Book Reviews

• A Cry Unheard - The Medical Consequences of Loneliness (Review)
  A book that names what medicine rarely does: loneliness as a medical condition, killing more quietly than heart disease and more widely than cancer.
  1,282 words · 5 min read
• A Force More Powerful (Book Review)
  The book-length case that nonviolent resistance is not idealism but strategy — a century of evidence that force without weapons works.
  1,091 words · 4 min read
• A Force More Powerful (Film Review)
  The film that answers the question every student asks — 'but would nonviolence stop a Hitler?' — with historical evidence instead of theory.
  1,055 words · 4 min read
• A People Adrift - The Crisis of the American Catholic Church (Review)
  Supportive friends invite you to join a billion-member organization that is male-run, land-rich, and undemocratic — and then wonder why you hesitate.
  1,406 words · 5 min read
• Anatomy of an Execution (Review)
  The life and death of Douglas Christopher Thomas — anatomy of a Virginia execution and the system that made it possible.
  789 words · 3 min read
• Bicycle - The History (Review)
  Except for golf, no sport has produced literature quite like the bicycle — a 470-page history of the machine that democratized human movement.
  823 words · 3 min read
• CLASS DISMISSED (Review)
  A year inside an American high school, seen from the parental sideline — where involvement in a child's education is the variable that changes everything.
  986 words · 3 min read
• Dear World—A Global Odyssey (Review)
  A World War II veteran's global odyssey of remorse and reconciliation — one of those Americans who obeyed orders to kill and came home unable to stop asking why.
  1,268 words · 5 min read
• Doing Time for Peace (Book Review)
  The oral histories of Catholic Workers who went to prison for peace — Rosalie Riegle collects the voices of people who meant what they said about nonviolence.
  940 words · 3 min read
• Double Crossed - The Catholic Church and American Nuns (Review)
  Nearly 100,000 American nuns left their orders since Vatican II, and only a trickle are joining — what went wrong between the church and its most devoted women.
  563 words · 2 min read
• First Service - Andrea Jaeger’s Second Life (Review)
  Andrea Jaeger’s future seemed assured — tennis stardom, large paydays — until she chose a second life of service over the first life of fame.
  273 words · 1 min read
• Four Books About the Game of Golf
  Four books about golf, reviewed as the U.S. Open comes to Winged Foot — because the game's literature deserves the same attention as its tournaments.
  1,540 words · 6 min read
• Golfing with God (Review)
  A novel in which God plays golf — reviewed by a man who once scored a 65 in competition and has been seeking the divine in the game ever since.
  810 words · 3 min read
• Handbook for Mortals (Review)
  A guide for facing serious illness that does what most medical books won't — treats dying as something that happens to a whole person, not just a body.
  827 words · 3 min read
• IN SEARCH OF TIGER (Review)
  Among golf's beat reporters, Tom Callahan is a rarity — a writer who got close to Tiger Woods and came back with a book worth reading.
  750 words · 3 min read
• In the Hands of the Great Spirit (Review)
  Twenty thousand years of American Indian history told whole — the book that starts long before Columbus and doesn't end with the reservation.
  914 words · 3 min read
• Julia’s Mother (Review)
  A pediatric emergency room doctor learns that his talents are needed by more than the children — the parents who bring them in are breaking too.
  1,224 words · 4 min read
• Oh, Johnny by Jim Lehrer (Review)
  Jim Lehrer's nineteenth novel sends a Maryland country boy to war — fiction that knows what the nonfiction can't quite say about combat and loss.
  475 words · 1 min read
• On Turning Sixty-Five - Notes From the Field (Review)
  A man of opinions, wonder, and unsolicited advice turns sixty-five and takes notes from the field — the field being his own aging body.
  1,234 words · 4 min read
• Prisoners - A Muslim and Jew Across the Middle East Divide (Review)
  A Jewish boy from Long Island and a Palestinian prisoner — Jeffrey Goldberg's memoir of the unlikely friendship that formed across the divide.
  682 words · 2 min read
• Profiles in Courage for Our Time (Review)
  Caroline Kennedy updates her father's book with new profiles in political courage — and McCarthy asks whether courage in politics has gotten any easier.
  579 words · 2 min read
• Review - A Force More Powerful and Other Peace Books
  A review arguing that nonviolence is not a creed for the naïve but a proven strategy — and that the books documenting it deserve wider reading.
  1,352 words · 5 min read
• Sisters - Catholic Nuns and the Making of America (Review)
  Any Catholic has a favorite nun story — this book collects them all, from the frontier schoolrooms to the inner-city hospitals where sisters built America.
  795 words · 3 min read
• Thank You, Anarchy (Review)
  There's that word again — anarchy — but etymologically it means without a ruler, not without rules, and Occupy Wall Street took the distinction seriously.
  728 words · 2 min read
• The Beloved Community - Faith and the Civil Rights Movement (Review)
  How faith shaped the civil rights movement and what happened to the beloved community after the marches ended and the cameras left.
  829 words · 3 min read
• The Forgetting - Alzheimer’s and the Meaning of Loss (Review)
  Reagan proclaimed National Alzheimer’s Month in 1982; a decade later the disease found him — a book about the epidemic of forgetting.
  1,221 words · 4 min read
• The Future of Peace (Review)
  A slightly grandiose book about the future of peace — McCarthy enjoys the ambition while questioning whether the legwork matches the claim.
  764 words · 3 min read
• The Longest Trip Home (Review)
  John Grogan's memoir of the longest trip home — the one that leads back to the parents, the faith, and the questions that never got answered the first time.
  913 words · 3 min read
• The Mysterious Montague (Review)
  The true tale of a golfer who could outdrive anyone, mixed with Hollywood glamour and armed robbery — a mystery the sport has never quite explained.
  716 words · 2 min read
• The Pig Who Sang to the Moon (Review)
  A book that takes seriously what farmers and slaughterhouse workers already know: farm animals have emotional lives, and we'd rather not think about it.
  858 words · 3 min read
• The Pleasure of Their Company (Review)
  Doris Grumbach in relaxed conversational prose on the pleasure of solitude — a book that makes being alone sound like the richest company.
  1,250 words · 5 min read
• The Soul of Baseball and Other Baseball Books (Review)
  Buck O'Neil played in the Negro League when America wouldn't let him play anywhere else — a road trip through his America, where the soul of baseball lives.
  1,182 words · 4 min read
• Three Books on the Nonviolent Movement
  Reviews of three essential books on nonviolence — Chernus on the history of the idea, Schell on the power of it, Wittner on the movement to abolish the bomb.
  859 words · 3 min read
• Unholy Ghost - Writers on Depression (Review)
  Twenty-three writers name what the word 'depression' can't: a vagueness that comes nowhere near the suffering it's supposed to describe.
  860 words · 3 min read
• Walking With Jack and Loopers (Golf Book Review)
  Two books about caddying — the grand claim that no sport has produced a finer literature of service, devotion, and carrying someone else's burden.
  960 words · 3 min read
• Was World War II a “Necessary War”? (Ken Burns film review)
  Ken Burns calls World War II a necessary war — McCarthy asks whether it was necessary to firebomb Tokyo and vaporize Hiroshima.
  708 words · 2 min read
• Why America Fights (Review)
  A month after 9/11, American bombers began killing in Afghanistan — a book that traces the propaganda patterns from the Philippines to Iraq.
  948 words · 3 min read