Book Reviews

About the author: Peter  Manseau is the author of the memoir Vows; the novel Songs for the Butcher’s Daughter; and most recently Rag and Bone: A Journey Among the World’s Holy Dead.

He has won the National Jewish Book Award and the Sophie Brody Medal for Outstanding Achievement in Jewish Literature, and was shortlisted for the Mecantile Library First Novel Award.

A founding editor of the religion blog, KillingtheBuddha.com, and coauthor of Killing the Buddha: A Heretic’s Bible, he is currently the editor of Search magazine. In his spare time, he is both a doctoral candidate in religion and a lecturer in journalism at Georgetown University.  He lives in Washington, DC with his wife and two daughters.

Visit his website:  www.petermanseau.com

Notes on the book: Peter Manseau embarks on a global odyssey in search of the “dismembered toes, splinters of shinbone, stolen bits of hair, burned remnants of an anonymous rib cage, and other odds and ends” belonging to saints and other sacred figures. The result is an entertaining, sometimes affecting inquiry into man’s yearning for spiritual transcendence through the worship of holy relics, real or otherwise–from the Shroud of Turin to more obscure bits of clothing and body parts.

Manseau meets a cast of fellow enthusiasts–including a French paleopathologist who spends his spare time rummaging through the supposed bone fragments of Joan of Arc.

The veneration of relics is certainly not a thing of the past. The book relates that when Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger became Pope Benedict XVI, he sequestered himself in his apartment with the heart of Saint Jean-Baptiste-Marie Vianney, patron saint of priests.

“Relics seem to me to admit that, yes, while we do have a spiritual dimension to our lives, we are also flesh under the looking glass of all those around us. Our lives and our deaths are witnessed by others, and what our lives might mean to them is mostly beyond our control. We are simultaneously people who need symbols to survive, and we are symbols ourselves. Our bodies - our toes and shins, our foreskins and ribs, our hands and whiskers, our teeth and hair - have the capacity to tell stories we cannot imagine. And the facts of our lives can be as mysterious and in need of explanation as anything that lies beyond.”

About the author:  Aelred of Rievaulx (c. 1109-1167) was born at Hexham, Northumberland, and grew up at the court of King David of Scotland. On one occasion when Aelred was in Yorkshire on the business of the royal court he heard of the “angelic men” of Rievaulx and, after visiting the community, decided to enter monastic life there. Aelred rose to prominence; he became novice master of Rievaulx and was then sent to lead a new foundation at Revesby, Lincolnshire. In 1147, when he was 38, Aelerd returned to Rievaulx and presided as abbott until his death in 1167.  Aelred’s charisma and devotion encouraged many to join the community and the number of monks and lay brothers rose considerably during his abbacy.

Aelred was one of the most influential men of his time. He counseled other abbots and bishops and corresponded frequently with kings and popes. He kept up a close friendship with King David I of Scotland, and acted as an advisor to King Henry II of England.

A contemporary, Jocelin of Furness, gives the following account of Aelred in his Life of St. Waldef: “Moreover, he was a man of the highest integrity, of great practical wisdom, witty and eloquent, a pleasant companion, generous and discreet. And, with all these qualities, he exceeded his fellow prelates of the Church in his patience and tenderness.  He was full of sympathy forthe infirmaties, both physical and moral, of others.”

Aelred fell in love with two fellow Cistercians. He described the second monk as “the refuge of my spirit, the sweet solace of my griefs, whose heart received me when fatigued from labors, whose counsel refreshed me when plunged in sadness…I deemed my heart in a fashion his, and his mine…We had but one mind and one soul…”

Notes on the book:  Throughout his life, Aelred of Rievaulx took great joy in his friends and he believed that by loving and being loved by them, we learn to accept and return God’s infinitely greater and enduring love.  Aelred saw friendship not as a threat to community, but as the cement of community. For Aelred, every true friendship opens onto the love of Christ, the dearest friend of all. “God is friendship,” he said, “and he who dwells in friendship, dwells in God and God in him.”

He incorporated his personal experience of gay love to write some of the best Medieval treatises on Christian friendship and the love of God. Aelred did not repress his homosexual feelings but integrated them into his monastic discipline and spiritual reflections.

“It is a great consolation in life,” he wrote, “to have someone to whom you can be united in the most intimate embrace of the most sacred love..with whom you can rest, just the two of you, in the sleep of peace, away from the noise of the world, in the kiss of unity, with the sweetness of the Holy Spirit flowing over you..”

About the author: David Plotz is the editor of Slate.   Before becoming Slate’s editor in 2008, Plotz worked as a staff writer, political columnist, media columnist, and as the Washington editor for the magazine. He has also freelanced for many magazines and newspapers, including the New York Times Magazine, Rolling Stone, New Republic, Washington Post and GQ.

