This inspiring and fascinating memoir, subtitled, ‘The Autobiography of the Legendary Catholic Social Activist,’ The Long Loneliness is the late Dorothy Day’s compelling autobiographical testament to her life of social activism and her spiritual pilgrimage. A founder of the Catholic Worker Movement and long-time associate of Peter Maurin, Dorothy Day was eulogized in the New […]
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This is the definitive biography of one of the Christian Church’s most prominent figures. St. Augustine (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St_Augustine) was born in A.D. 354 in the town of Thagaste in North Africa to a pagan father and a Christian mother. From these inauspicious beginnings, he would eventually become one of the most influential thinkers in the history of the
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Why is belief so hard to shake? Despite our best attempts to embrace rational thought and reject superstition, we often find ourselves appealing to unseen forces that guide our destiny, wondering who might be watching us as we go about our lives, and imagining what might come after death. In this lively and masterfully argued
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In this magnificent biography by Jon Meacham (http://www.jonmeacham.com/about/), the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of American Lion and Franklin and Winston brings vividly to life an extraordinary man and his remarkable times. Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power (2012) gives us Jefferson the politician and president, a great and complex human being forever engaged in the wars
Mary Beard, Professor of Classics at Cambridge, (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Beard_(classicist)) wrote the following at the time of the major exhibition about Pompeii at The British Museum (http://www.britishmuseum.org/whats_on/past_exhibitions/2013/pompeii_and_herculaneum.aspx, ran from 28 March – 29 September 2013 ) and the publication of her book Pompeii: The Life of a Roman Town. ‘Natural disasters create household names. If it wasn’t for the eruption of
E. H. Gombrich’s (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E._H._Gombrich) bestselling history of the world (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Little_History_of_the_World) for young readers tells the story of mankind from the Stone Age to the atomic bomb, focusing not on small detail but on the sweep of human experience, the extent of human achievement, and the depth of its frailty. The product of a generous and humane sensibility,
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Latvian-born Oxford historian Isaiah Berlin (http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/berlin/, and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isaiah_Berlin) was one of the most important thinkers of the twentieth century. He was an activist of the intellect who marshalled vast erudition and eloquence in defence of the endangered values of individual liberty and moral and political plurality. The essays in The Crooked Timber of Humanity expose the links between
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The pattern of European development since 1789 can be understood only by study of all those all-embracing forces that have affected the whole Continent, from the British Isles to the Balkans. David Thomson (Master of Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge 1957-1970, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Thomson_(historian) first published this magisterial and acclaimed history in 1957. The book deals with all those grand
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Chris Harman (http://www.marxists.org/archive/harman/index.htm, and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chris_Harman) offers us this magisterial volume on the history of humans from the Stone Age to the present day. Originally published in 1999, Harman has had the heroic ambition to tackle the entire sweep of our past. Bombarded with daily news of international events as we are, it might be understandable that
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