A church in communion with all creatures
The Covid pandemic has produced many new books with many of them addressing the current situation in which we humans find ourselves and the pressing issues that we need to address.
Rash takes care of business in ‘The Caretaker’
Ron Rash’s new novel “The Caretaker” (Doubleday, 2023, 252 pgs.) is much different than his previous novels.
The unfailing connection of a classic novel
I have always been a fan of old books. There’s a comfort I find in between the pages of a story written long ago, a sort of escape from my modern-day life.
A love story from a more innocent time
Every once in a while, a novel hits me with a punch I never saw coming, perhaps even one unintended by its author.
An indigenous road map for all mankind
Sometimes a great book just falls into my lap, which is what happened recently with Sherri Mitchell’s “Sacred Instructions” (North Atlantic Books, 2018, 227 pages).
How can the citizenry take back America?
Suppose you believe that climate change is a threat to humanity, but you oppose abortion or that you consider owning a firearm a natural right, but support open borders?
War history cites brotherhood, and bloodshed
Sometimes we read certain histories — Scott’s expedition to Antarctica, for example, or Washington’s troops at Valley Forge, or the prisoners in the Soviet gulag — and are stunned by the endurance and courage of the human spirit.
Notes on a novel and a collection of verse
The day before my June getaway to the beach ended, I developed a bad case of bookshop lust.
The party everyone’s invited to: National Poetry Month
April is the season when Chaucer’s pilgrims gathered before setting off to Canterbury and the shrine of Saint Thomas Becket. “Oh, to be in England,” wrote poet Robert Browning, “Now that April’s there.” Later, T.S. Eliot added a different perspective: “April is the cruellest month, breeding lilacs out of a dead land.” In her poem “Spring,” Edna St. Vincent Millay also looks askance at the fourth month: “To what purpose, April, do you return again?” and then ends with “It is not enough that yearly, down this hill/April/Comes like an idiot, babbling and strewing flowers.”
Reading, reviews, and self-remonstrance
Maybe it’s the mixed-up weather. The warmer temperatures have delivered a sort of raucous springtime mood, though Whatever the cause, a parade of books on all sorts of topics has passed through my hands, volumes taken from the library and from the pyramid of print on the floor of my study. Some I’ve read, some only browsed, but all deserve at least some garland of recognition.
