On khokmes as they say in Yiddish but seriously nobody not even a veteran scholar like Professor Sachar could compress the whole of modern Jewish history into a mere 800-plus pages with alas no maps photographs or statistical tables Not if you start roughly with the horrific massacres le

It is difficult if not impossible to overstate the dramatic changes in American religious life in the mid- to late 20th century Regardless of whether one views them a success or failure no one can argue that Catholic religious sisters burst through the Second Vatican Council rsquo s doors and wi

Any organization shrouded in secrecy casts a powerful spell over the imagination Entities as varied as the Mafia and the Central Intelligence Agency inspire fervid fantasies about their hidden powers that only sometimes accord with reality La Cosa Nostra decimated by decades of zealous prosecutio

Voltaire loved to mock the pretensions of scholastic philosophythe notion that some grand intellectualist construction would explain any fact the conviction that one rsquo s own mental categories were the real stuff of the universe the assumption of a guiding intelligence behind every event What

Those who don rsquo t know history are doomed to repeat it Or in Woody Allen rsquo s more memorable paraphrase History repeats itself It has to Nobody listens the first time round In great history writing the author immerses us in a world vastly different from our own while somehow demonstrat

If she were a name-dropper Jane Kopas might tell us that she and Pope John XXIII agree about many things She would agree with his opening address at the Second Vatican Council when the pope attentive to reading the signs of the times said that the substance of the ancient doctrine of the deposi