Memory is a peculiar thing. I attended Montreal’s Concordia University during the same years as Yves Engler. Reading his book — part memoir, part explanation of what may draw Canadian youth to embrace radical activism — brought long forgotten memories to the surface, including events that seemed so momentous at the time and once consumed my thoughts, but which nearly…
Category: Book Reviews
Set in a sweltering Colombian town during the 1950’s, In Evil Hour explores life in a repressive regime, once the dictatorship transitions from an initial period of overt political violence to the “peaceful” consolidation of power. This tenuous peace, however, is built on censorship and self-censorship, and on the exhausted acquiescence of its residents. The town’s dull stability is punctured by…
Tortured by a scrupulous desire for intellectual honesty, struggling with the paradoxes of Catholicism and attentive to the quiet presence of the neglected, Simone Weil is among the most compelling Catholic thinkers of the twentieth century. Weil’s vocation was to remain on the margins of the institutional Church. Waiting for God, published posthumously in 1951, is a raw work. One…
This book isn’t about a pastor’s triumphant journey into jail to teach inmates and preach about salvation. Rather, it’s an exploration of how a wavering, vulnerable man, sometimes without convincing answers, a clumsiness and awkwardness that comes from raw uncertainty, opens himself up to learning from the gang members, felons and violent schizophrenics to whom he ministers — men whose…
There is barely an ember of warmth in Dennis Cooper’s work of transgressive fiction Closer. Instead, we meet a handful of young men on the threshold of adulthood who seem emotionally detached from any sense of community, family or from the concept of human dignity. It’s almost as if they exist as merely biological bodies–vessels devoid of that which actually makes…
Told in the first person through the eyes of Tony Joppa, this highly readable account of a young man’s struggle to overcome alcoholism is something of a glimpse into the world of Alcoholics Anonymous and an introduction to Buddhism. The protagonist and the characters who populate his world sound authentic, even though dialogue is used sparingly in this novel. At…
Barbara Brown Taylor, a professor of religion and an Episcopal priest, makes a compelling case for erasing the artificial boundary between the sacred and the secular, and adopting a spirituality firmly grounded in the physical world that surrounds us. We can walk with reverence in this world and not neglect the life or the moment that we are presently living.…
Father Rob Galea, a Maltese Catholic priest serving in Australia, writes in a highly conversational style about his journey from addiction, depression and anger to a life of faith and ministry. Somewhere between memoir, homily and a Catholic youth group talk, the book documents the path of a priest who speaks quite candidly of his own struggles and who is…
The most striking aspect of Richard Currey’s collection of stories, The Wars of Heaven, is how from the raw, coarse and tragic lives of working class people in West Virginia we get such richly atmospheric prose. There are two ways to escape the misery of the present: either find refuge in nostalgic images of the past or else in the…
Patrick Canning’s thoroughly quirky novel about a depressed janitor from Idaho who finds himself in the midst of a bizarre game feels like an adult psychedelic take on The Wizard of Oz, or else a literary escape room. Replace Dorothy with Jim, the dog Toto with a scruffy mutt called Mars, the Yellow Brick Road with, in the first part at least,…