Reviews

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.

Reading The Morning You Came for Us, though difficult to absorb, may be one way you can begin to understand some of the realities that your Syrian newcomer friends, their families and nation have faced.

“I’d always maintained that a sense of humour can be found in any destination, no matter how bruised, how battered, and that through humour we can find a sense of shared humanity. But Rwanda?”

Much has been written about C.S. Lewis, but far less is known is about his wife. If Christians know anything about Lewis’ marriage, it is that he married late in life, and that his wife died soon after of cancer.

Communication is complicated. It always involves an attempt to mesh at least two ways of thinking that don’t line up.

We talk of Gnosticism as an early Christian heresy; it is better understood as an everyday Christian temptation. Loveless knowledge, implied St. Paul, does nothing but puff you up, and as Christians can hardly help claiming to know something about God, so the mere momentary absence of love threatens to leave us with swelled heads.