Here’s a small list of books I wrote down from the library stacks of St. Gregory’s Abbey during a recent visit.
DJ means the quote is taken from the book’s dust jacket. I’ve listed the publisher and date of publication for the edition in the library.
1945: The War That Never Ended by Gregor Dallas
Yale University Press: 2005
DJ: “1945 is a monumental, multi-dimensional history of the end of World War II. Gregor Dallas narrates in meticulous detail the conflicts, contradictions, motives, and counter-motives that marked the end of the greatest military conflict in modern history and established lasting patterns of deceit, uncertainty, and distrust out of which the Cold War was born.”
Abraham: A Journey to the Heart of Three Faiths by Bruce Feiler
William Morrow: 2002
A book I had intended to read when it was published but didn’t get to it. DJ: “Bruce Feiler set out on a personal quest to better understand our common patriarch. …he discovers the untold story of the man who defines father for half the world.”
All My Road Me 1922-1927: The Diary of C.S. Lewis
Edited by Walter Hooper
Harcourt Brace Jovanovich: 1991
DJ: “This most intimate of C.S. Lewis’s writing begins when he is twenty-three, an undergraduate at Oxford, and an atheist. It records his diligent studies, burgeoning friendships, and excursions in the surrounding countryside, but it is of primary interest for its day-do-day account of life with a woman twenty-six years his senior.”
The Book of Miracles: The Meaning of the Miracle Stories in Christianity, Judaism, Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam by Kenneth L. Woodward
Simon & Schuster: 2000
Author Annie Dillard blurbed the book: “All roads to the sacred run through the tricky terrain of miracles. For those making the journey, Ken Woodward’s The Book of Miracles is a wise and delightful guide.”
Children’s Literature: An Illustrated History
Edited by Peter Hunt
Oxford University Press: 1995
A more recent book on this topic was published this summer, one that caught my interest but didn’t land on the reading table –Children’s Literature: A Reader’s History from Aesop to Harry Potter by Seth Lerer. Hence, my interest here.
DJ: “Written by leading experts, this survey shows that children’s literature reflects how childhood has been defined, controlled, and appreciated at different times. It reveals how adults have explored questions of power, entertainment, sexuality, and equality through their writing for children, and demonstrates how the borders between what is adult and what is children’s fiction are routinely blurred.”
Dakota: A Spiritual Journey by Kathleen Norris
Ticknor & Fields: 1993
DJ: “Nearly twenty years ago, Kathleen Norris returned to the house built by her grandparents in an isolated town on the border between North and South Dakota. The elemental landscape forced her to confront and reexamine her heritage, religion, language, and the land itself. …Norris reveals to us the contradictions of small town life on the Great Plains…” Norris is the author of best-selling The Cloister Walk and the most recent book, Acedia & Me.
Don’t Tell the Grown-ups: Subversive Children’s Literature by Alison Lurie
Little Brown and Company: 1990
DJ: The author writes, “Most of the great works of juvenile literature are subversive in one way or another: they express ideas and emotions and not generally approved of or even recognized at the time; they make fun of honored figures and piously held beliefs; and they view social pretenses with clear-eyed directness, remarking – as in Andersen’s famous tale – that the emperor has no clothes.”
The Essays of Montaigne
Volumes I and II translated by E. J. Trechmann
Oxford University Press: 1935
Here are just a few essay titles that caught my interest:
- “On Keeping a Diary”
- “Heroic Suicides”
- “Kindness to Animals”
- “Ants Making Terms” (too odd not to be intriguing)
- “Our Feelings Continue Beyond This Life”
- “How We Cry and Laugh for the Same Thing”
First Nights: Five Musical Premieres by Thomas Forrest Kelly
Yale University Press: 2000
DJ: “This lively book takes us back to the first performances of five famous musical compositions:
- Monteverdi’s Orfeo in 1607
- Handel’s Messiah in 1742
- Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony in 1824
- Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique in 1830
- Stravinsky’s Sacre du printemps in 1913
“Thomas Forrest Kelly sets the scene for each of these premieres, describing the cities in which they took place, the concert halls, audiences, conductors, and musicians, the sound of the music when it was first performed (often on instruments now extinct), and the popular and critical responses.”
God Talk: Travels in Spiritual America by Brad Gooch
Alfred A. Knopf: 2002
Blurb by Gore Vidal: “On so hot a subject as religion in America, Brad Gooch is as serenely cool as Tocqueville was on an equally hot subject, democracy in America; and as irresistibly readable.”
The History of God: The 4000-Year Quest of Judaism, Christianity and Islam by Karen Armstrong
Alfred A. Knopf: 1994
Armstrong is also the author of the best-seller The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (thank you to Sarah G). DJ: “Weaving a multicolored fabric of historical, philosophical, intellectual and social developments and insights, Armstrong shows how, at various times through the centuries, each of the monotheistic religions had held a subtly different concept of God.”
