Pure Act by Michael McGregor (Fordham University Press, £23.99). Not many people who know and love the writings of Thomas Merton will be aware of his long-lasting friendship with the gentle and reclusive poet Robert Lax, whom he met at Columbia University in 1935. McGregor, who discovered Lux after reading Merton’s classic book The Seven-Storey Mountain as a young man, subtitles his biography “The Uncommon Life of Robert Lax”. The poet, who spent most of his life living an austere, quiet life in Greece, latterly on the island of Patmos, regarded his dwelling place as “like living in a church”.
Letters to Nevie by Gerald O’Collins SJ (St Pauls, £9.95). These letters were written to the author’s great-niece when she went to boarding school at Ballarat in Australia in 2013. O’Collins, who taught for 33 years at the Gregorian University in Rome, describes them as a way of “learning from the Scriptures”. Keen that Nevie might draw the same strength and inspiration from her faith as he himself had done, the author writes that his “deepest desire for Nevie and for those who read these letters is that they too may find in Jesus “the way, the truth and the life”.
My Dear Ones by Jonathan Wittenberg (William Collins, £16.99). In this very affecting account the author, rabbi of the New North London Synagogue, describes how members of his own family, prominent and cultured German Jews, had suffered under the Final Solution instigated by the Nazis. Wittenberg, the child of refugees, discovers old letters in a trunk in Jerusalem after the death of an elderly aunt. They answer all the questions that had troubled him about his family history and graphically describe the hopelessness and terror of Jews trapped in Germany in 1939, when escape became almost impossible.
The Naive and Sentimental Novelist by Orhan Pamuk (Faber, £12.99). Turkey’s premier writer, Pamuk started his career with a series of novels interrogating the Turkish soul and Anatolian history. His recent works have become more personal and eccentric, not to say oblique, but this pithy piece of literary criticism is pure delight. Pamuk takes Schiller’s formulation of the two types of novelist and uses them to look at what it is that makes novels special and why we react to them the way we do. Using Balzac, Tolstoy and others, Pamuk has produced a fascinating treatise on why the novel is so important to us.
The History of Modern France by Jonathan Fenby (Simon and Schuster, £10.99). Fenby, a former editor of the Observer, is somewhat of a specialist on France, having written books about De Gaulle as well as other aspects of Gallic culture. This book, subtitled “From the Revolution to the War on Terror”, is a relatively short but extremely readable survey. Despite the subtitle, the book begins with the Restoration of 1815, goes through the 1848 revolutions, Republicanism, Napoleon’s empire – all the way through to World Wars I and II, bringing us up to date with the terror attacks of 2015.
Areas of Catholic Herald business are still recovering post-pandemic.
However, we are reaching out to the Catholic community and readership, that has been so loyal to the Catholic Herald. Please join us on our 135 year mission by supporting us.
We are raising £250,000 to safeguard the Herald as a world-leading voice in Catholic journalism and teaching.
We have been a bold and influential voice in the church since 1888, standing up for traditional Catholic culture and values. Please consider donating.