Book Reviews

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.

About the authors: Todd A. Salzman and Michael G. Lawler are professors at Creighton University in Omaha, Nebraska. They have both written extensively  on sexual ethics and have a thorough knowledge of current theological debates. They stand firmly within the Catholic tradition even as they argue for significant change.

Notes on the book: Two principles capture the essense of the official Catholic position on the morality of sexuality: first, that any human genital act must occur within the framework of marriage; second, each and every marriage act must remain open to the transmission of life.

In this comprehensive overview of Catholicism and sexuality, theologians Salzman and Lawler examine and challenge these principles.

The authors, both theologians, compare the Catholic hierarchy’s willingness to adjust and adapt its teachings on social issues with its refusal to do the same with its teachings on sexual ethics.

The main contribution of the book is its clear articulation of a person-centered natural-law ethic that offers Catholics an authentic way to think about sex in relation to their faith.

Although the authors embrace reasoning from natural law, they argue it is impossible to gain knowledge of nature. We can only reflect on our limited human experience of nature, aknowledging that it is always partial, evolving and in need of application. Thus, traditional assertions about the unnaturalness of certain sexual acts are flawed.

The authors posit that making good sexual decisions means discerning whether or not actions contribute to human flourishing. Sexual acts that are “truly human” must be loving, just and able to meet the test of “holistic complementarity.” Complementarity is defined in relation to sexual orientation. For persons with a homosexual orientation, sexual relationships with a person of the same sex are complementary and can be loving, just and moral.

The book points the way to a thorough revision of Church teaching on birth control, premarital sex and homosexuality.

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.