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* How It Went: Thirteen More Stories of the Port William Membership. By Wendell Berry. Nov. 2022. 256P. Counterpoint, $26 (9781640095816). Wendell Berrys fiction and nonfiction are tightly interwoven, the [...]

* The Need to Be Whole: Patriotism and the History of Prejudice. By Wendell Berry. Oct. 2022.528p. Shoemaker & Hoard, paper, $24 (9798985679809). 323. With this big, urgent, and gratifying [...]

American Comics: A History. By Jeremy Dauber. Nov. 2021.496p. illus. Norton, $35 (9780393635607). 741.5. Dauber, an historian of Jewish literature and humor, expands his professional preserve only slightly to accommodate [...]

The Pope's Army: The Papacy in Diplomacy and War. By John Carr. 2019.328p. illus. CasematelPen&Sword, $39.95 (9781526714893). 261. Carr identifies the first papal warfare in gang clashes over the election [...]

Outgrowing God: A Beginner's Guide. By Richard Dawkins. Sept. 2019. 304p. illus. Random, $27 (9781984853912). 211.8. Aiming to create a first book on atheism, with young people particularly in mind, [...]

* Sacred Liberty: America's Long, Bloody, and Ongoing Struggle for Religious Freedom. By Steven Waldman. May 2019.400p. illus. HarperOne, $28.99 (9780062743145). 277. In this highly accessible popular history, Beliefnet cofounder [...]

Mr. Know-It-All: The Tarnished Wisdom of a Filth Elder. By John Waters. May 2019.336p. illus. Farrar, $27 (9780374214968). 814. Waters may not be making any more movies (the last few [...]

The Four Horsemen: The Conversation That Sparked an Atheist Revolution. By Christopher Hitchens and others. Mar. 2019.128p. Random, $20 (9780525511953). 211.8. Most of this small book is taken up by [...]

* The Secret Gospel of Mark: A Poet's Memoir. By Spencer Reece. Mar. 2021.448p. Seven Stories, $24.95 (97816442104201.81). Reece is a poet first, and poetry's economy coupled with verbal daring [...]

* The Lehman Trilogy. By Stefano Massini. Tr. by Richard Dixon. June 2020. 720p. HarperVia, $35 (9780062940445). The Lehman Trilogy, a 2012 Italian radio play turned into a full-length play [...]

The Lives of Isaac Stern. By David Schoenbaum. June 2020. 256p. Norton, $30 (9780393634617). 787.2092. The amateur violinist author of the enjoyable 'social history' The Violin (2012), informs, amuses, and [...]

Yes to Life: In Spite of Everything. By Viktor E. Frankl. May 2020. 136p. Beacon, $19.95 (9780807005552). 150.19. Less than a year after his liberation from a Nazi concentration camp, [...]

* What Is the Grass: Walt Whitman in My Life. By Mark Doty. Apr. 2020. 288p. illus. Norton, $25.95 (9780393070224). 811.54. Poet and memoirist Doty dons his teacher's hat--surely a [...]

Shakespeare in a Divided America: What His Plays Tell Us about Our Past and Future. By James Shapiro. Mar. 2020.320p. illus. Penguin Press, $27 (97805255222941. 822.3. Inspired, perhaps, by Andrew [...]

The Banished Immortal: A Life of Li Bai. By Ha Jin. Jan. 2019.320p. Pantheon, $28 (9781524747411); e-book (9781524747428). 895.11.In Tang dynasty China, a poet could nurture high hopes. Becoming an [...]

* Debussy: A Painter in Sound. By Stephen Walsh. Oct. 2018.336p. illus. Knopt, $28.95 (9781524731922). 780.92. In Fryderyk Chopin (2018), Alan Walker gave us a life and times. In Schumann [...]

The King and the Catholics: England, Ireland, and the Fight for Religious Freedom, 1780-1829. By Antonia Fraser. Sept. 2018. 320p. Doubleday/Nan A. Talese, $28.95 (9780385544528). 940. Fraser's (My History, 2015) [...]

