Victor Stepien, Author at Catholic Herald

Victor Stepien

A novel about dashed hopes and delusions of grandeur

July 02, 2020

The Cactus League By Emily Nemens Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 288pp, £20.99/$27 Many readers will be drawn to Emily Nemens’s first novel because of her day job as editor of the Paris Review, America’s premier literary journal. The product of Louisiana State University’s creative writing programme and a slew of writers’ retreats, the novel is

Small farmers against Big Pharma

April 02, 2020

With Dark Waters, director Todd Haynes brings back to life the real story of Robert Bilott, a corporate defence attorney based in Cincinnati, who, when presented with corporate malfeasance in his hometown of Parkersburg, West Virginia, in 2001, turned into a consumer protection advocate à la Ralph Nader. The culprit was DuPont, the corporate juggernaut

Nature-worship in the land of inequality

April 02, 2020

Billionaire Wilderness By Justin Farrell Princeton, 392pp, £22/$15 Known as the Equality State, Wyoming is not quite the frontier state of our collective imagination. It hasn’t been for a long time: as early as 1927, no other than John D Rockefeller Jr, an heir to the Standard Oil fortune, purchased much of the land around

Armando Iannucci’s Dickensian journey

March 19, 2020

The Personal History of David Copperfield, a cinematic adaptation of Charles Dickens’s 1850 novel, is ebullient. The editing, with flashbacks and a fast pace, may seem hackneyed, but director Armando Iannucci’s decision to condense 600 pages into two hours works well for the most part. Iannucci has cut out some stories and characters from the

How Donald Trump charmed Evangelicals

February 20, 2020

Trump and the Puritans By James Roberts and Martyn Whittock Biteback, 320pp, £20/$29.95 “God wanted Donald Trump to be president.” That is how Sarah Sanders, the former White House press secretary and a vocal Evangelical, explained President Trump’s close relationship with the Christian community. Unfazed by his divorces, alleged extramarital affairs and uncouth remarks, followers of

Parasite review: An unmitigated triumph for South Korea’s Ken Loach

February 13, 2020

South Korean director Bong Joon-ho is a devotee of Ken Loach, the British socialist director, and it shows. In Parasite, he uses a parable to explore the socio-economic malaise that pervades our postmodern societies. The story has resonated with audiences globally: it won the 2019 Palme d’Or and is the first non-English language movie to

Just Mercy exposes the workings of a corrupt establishment

February 06, 2020

Guilty until proven innocent: that is the “justice system” presented to us by director Destin Daniel Cretton in this cinematic adaptation of Bryan Stevenson’s 2014 memoir, Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption. Stevenson, founder of the Equal Justice Initiative (EJI) based in Montgomery, Alabama, has dedicated his career to overturning the wrongful convictions

A broad entertaining overview of japan, but not for everyone

January 24, 2020

This six-part documentary series may not seem to be for everyone, yet it brings more to the table than one might initially expect. The target audience seems to be the bored middle class who lacks the social conscience to commune with those less unfortunate in their own neighbourhoods and would rather spend their free time

Little Women: much more than a feminist screed

January 13, 2020

This latest cinematic adaptation of Louisa May Alcott’s 1868 eponymous Civil War classic asks a fundamental question: can little women produce “something of value”? It isn’t clear who is asking the question: Greta Gerwig, the youngish, artsy director, or Sony Pictures, the sales-driven, diversity-obsessed octopus of a movie studio? In just two hours, Gerwig does

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