Books

After World War I the victorious powers cobbled together a new kingdoma constitutional monarchyout of the collapsed Austro-Hungarian Empire It would later be known as Yugoslavia or Land of the South Slavs The new polity was a multi-ethnic state made up of subnational units of Serbs Croats and S

The right to name Supreme Court justices clearly among the most far-reaching of presidential powers has received surprisingly little analysis by historians Though the influence of a John Marshall a Roger Taney or an Earl Warren on history is vast the motives and goals of presidents in choosing

In a series of very readable books over the last two decades John F Haught a professor of theology at Georgetown University Washington D C has established himself as one of the most intelligent voices in the whole science-religion debate Unfortunately for him and the rest of us Haught rsquo

We Catholics are quite a strange lot actually We make the nastiest bigots and the most wonderful saints Of course such a potpourri of human experience could never be stirred by such clumsy tools as doctrine and church discipline No there rsquo s far more to it than that In the hands and throug

On the way as a guest to the annual meeting of the Chrysostom Society a community of Christian writers that includes novelists poets biographers and essayists I toted along this newly arrived book–oil to Houston perhaps By the time the plane landed in that city I had finished the seven grac

Heroes populate Ian Frazier rsquo s book about the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota Some of the heroes are of his own making others we recognize by name and still others are unique to the Oglala Lakota who live on the reservation All of them are cast against a backdrop of problems

Agnes Browne is a Dublin widow with seven children six sons struggling to see her offspring into maturity in the Dublin of the early 1970 rsquo s It was the time of the first lurch toward prosperity that would anticipate the present era of the Celtic Tiger in which the standard of living of Irel

At first the inclusion of Brian De Palma among the six directors thoughtfully dissected in Richard A Blake rsquo s AfterImage The Indelible Catholic Imagination of Six American Filmmakers did not seem to fit The other five mdash Martin Scorsese Alfred Hitchcock John Ford Frank Capra and Franci

Here are three books about Christian faith each orthodox in content diverse in approach and likely to appeal to different audiences I read them serially in under a month rsquo s time They deserve better Still I tried to imagine some ways in which readers might use these books to great advan

Academic authors occasionally write with verve and color there rsquo s no law against it but when their subject is academe itself caveat lector The historians Jon Roberts U of Wisconsin Stevens Point and James Turner Notre Dame devote a full third of their text to notes and glosses They