Book Reviews

About the author: C.J. Sansom earned a Ph.D. in history and was a lawyer before becoming a full-time writer. Dissolution (2003) was his first book in the Matthew Shardlake mystery series.  They include Dissolution (2003), Dark Fire (2004), Sovereign (2006) and Revelation (2008).  He lives in Sussex, England.

Notes on the book:  Dissolution has established historian C. J. Sansom as one of the most promising new writers of detective fiction.  The book is set in 1537, when England is torn by the Reformation. The terrifying Henry VIII has proclaimed himself Supreme Head of the Church and his power is being enforced by savage new laws and a network of secret informers. A team of commissioners is sent out to investigate the country’s monasteries. At one, a commissioner is found dead, his head severed from his body, his murder accompanied by sinister acts of sacrilege. The hero, Matthew Shardlake, a hunchback lawyer, intelligent and incorruptible, is ordered by Thomas Cromwell to uncover the truth. His investigation involves him in treachery and danger, leading him to question everything he believes. The sights, the voices, the very smell of this turbulent age seem to rise from the pages.

One of the murder suspects is Brother Gabriel, the sacristan, who is strongly attracted to Commissioner Shardlake’s virile young assistant, Mark Poer.

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: Ingrid D. Rowland is a professor, based in Rome, at the Notre Dame School of Architecture. She is a frequent contributor to the New York Times Review of Books.

Notes on the book: Giordano Bruno was a man who refused to back down to the Inquisition. For that he was burned at the stake on Ash Wednesday, 1600, after seven years of languishing in Venetian and Roman prisons. The Holy Inquisition declared him to be “an impenitent, pertinacious, and obstinate heretic.”

He could have saved his life like Galileo, but chose not to do so. His statute overlooks the marketplace of Campo de’ Fiori (Field of Flowers) in Rome where he died.

Hounded by critics because of his outspoken and heretical views on doctrinal matters like transubstantiation, the divinity of Jesus, and the virginity of May, Bruno is said to be the world’s first martyr to science.  He was a free thinker who held a distinctly modern view of the universe – he said there could be many worlds besides ours which could be inhabited with many other forms of life. He taught mathematics and astronomy, and the “art of memory” for which he became famous.

Bruno was a thinker and scholar with expansive views on the nature of God and the cosmos. He had the misfortune of living in a time when Catholic orthodoxy was being challenged and the church was fighting back.  Not unlike our own day.

Read the Washington Post review here.

Read the New York Times review here.