Sarah Vowell whose idiosyncratic voice in both senses is familiar to listeners of National Public Radio rsquo s This American Life expended a considerable amount of effort trekking to places associated with events of national tragedynamely the murders of Presidents Lincoln Garfield and McKinle

Since the flurry of biographies of Pope John Paul II appeared in the 1990s an uneasy deathwatch has set in among Vaticanologists who have been predicting his imminent death since 1994 The 84-year-old pontiff has not only refused to follow their scenarios he has actually buried many of his

This slender but powerful book describes how an upper-middle-class parish in Lima Peru was transformed in concert with the poor people in its midst largely through the efforts of its founding pastor The pastor who is also the author of Birth of a Church Joseph Nangle O F M recounts how this

When Wendell Berry came to Seattle to read from his new novel Hannah Coulter he was introduced with the words ldquo For those of you who wonder where hope still lies rdquo The audience responded with rapt silence as if to say ldquo Yes we are eager for hope rdquo Berry rsquo s novel d

It was inevitable the academy has struck back After the early favorable reviews and popular success of Professor Stephen Greenblatt rsquo s ldquo biography rdquo of William Shakespeare his scholarly colleagues have now weighed in to remind him that such success comes at a price The New York Ti

It is rare that the author of one extraordinary book should follow it a decade later with another of almost equal power And yet this is what Helen Prejean C S J has done in The Death of Innocents An Eyewitness Account of Wrongful Executions Already an acclaimed author for her Dead Man Walking