Any organization shrouded in secrecy casts a powerful spell over the imagination Entities as varied as the Mafia and the Central Intelligence Agency inspire fervid fantasies about their hidden powers that only sometimes accord with reality La Cosa Nostra decimated by decades of zealous prosecutio

On khokmes as they say in Yiddish but seriously nobody not even a veteran scholar like Professor Sachar could compress the whole of modern Jewish history into a mere 800-plus pages with alas no maps photographs or statistical tables Not if you start roughly with the horrific massacres le

It is difficult if not impossible to overstate the dramatic changes in American religious life in the mid- to late 20th century Regardless of whether one views them a success or failure no one can argue that Catholic religious sisters burst through the Second Vatican Council rsquo s doors and wi

Those who don rsquo t know history are doomed to repeat it Or in Woody Allen rsquo s more memorable paraphrase History repeats itself It has to Nobody listens the first time round In great history writing the author immerses us in a world vastly different from our own while somehow demonstrat

Voltaire loved to mock the pretensions of scholastic philosophythe notion that some grand intellectualist construction would explain any fact the conviction that one rsquo s own mental categories were the real stuff of the universe the assumption of a guiding intelligence behind every event What

Bruce Feiler is one American determined to find meaning in the terrorist attacks of Sept 11 2001 and the war in Iraq mdash and he does it in one of the most dangerous places on earth As a follow-up to his Walking the Bible 2002 Feiler returns to the Middle East to answer the question ldquo