* Know Thyself: Western Identity from Classical Greece to the Renaissance. By Ingrid Rossellini. May 2018. 496p. illus. Doubleday, $28.95 (9780385541886). 306. Rumors of the death of Western civilization must [...]

Because of his multiple-award-winning Angels in America (1993-94), Kushner is about the hottest ticket in American theater. Highly interested in his jewish heritage, he is also an experienced adapter of [...]

* Conflagration: How the Transcendentalists Sparked the American Struggle for Racial, Gender, and Social Justice. By John A. Buehrens. Jan. 2020.328p. illus. Beacon, $32 (9780807024041). 141.30973. The best-remembered Transcendentalists of [...]

Some Assembly Required: Decoding Four Billion Years of Life, from Ancient Fossils to DNA. By Neil Shubin. Mar. 2020. 288p. illus. Pantheon, $26.95 (9781101871331). 576.8. Shubin's (The Universe Within, 2013) [...]

Dangerous Melodies: Classical Music in America from the Great War through the Cold War. By Jonathan Rosenberg. Dec. 2019.512p. illus. Norton, $39.95 (9780393608427). 780.973. From the U.S. entering WWI to [...]

Wounded Shepherd: Pope Francis and His Struggle to Convert the Catholic Church. By Austen Ivereigh. Nov. 2019.416p. illus. Holt, $30 (9781250306593). 282. Ivereigh, author of the fine biography of Jorge [...]

* Kingdom of Nauvoo: The Rise and Fall of a Religious Empire on the American Frontier. By Benjamin E. Park. Feb. 2020.352p. illus. Norton/Liveright, $28.95 (9781631494864). 289.3. On the run [...]

Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World. By Tom Holland. Nov. 2019. 624p. Basic, $32 (9780465093502). 270. Christianity is said to draw about equally on classical Greece (Plato, Aristotle) [...]

Did America Have a Christian Founding? Separating Modern Myth from Historical Truth. By Mark David Hall. Nov. 2019. 240p. Nelson, $26.99 (9781400211104). 261.7097309. Religion and law in the early republic [...]

* Abraham Joshua Heschel: Mind, Heart, Soul. By Edward K. Kaplan. Nov. 2019.480p. illus. Univ. of Nebraska, $34.95 (9780827614741). 296.3092. The principal author of the definitive Heschel biography has distilled [...]

* Nightmares in the Dream Sanctuary: War and the Animated Film. By Donna Kornhaber. Jan. 2020.328p. illus. Univ. of Chicago, $35 (9780226472683); e-book, $21 (9780226472713). 791.43. In the earliest extant [...]

Nothing to See Here. By Kevin Wilson. Nov. 2019. 272p. Ecco, $26.99 (9780062913463). Slighter in scale than Wilson's previous novels, this one is powered, like his strange and funny short [...]

* Crusaders: The Epic History of the Wars for the Holy Lands. By Dan Jones. Oct. 2019.448p. Viking, $30 (9780525428312). 909.07. Jones' sweeping coverage of a conflict of three centuries' [...]

Passionate Spirit: The Life of Alma Mahler. By Cate Haste. Sept. 2019. 368p. illus. Basic, $32 (97804650967181. 780.92. Landscape painter Emil Schindler's elder daughter, Alma, grew up at the heart [...]

* Music: The Subversive History. By Ted Gioia. Oct. 2019. 528p. Basic, $35 (9781541644366). 780. Gioia's historical inquiry springs from the question, How does music change people's lives? Jazz pianist [...]

A Pilgrimage to Eternity: From Canterbury to Rome in Search of a Faith. By Timothy Egan. Oct. 2019.384p. illus. Viking, $28 (9780735225237). 263.04245632. After arriving with Chaucer at Canterbury and [...]

