Reviews

What do Canadians think about religion? In a sentence, they think it’s a personal hobby that you ought to keep to yourself.

Trevor Noah was born in South Africa to a black Xhosa mother and a white Swiss father. Under apartheid’s rule, his birth was a crime, a violation of the 1927 Immorality Act which prohibited “illicit carnal intercourse between Europeans and natives and other acts in relation thereto.”

Throughout his survey, Rubin gives special emphasis to the role of Christianity in Western society, and he concludes the work by offering his forecast on Christianity’s role in a society based on the morality of self-fulfillment.

Do not fear: this is a highly entertaining thriller with well-drawn, interesting characters. Whatever your level of philosophical fitness, you’ll love this workout.

In writing that is justifiably called lyrical poetic prose, Terpstra has embraced deeply personal and broad macro themes that are intellectually provocative, while also plumbing emotional and spiritual depths.

On Living, as the title suggests, primarily focuses on life, even as patients face death. The book offers a gentle, wise view on not only the lives of hospice patients and of Egan herself, but on a sacred place and space in which we most likely all will enter, either to walk alongside someone who is dying in hospice, or as a hospice patient ourselves.

Isn’t reconciliation more of a spiritual gift, and less of a targeted process to be worked toward step-by step as if by YouTube video?

How do we figure out who we are? And how do we find a space where we can truly be ourselves? It’s a learning process that goes on our whole lives. Moonlight explores these questions, through a window into three short periods of the life of a young African American man named Chiron.

Dr. C. Nicole Mason’s objective in writing Born Bright is “to offer a fresh perspective on the dynamics of poverty that have long been concealed by grandiose narratives of American exceptionalism promoted by liberals and conservatives alike.”

You Want It Darker is Leonard Cohen’s last album of his lifetime. It treads the familiar territories of God, sex and death, but with the tone of a man who knows he’s nearing the end and has loosened his grip on them. They are all there, but not as in your face as they once were.

Medical science has rendered obsolete the experience, tradition and language about our mortality and created a new difficulty: how to die. We need to re-learn when and how to accept that the battle is over. We wait till doctors tell us there is nothing more they can do. But rarely is there nothing more doctors can do.

The Sympathizer is one of the most accomplished war novels in recent years, right up there with Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk. The story of a North Vietnamese secret agent working with the Southern Vietnamese forces, it finds new ground in subject matter that has been examined by writers too numerous to count. To understand its significance, however, will require a little history.