Category Archives: Book Reviews
Book Reviews
If someone we trust suggests a good book for us to read, we are more inclined to do so. On the other hand, if someone we trust tells us not to bother reading this or that book, we usually heed their advice. Book reviews provide that service. The reviewers that contribute to our website are excellent critics. So far, all of our book reviews, except one, have been commendatory. Brian Kelly’s review of Deepak Chopra’s The Third Jesus was condemnatory.
Positive book reviews that appear in good Catholic media outlets would not be there if the books were not of great value. Earnest reviewers would not bother to push mediocrity. Their mission is to whet the appetites of potential readers. They want to share their own enthusiasm for another’s written work in order to benefit the readers of their own columns. It is actually an act of charity. A potential reader has to be motivated. As G.K. Chesterton pointed out: “There is a great deal of difference between an eager man who wants to read a book and a tired man who wants a book to read.”
‘And You Cannot Build Upon a Lie’
In 1920, ten years after Hilaire Belloc had stepped down from his four maturing years of publicly elected service in the House of Commons, he published a lucid book-length essay, entitled, The House of Commons and Monarchy. It is a forthright and equitably proportioned work with a clearly stated thesis; and the development of Belloc’s presented evidence and argumentation will help us still better understand … More →
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Why Human Rights Are Wrong
Modernity offers many substitutes for God and for the Christian religion that was the sole foundation of Western civilization and culture for most of two millennia. Some of these substitutes aren’t what they used to be. For instance, racism, according to which men worship their genes and which was very big in the nineteenth century and first decades of the twentieth, is no longer espoused … More →
Father Karl Gereon Goldmann, SS, OFM
It is fascinating to contemplate the edifying life of Karl Gereon Goldmann, and to see so clearly the hand of God operating throughout it. Born in 1916, Karl was the third of seven sons of a devoutly Catholic German couple, Karl and Margareth. The older Karl was a country veterinarian, travelling with his brood of boys throughout the farm country of Fulda to tend to … More →
Glittering Images
My tongue is not entirely in cheek when I say I have never been able to make up my mind about best-selling art critic and social commentator Camille Paglia. Is she really the bisexual leftwing atheist she professes herself to be? Or, is it possible that is a persona she has cleverly assumed, knowing that the views she often expresses would be derided, at best, … More →
The Who, What, Where, When, and Why of the Council
A book review, by Michael J. Miller, of The Second Vatican Council: An Unwritten Story, by Professor Roberto de Mattei, reprinted with kind permission of Loreto Publications. The famous black-and-white photograph of the Second Vatican Council in session, taken from a high balcony at the back of Saint Peter’s Basilica, shows more than 2,000 Council Fathers standing at their places in slanted stalls that line the nave, with … More →
Liberty, the God That Failed
Review of Liberty, the God That Failed: Policing the Sacred and Constructing the Myths of the Secular State, from Locke to Obama (Angelico Press, 2012) In his first encyclical, Inscrutabili (On the Evils Affecting Modern Society), April 21, 1878, Pope Leo XIII wrote: “Now the source of these evils lies chiefly, We are convinced, in this, that the holy and venerable authority of the Church, … More →
The Man Who Changed The Face of Europe
[Review of Richelieu, by Hilaire Belloc. Gates of Vienna Books, 2006.] Many years ago when I was in college, my history professors explained two theories of how and why a single man can change the course of history. Was the man so great that he actually had an effect on the events of his day? Or, was it the world-shaking turn of events that caused … More →
For Sobran Lovers (I’m One)
There are still persons who will open a book and read instead of watching whatever’s on television or fiddling with an iPhone when they have leisure and whether or not the time is planned. (When they are truly devoted readers, it will be.) I know these persons exist because I am one. Some of us remaining readers rejoiced a few years ago when The Library … More →
A Conversion Story for Our Time
Review of Young Tony and the Priest: Coming to Belief in an Age of Unbelief, by Gary Potter. Loreto Publications, 2012 This, my friend Gary Potter’s first foray into fiction, is a lovely story. Lovely in that it is filled with love — the uplifting kind that the world so needs today. It is also filled with an amazing number of historical lessons for so … More →
Catholic Heroism in the Face of Nazi Domination
A Review of When Hitler Took Austria, by Kurt von Schuschnigg. Ignatius Press, 2012 When I took up this book for my reading pleasure and to add to my store of historical knowledge, I expected it to be something a bit different. I was somewhat disappointed in it at the beginning, but as the story of the von Schuschnigg family unfolded, it became more interesting … More →
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Anti-Christ Word Games
John Rao Black Legends and the Light of the World (Forest Lake, MN, Remnant Press, 2011) ISBN: 1-890740-17-9 Dr. John C. Rao, D. Phil., Oxford, is Associate Professor of History at St. John’s University and director of the Roman Forum. Black Legends is the product of years of research on Church history, and includes reflections from lectures he has given for the Roman Forum’s Summer … More →
Book Review of ‘Church Militant: Bishop Kung and the Catholic Resistance in Communist Shanghai’
Thomas J. Craughwell for National Catholic Register: No China scholar wants to answer a knock on the door and find Chinese government officials standing at his doorstep. Yet, in 2006, that is what happened to Jesuit Father Paul Mariani. He had traveled to China to research how the Communist Party crushed the Catholic Church in Shanghai, one of the most dynamic Catholic communities in the … More →
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Gary Potter’s ‘In Reaction’: A Vision of Virtue
THE VISION OF VIRTUE 1 that informs In Reaction, the literary testament of a man who speaks the truth, is, essentially, the culture of sacramentality: the cultivation of grace upon our createdness; the intimate culture of the Incarnation. It is the culture of the Humility of God and the extensions of His mercy: His love reaching out to our lowliness, deep disorder, and destructively cramped … More →
Solving a Two Thousand Year-Old Mystery
Review of The Bones of Saint Peter by John Evangelist Walsh. Sophia Institute Press, 2011. This fascinating and fairly short volume (178 pages) is a reprint of the original published in 1982. It tells the story of the search for the remains of the first pope of the Catholic Church, Saint Peter, martyred at Rome in the year 68 (some sources say 64) A.D. Tradition … More →
A Frightening Future If We Do Not Change
Review of Suicide of a Superpower: Will America Survive to 2025? by Patrick J. Buchanan, Thomas Dunne Books, 2011 This 428 page book, containing copious notes in the end note section (1104 of them to be exact), is so jam-packed with historic and current information that any review truly cannot do it justice. One can only pick and choose a few topics within it and … More →
