April 19, 2019
by Roland Millare
"Nothing is more disconcerting, it seems to me, than to enter a home or apartment in which there are no books and no place for books, no sign a book had ever been there. It always seems like a kind of desecration to me, even though I am perfectly aware that bookless people can also [...]
July 10, 2017
by Enoch Arnold Bennett
For some considerable time I have been living, as regards books, with the minimum of comfort and decency—with, in fact, the bare necessaries of life, such necessaries being, in my case, sundry dictionaries, Boswell, an atlas, Wordsworth, an encyclopedia, Shakespeare, Whitaker, some De Maupassant, a poetical anthology, Verlaine, Baudelaire, a natural history of my native [...]
July 7, 2017
by Richard Becker
“Books—oh no! I am sure we never read the same, or not with the same feelings.” “I am sorry you think so; but if that be the case, there can at least be no want of subject.” ~ Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen As a family, we watch Simon Langton’s BBC version of Pride and Prejudice at [...]
July 6, 2016
by K. E. Colombini
When Bill Gates announced his 2016 summer reading list, geeks rejoiced. As in previous years, it’s a stack of books full of a lot of long words and sentences. No James Patterson or Stephen King for him; certainly no Austen or Dickens. To his credit, there is a novel, a sci-fi one that does look [...]
April 27, 2012
by Gerald J. Russello
Individualism and community are the opposite halves of the American character. For every myth of the self-made man, there is the image of the closely knit New England small town. For every lone cowboy on the frontier, there are the social, political, and cultural groups that Americans have formed since the beginning of the Republic. [...]
February 15, 2012
by William Edmund Fahey
It is officially over. I should admit that publicly, shameful and embarrassing though it may be. It pains me to think back over these years. When I first met her I cannot exactly recall (I had heard her name before I met her). I think I saw her first walking away from the library. In [...]
November 30, 2011
by George Weigel
If memory serves, this past year saw electronic books top printed books in the sales figures at Amazon.com. Be that as it may, books—real books—still make wonderful Christmas gifts. Here are some recently published (and read) titles I can recommend with enthusiasm. The Union War, by Gary W. Gallagher (Harvard University Press): As the Civil [...]
November 17, 2011
by Charlotte Hays
A Pelican in the Wilderness: Hermits, Solitaries, and Recluses, Isabel Colegate, Counterpoint Press, 320 pages, $25 When the English novelist Isabel Colegate, author of the acclaimed The Shooting Party, discovered an abandoned hermit’s cell in her garden, she restored it and thereby acquired an interest in the subject of hermits and solitaries. The result [...]
November 10, 2011
by H. W. Crocker III
With its divine foundation, sanction, and mission, nothing could be more glorious than the Catholic Church. But, of course, many people — even many baptized Catholics — don't see it that way. Yet when the sins of men — secular material progress, or our own self-centeredness — blind us to this, they blind us to everything. The Renaissance, a [...]
November 8, 2011
by Robert Spencer
Who is the Tolstoy of the Zulus? The Proust of the Papuans? I’d be glad to read him. – Saul Bellow. In asking about the Papuan Proust, novelist Saul Bellow summed up the core problem with the twin idols of our age, Multiculturalism and Diversity. For the ideology of Multiculturalism—now dominant on most college [...]
November 8, 2011
by John C. Chalberg
Whittaker Chambers: A Biography, Sam Tanenhaus, Modern Library, 1998, 638 pages, $20 It was early December 1948, and Congressman Richard Nixon was in the midst of the first of his "six crises." For the moment this particular crisis was in recess, and a supremely satisfied Nixon was posing for pictures. In his hands was [...]
November 7, 2011
by Tom Howard
The name Dietrich von Hildebrand is not, perhaps, as well known as it should be among intelligent and literate Catholics -- or, for that matter, among Christians of any ilk. He is a man whom Pius XII referred to as “a 20th-century doctor of the Church.” Those who remember this pontiff will recall that he [...]
November 5, 2011
by Michael Kirk
One of the fundamental characteristics of modernism, that cultural shift in the way we see the world, ourselves and our condition, was the celebration of the ordinary – ordinary life, ordinary work, ordinary people and the ordinary things they do. Not everything about the “modern movement” – which began over a hundred years ago – [...]
November 3, 2011
by Russell Shaw
Papal Sin: Structures of Deceit, by Garry Wills, (2000) Doubleday, 328 pages, $25 When Pope John Paul II summoned Catholics to a “purification of memory” by facing up to faults, he spoke of a process that should engage us all. This stripping away of delusion and self-deception will be difficult, but it will be [...]
November 2, 2011
by Thaddeus J. Kozinski
Things in Heaven and Earth: Exploring the Supernatural, Harold Fickett, ed., Paraclete, 1998, 230 pages, $14. We are now living through a third Great Awakening. It is, of course, a far cry from anything Jonathan Edwards could have imagined. The television show, Brimstone, depicts a damned soul released from Hell with the mission of [...]
November 2, 2011
by L. Brent Bozell III
Those prestigious publishers at Simon and Schuster selected All Saints Day to unleash the book world's latest attempt at mocking Christianity. It's called The Last Testament, by God. The author is David Javerbaum, a top writer for 11 years for The Daily Show on Comedy Central, perhaps America's leading religion-hating TV network. Is it any [...]
July 8, 2011
by Crisis Magazine
With summer fully, oppressively upon us, it's time once again for the Crisis Magazine Summer Reading List. We've asked writers, staff, and friends to share with us some books they've recently enjoyed and what they recommend to while away a muggy afternoon. Their picks cover everything from classics to new favorites, fiction to history to [...]
March 11, 2011
by Martin Morse Wooster
All of the Founding Fathers were married, and most of them had children. What do the stories of the wives and families of George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton, and James Madison tell us about the personality and character of these great Americans? In his latest book, Thomas Fleming superbly answers [...]
March 3, 2011
by Margaret Cabaniss
Pope Benedict's second book on Jesus of Nazareth -- Holy Week: From the Entrance into Jerusalem to the Resurrection -- is set to be released next week, but readers can get a sneak peek at a few sections now. Amy Welborn teases out one of the interesting chapters on "The Dating of the Last Supper." [...]
November 13, 2010
by Ralph McInerny
An hour after arrival in Minneapolis Philip Knight called on his client, but the man who answered the door was clearly a policeman. "Is Genevieve Magee at home?" "Who are you?" Though he was on a step below the man, Philip could see the top of his head. "I was going to ask you the [...]