Books

  • June 23-30, 2014

    Sand between the pages: that pretty much captures how I feel. Even without a summer vacation, a blue horizon, a rich red sunset off Acapulco, Long Island or Nantucket, a good summer read engages me. Well, sure, not everyone gets to the beach in the summer. Yet there’s a certain moment when summer hits hard, temperatures soar and many of us yearn to get lost in a book. Mary Higgins Clark is that sort of reader and that sort of writer.

  • June 23-30, 2014

    James Martin, S.J., the engaging author of this book on Jesus, had to be persuaded to travel to the Holy Land by his fellow Jesuit, Drew Christiansen, S.J., then editor in chief of America. Martin felt he knew enough about Jesus and the Gospels from a lifetime of study and reflection and didn’t need to travel to the Middle East. But he finally agreed to go—and the readers of this book on Jesus will be grateful.

  • June 23-30, 2014

    On Feb. 21, 2012, a group of Russian female performance artists slipped into Moscow’s Cathedral of Christ the Savior to stage “A Punk Prayer,” beseeching “Virgin Mary, Mother of God, chase Putin out” and to protest the impending re-election of Vladimir Putin to his third term as president. The group chose the cathedral for the action because the church supported the Russian regime and symbolized the luxury and commercialism of the era.

  • This spring I attended a dramatic reading of the 1928 novel “Mr. Blue,” written by Myles Connolly. The book was required reading when I was in high school, and the staged reading was directed by a longtime Jesuit friend of mine, the multitalented George Drance, S.J., so I was eager to attend this event.

  • June 9-16, 2014

    Robert M. Veatch is instantly recognizable to all specialists in the field of bioethics as the leading and long-term opponent of the effort of the Hippocratic tradition across two millennia to locate medical ethics solely within the medical guild and to assert the guild’s right and duty to define—for both professionals and their patients—their reciprocal obligations.

  • June 9-16, 2014

    My Beloved World opens with a parental spat. Sonia Sotomayor’s mother, Celina, tells her father, Juan Luis, called Juli, that he must give their daughter her insulin shot. He does not want to because he dreads hurting the child. The scene ends with 7-year-old Sonia, a Type 1 diabetic, learning to inject herself. Diabetes teaches her self-discipline and self-reliance. Once thought to cut life short, diabetes teaches her not to waste time, but to...

  • May 26-June 2, 2014

    In his rather obscure “Hymn to Matter,” Teilhard de Chardin, S.J., wrote:

    I bless you, matter, and you I acclaim: not as the pontiffs of science or the moralizing preachers depict you—debased, disfigured—a mass of brute forces and base appetites—but as you reveal yourself to me today, in your totality and your true nature. I acclaim you as the divine milieu, charged with creative power, as the ocean stirred by...

  • May 26-June 2, 2014

    I read this book about Spain, a Catholic country with a complicated 20th century history, during a three month sojourn in the Republic of Ireland, a country with a similar history. The setting and the text combined to help me, as a historian, to realize that in these nations the attempt to make a just remembrance of the past is not only an academic exercise. It is a project essential to contemporary domestic tranquility. Toward the end of my Irish visit, the...

  • May 26-June 2, 2014

    Prospero, stepping out of his role as the reinstated Duke of Milano in William Shakespeare’s great play “The Tempest,” delivers an epilogue directly to the audience. It is in fact Shakespeare ruminating about the artist, the response of the public, the meaning of the project itself, “…which was to please.” And what pleases, in the case of “The Tempest,” is the complexity of language, structure and story that illustrate and engage human experience.

  • May 19, 2014

    This spring poetry review is a spring poetry anti-review. It is all so subjective isn’t it? After a collection of poems has already made it through the jangly rites of agents and editors and elegant publishing houses and beautiful jacket covers and delectable author photos and a brief passage at the end about the book’s typeface, who are we to judge which are better than others? At this level it is all about style. It is all about taste. It is about what...