny of political and military leadership and so regale their readers with accounts of decisive elections won wars fought victoriously or to no successful outcome all told with
Books
Growing Poorly
Lives on the Line is a powerful account of what low-income Americans endure in their struggle to raise children in surroundings of poverty The detailed descriptions of these quot lives quot profiles of 10 families of diverse racial and geographical backgroundsare placed in meaningful context by th
Searching for Salvation
The T S Eliot industryall those library shelves of dissertations and articles and book-length studieshas issued at last in a model biography In it Lyndall Gordon sharpens and expands two earlier volumes on Eliot Early Years 1977 and New Life 1988 She has drawn on much correspondence and mat
Smart Rebel
With his latest novel Roddy Doyle the laureate of Dublin rsquo s present quot lower middle classes quot moves down the social ladder a notch or two and a century back in time His sympathy remains however clearly with the proles and in Henry Smart he has found his ideal protagoniststreet-sma
Behold the Mother
Is there a more remarkable spiritual writer today than Kathleen Norris And how full of paradoxes she is quot containing multitudes quot to take a leaf from Walt Whitman Coming from what she calls a quot thoroughly Protestant background quot her meditations have been both widely read and grea
Winners Behind the Wall
Doing Time 25 Years of Prison Writing is an anthology of short stories essays and poems written by incarcerated women and men over a 25-year period They were all prize winners in the yearly competition sponsored by the prison writing program of PEN Poets Playwrights Essayists Editors and Nove
Normative and Not
Martha Nussbaum a philosopher and professor of law and ethics at the University of Chicago is a prolific and forceful writer with wide-ranging interests in the classics literature jurisprudence politics feminist theory economics and international development But her primary orientation is et
One Body, Many Activities
Sixteen years after the well received first edition of this book appeared Thomas F O rsquo Meara O P the William K Warren Professor of Theology at the University of Notre Dame has updated his analysis of the source character and locus of ministry in the church Part systematic theology par
Moving With the Spirit
Some books merit reading because they explain the past unusually well Some books deserve to be read because they clarify the present with uncommon perspective But there are few books that manage to do both Journey in Faith and Fidelity Women Shaping Religious Life for a Renewed Church is one of
The Economics and Politics of Aging
If this book sold only 535 copies and each found its way into the hands of a member of the U S Senate and House of Representatives it would be a great publishing success Bookstore browsers may be deterred by the rather ambitious subtitle quot How the Coming Age Wave Will Transform Americaand th