* What Are Biblical Values? What the Bible Says on Key Ethical Issues. By John J. Collins. Aug. 2019. 296p. Yale, $28 (9780300231939). 220. Perhaps this book's title should be [...]

The Immoral Majority: Why Evangelicals Chose Political Power over Christian Values. By Ben Howe. Aug. 2019. 304p. Broadside, $26.99 (9780062797117). 277.3. With sorrow, some pain, but hope, too, filmmaker and [...]

What It Means to Be Moral: Why Religion Is Not Necessary for Living an Ethical Life. By Phil Zuckerman. Sept. 2019. 400p. Counterpoint, $26 (9781640092747). 170. Zuckerman's three-part overview of [...]

Tchaikovsky: The Man Revealed. By John Suchet. June 2019.288p. illus. Pegasus, $29.95 (9781643131337). 780.92. Suchet's fourth great-composer biography bearing the subtitle The Man Revealed grants that what needs revealing about [...]

* And How Are You, Dr. Sacks? A Biographical Memoir of Oliver Sacks. By Lawrence Weschler. Aug. 2019.400p. illus. Farrar, $28 (9780374236410). 616.80092. Weschler's (Waves Passing in the Night, 2017) [...]

The Last Love Poem I Will Ever Write. By Gregory Orr. June 2019.112p. Norton, $26.95 (9781324002352); e-book (97813240023691.811. Rather than the thing itself, the poem that entitles Orr's ample collection [...]

River of Fire: My Spiritual Journey. By Sister Helen Prejean. Aug. 2019. 320p. Random, $27 (9781400067305). 200. Her first book, Dead Man Walking (1993), and the movie adapted from it, [...]

The World of the Crusades. By Christopher Tyerman. May 2019. 520p. illus. Yale, $35 (9780300217391). 909. Tyerman has devoted his career to studying the Crusades, those military expeditions sanctioned and [...]

God's Favorites: Judaism, Christianity, and the Myth of Divine Chosenness. By Michael Coogan. Apr. 2019. 200p. Beacon, $24.95 (9780807001943). 296.3. Coogan examines the notion that God chooses certain peoples or [...]

* The Conservative Sensibility. By George F. Will. June 2019.640p. Hachette, $35 (9780316480932); e-book, $16.99 (9780316480918). 320. Russell Kirk's classic work, The Conservative Mind (7th rev. ed., 1986), stresses that [...]

* Nouns & Verbs: New and Selected Poetry. By Campbell McGrath. Apr. 2019. 288p. Ecco, $24.99 (9780062854148); e-book (9780062854162).811. The title of the last poem in this retrospective is 'Campbell [...]

Playlist. By David Lehman. Apr. 2019. 72p. Univ. of Pittsburgh, paper, $17 (9780822965848). 811. Playlist was inspired by Tape for the Turn of the Year (1965), by A. R. Ammons [...]

Against Translation. By Alan Shapiro. Mar. 2019. 96p. Univ. of Chicago, paper, $18 (9780226613505); e-book (97802266136421.811. The usual complaint about translation is linguistic. Something is lost going from one language [...]

* This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom. By Martin Hagglund. Mar. 2019.464p. Pantheon, $28.95 (9781101870402). 110. Philosopher Hagglund says the problem with faith in God and eternal life is [...]

Psychology: The Comic Book Introduction. By Grady Klein and Danny Oppenheimer. Illus. by Grady Klein. Dec. 2017. 256p. Norton, paper, $18.95 (9780393351958). 741.5. Klein continues a string of books in [...]

The Story of Hebrew. By Lewis Glinert. Mar. 2017. 288p. illus. Princeton, $27.95 (9780691153292). 492.4. Hebrew is reputedly the oldest living language, its earliest vocabulary still spoken today. Indeed, as [...]

Genesis: The Deep Origin of Societies. By Edward 0. Wilson. Mar. 2019.160p. illus. Norton/Liveright, $23.95 (9781631495540). 591.5.Tens of thousands of extant animal species 'display among them almost every conceivable level [...]