A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters by Julian Barnes (a novel)
Alfred A. Knopf: 1989
Barnes is the entertaining author of Flaubert’s Parrot and other novels. DJ: “It begins with a revisionist account of Noah’s story, told by a stowaway on the Ark. It ends with a sneak preview of Heaven.”
The Intimate Merton: His Life from His Journals
Edited by Patrick Hart and Jonathan Montaldo
Entries are culled from the seven volumes of Merton’s personal journals. Here’s an excerpt from January 21, 1961:
“You can make of your life what you want. There are various ways of being happy. Why do we drive ourselves on with illusory demands? Happy only when we conform to something that is said to be a legitimate happiness? An approved happiness?”
The Last Knight: The Twilight of the Middle Ages and the Birth of the Modern Era by Norman F. Cantor
Free Press: 2004
About John of Gaunt. DJ: “The richest man in Europe, apart from its monarchs, and he epitomized and surpassed the ideals of the late Middle Ages. From chivalry — he was taught at a young age to fight on horseback like the knights of old – to courtly love – his three marriages included two romantic love-matches – he was an ideal leader.”
Love & Friendship by Allan Bloom
Simon & Schuster: 1993
Bloom wrote the bestseller The Closing of the American Mind published in the 1980s. DJ: “In a spirited polemic directed at our contemporary culture, Allan Bloom argues that we live in a world where love and friendship are withering away.”
Man’s Hope by Andre Malraux
Translated from the French by Stuart Gilbert and Alstair MacDonald
Random House: 1938
A small, dusty novel. This article from Time magazine, June 16, 1947, gives some insight on what it’s about, including this quote: “In Man’s Hope (1937), one of his characters said: ‘The danger is that every man carries the desire for an apocalypse in himself. . . . By its very nature, the Apocalypse has no future—not even when it pretends to have one. . . . Our modest function . . . is to organize the Apocalypse.’”
The Ominibus: A Jules Verne Anthology
Illustrated by Helene Carter
Blue Ribbon Books: 1931
This reminds me that it’s been a long time since I read a Jules Verne book, and here they are in one giant doorstopper:
- Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea
- Around the World in 80 Days
- The Blockade Runners
- From the Earth to the Moon and a Trip Around it
The Passion of Michel Foucault by James Miller
Simon & Schuster: 1993
DJ: “…a startling look at one of this century’s most influential philosophers. It chronicles every stage of Foucault’s personal and professional odyssey, from his early interest in dreams to his final preoccupation with sexuality and the nature of personal identity.”
The Romance of Leonardo Da Vinci by Dmitri Merejkowski
Translated from the original Russian by Bernard Guilbert Guerney
The Modern Library: 1928
Leather binding, soft, old pages…a delight to hold in my hands. A novel of the Middle Ages.
Scoundrel Time by Lillian Hellman
Little, Brown and Company: 1976
DJ: “Lillian Hellman’s memoir of the witch-hunting, black-listing years of the 1950’s, and her involvement with them. “
Sor Juana by Octavio Paz
The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press: 1988
Translated by Margaret Sayers Peden
DJ: “Mexico’s leading poet, essayist, and cultural critic writes of a Mexican poet of another time and another world, the world of seventeenth-century New Spain. His subject is Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz, the most striking figure in all of Spanish-American colonial literature and one of the great poets of her age. Her life reads like a novel. A spirited and precocious girl, one of six illegitimate children, is sent to live with relatives in the capital city. She becomes known for her beauty, wit, and amazing erudition, and is taken into the court as the Vicereine’s protegee. For five years she enjoys the pleasures of life at court – then abruptly, at twenty, enters a convent for life. Yet, no recluse, she transforms the convent locutory into a literary and intellectual salon…”
Souls on Fire: Portraits and Legends of Hasidic Masters by Elie Wiesel
Random House: 1972
DJ: “While the world of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was engaged in shedding blood and destroying altars, the Hasidic Masters – whose portraits Elie Wiesel reveals through his superb retelling of their legends – built shelters with words and silence. Unaffected by outside events, they lived in their own kingdom, which they shared with their followers to whom they gave hope and fervor. Compassionate, with love on their lips, hope in their hearts, they carried their tales and their songs into the innermost corner of Jewish solitude and turned it into sanctuary.”
They Stand Together: The Letters of C. S. Lewis to Arthur Greeves 1914-1963
Edited by Walter Hooper
Macmillan Publishing Co.: 1979
DJ: “’Finding the first friend is … as great a wonder as first love, or even greater. I had been so far from thinking such a friend possible that I had never even longed for one; no more than I longed to be King of England.’ But then C. S. Lewis met Arthur Greeves, and the wonder happened: a friendship that was intense and durable enough to last half a century.”