Notes on the book: In Good Book, David Plotz, a self-described “pork-loving Jew,” takes notes on a year-old experiment: “What happens when an ignorant person actually reads the book on which his religion is based?” As he plodded through an English translation of the Hebrew Bible–unaided by teachers or commentaries–Mr. Plotz recorded his responses in “Blogging the Bible.”

The project began a few years ago, when Plotz, bored at a bat mitzvah, picked up the Torah in front of him and, opening at random, fell upon the story of Dinah. Its rape, forced circumcision and mass murder shocked him. He discovered in the Bible a book far less bland than the he had been led to expect.

At times he admires the Bible’s grand notions of justice or finds its laws–e.g.,injunctions in Leviticus 19 to render justice blindly, to love the stranger and to feed the poor–”monumental and beautiful.” He senses the experiment in close reading has joined him in new ways to Jewish life.

But more often, Plotz finds the Bible a big, contradictory, and stunningly violent opera. “We’ve been sold a Bible that’s blander and kinder than the real thing,” he writes. “Instead, let’s revel in its messiness, humor and cruelty.”

Read “Blogging the Bible” here.

See Plotz discuss the book here.

I recently received this email: “I’m a Latina lesbian author who was thrown out of a Catholic high school due to a love letter written to me by my first love. My new book, Down to the Bone, (nominated for ALA Best YA Book 2009, Rainbow List, received a starred Booklist review, and was submitted for consideration to the National Book Award and Lambda Literary Awards) was inspired by true-to-life experiences. My book brings up important Christian/Catholic issues that I strongly believe will interest you.”

About the author: Mayra Lazara Dole is an author who has also been a drummer, dancer, landscape designer, chef, hairdresser and library assistant.  She was born in Cuba and now lives in Miami with her partner, Damarys.

Mayra Lazara Dole is the author of Down to the Bone, a novel set in Cuban Miami, about Laura, a girl who gets kicked out of her house and expelled from school when it’s discovered she is a tortillera–a girl who likes girls.

“At 14, my first love and I were thrown out of a Miami Catholic high school due to a love letter she sent me about our first time making love.”

“The math teacher snatched the letter from my hand and gave it to Mother Superior. The math teacher had a bad rap among the girls for being a tortillera/disgusting dyke. They read the letter to my mom who’d been dragged from one of her factory jobs to attend the infamous finger-pointing experience (finding out her little girl was a total homo) - Mami was so shocked she punished me harshly: I could never again see or speak to my beloved.”

“The loss of my first love was grave–at the time, she was the love of my life. My best friend’s mom never let her speak to me again.  I was allowed to finish the last two months at school, where I was ostracized and treated like a leper. My neighbors–they’d been family to me–forbade me to enter their homes. I felt hopeless, lonely, unwanted and even thought about suicide  until, unexpectedly, straight-looking guys started befriending me. My family had no clue they were homos. My close friend Willy and I acted like a straight couple. We went to gay clubs on weekends and won every dance contests.  We became club kids in Miami’s gay scene.”

Notes on the book: 17-year-old Laura has fallen in love with Marlena. They have been involved in a committed relationship for two years, however, neither of their families know. That all changes when Laura is caught reading a love letter from Marlena by one of the nuns at her Catholic high school. Not only does the nun retrieve the letter, she reads it to the entire class. Immediately Laura becomes an outcast in the eyes of her friends. When she goes home she discovers gthat her mother was notified and she is immediately cast from her home.

Laura goes to live with her friend, Soli, and her mother, Viva, who are more open-minded and loving but she never stops yearning to go home. Laura is unable to tell anyone that she is a lesbian, so for most of he novel she lives a closeted lifestyle. The reader is allowed to feel Laura’s pain as she loses the people in her life and also her joy as she matures.

Dole does a good job in allowing readers a peek into the Cuban, gay and lesbian teen culture, and also provides a clear view of the pain these teens go through to be themselves.

About the author: Juan Gomez-Jurado, 31, is an award-winning journalist, best selling author and screen writer. He currently lives in Madrid, Spain.

Notes on the book: In the days following Pope John Paul II’s death, a cardinal is found brutally murdered in a chapel in Rome, his eyes gouged and his hands cut off. Called in for the grisly case, police inspector Paola Dicanti learns that another cardinal was recently found dead; he had also been tortured.

Desperate to find the killer before another victim dies, Dicanti’s investigation is soon joined by Father Anthony Fowler, an American priest and former Army intelligence officer examining sexual abuse in the Church, who knows far more about the killer than Dicanti can possibly imagine.

As Inspector Dicanti and Fr. Fowler struggle through a maze of tantalizing clues, they begin to question whether someone in the Vatican is aiding their cause or abetting a murderer. And when evidence leads them to powerful figures within the church hierarchy, their own pursuit of the truth may make them the next pawns to be sacrificed in a terrifying and deadly game.