Although it may be hard to imagine a volume on the construction of St Peter rsquo s Basilica as a beach book R A Scotti has produced an account gripping enough to be one The subtitle The Splendor and the Scandal hints at its focus This is not a dry account for the architectural journals but

Ayaan Hirsi Ali is the most controversialand courageousthinker to address the status of Muslims in Western societies today Born in Somalia and raised a Muslim she fled to the Netherlands in 1992 to escape an arranged marriage As an interpreter for Somali refugees she gained firsthand experience c

Everybody wants a piece of Flaubert His contemporaries Victor Hugo Ivan Turgenev Emile Zola Guy de Maupassant and others hailed his genius Twentieth-century critics from Erich Auerbach to Lionel Trilling ushered him into the pantheon of modernism Jean-Paul Sartre ground out five massive vol

This year Americans are hearing more and more about the environment and about climate change Al Gore rsquo s An Inconvenient Truth has brought to moviegoers the lecture he has given across the country A Newsweek cover asks Why Saving the Environment Is Suddenly Hot 7 17 a Nation cover proclaim

Dear Lord, I have swept and I have washed but

If Franz Kafka were to rewrite the British television comedy ldquo Yes Prime Minister rdquo the result might resemble Jos Saramago rsquo s new novel Seeing The Nobel Prize-winning novelist weaves wry sardonic humor into his dark parable of an unnamed nation locked down by fear of terrorism