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Amish Grace: How Forgiveness Transcended Tragedy by Donald B Kraybill
Culture of Forgiveness
A review by Chris Faatz
In October of 2006 a lone gunman entered an Amish school in Nickel Mines, Pennsylvania, and took ten girls hostage. At the end of the encounter, five of those girls and the gunman were dead, the other five girls were in critical condition, and the world was in shock. Sure, such horrific events might happen in the world at large, but to the Amish? They, with their quaint buggies and disciplined rural religious life, were outside the mainstream and its pressures -- about as far outside as one could go. Wasn't there any area of American society that was immune to such seemingly random violence...
Saints at the River by Ron Rash
Ron Rash's Water World
A review by Anna Godbersen
Ron Rash's novels tend to feature complex situations following a death, and dramatic water. His debut, One Foot in Eden, centered on the aftermath of a man's disappearance from an Appalachian valley town soon to be flooded by a power company. The circumstances of his death unfurl in a cloud of adultery and southern gothic mystery. Saints at the River, Rash's second novel, begins with a simpler death-by-water, but soon evolves into a scandal fraught with moral ambiguity. Maggie Glenn is a young newspaper photographer assigned to cover the drowning of a twelve-year-old girl in the Tamassee...
Supergods: What Masked Vigilantes, Miraculous Mutants, and a Sun God from Smallville Can Teach Us about Being Human by Grant Morrison
Virgil for Superheroes
A review by Greg Baldino
Whether they be gods or angels, the idea of sentient beings beyond us mere mortals but recognizably similar has influenced human thought since the earliest days of tale-telling around the fire. In some tellings, they are of a state of grace from whence humans fell; in others they are a potential, something that might, by labor or virtue, be reached by all. In the 20th century, these tales were given new form with the advent, at the publishing of Superman's first adventure in Action Comics #1, of the superhero. This sub-genre of a sub-genre, born of the highest mythologies and the lowest pulp...
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The Ghosts of Manila: The Fateful Blood Feud Between Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier by Mark Kram
A review by D. K. Holm
At the start of the 2001 holiday season, Michael Mann's biopic, Ali, with its popular lead actor (Will Smith) and Oscar-linked director, had the markings of a hit. Written by Mann with the credited aid of Gregory Allen Howard, Stephen J. Rivele, Christopher Wilkinson, and Eric Roth (the screenplay is available from Newmarket Press), the film sought out the same constituency who liked Spike Lee's Malcolm X and Norman Jewison's film about Hurricane Carter: a mature, educated crowd looking for alternatives to holiday hobbits and weekend wizards. But, as they say in the movie trade, the film ...
Death's Jest-Book by Reginald Hill
A review by Georgie Lewis
Reginald Hill's detecting duo, "Fat Andy" Dalziel and Peter Pascoe, work together like Velcro. Dalziel's caustic (and frequently obscene) tongue and overbearing character is the prickly stuff that binds with Pascoe's anxious and tightly wound persona. Pascoe's perpetual disquietude also stems from an ongoing obsession with an ex-prisoner, Franny Roote, that he put away years ago. Roote, and his subsequent release from prison, has remained on the fringes of Pascoe's mind, benign, obsequious, and just a little unsettling. In Dialogues of the Dead a series of seemingly unrelated deaths have...
God's Advocates: Christian Thinkers in Conversation by Rupert Shortt
Gifts and fragments
A review by John Habgood
Popular contemporary attitudes towards theology include condescending dismissal on the one hand, and conservative religious intransigence on the other. Rupert Shortt sets out to provide a more balanced and intellectually demanding assessment. The fourteen discussions in God's Advocates:
Christian Thinkers in Conversation cover a wide range, with the emphasis mainly on the philosophical, social and ethical aspects of theology, rather than on the Bible itself. Shortt is a perceptive questioner, and has obviously read widely in the works of the eighteen theologians with whom he has talked. ...
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