The Vanishing: The Twilight Of Christianity In The Land Of The Prophets by Janine di Giovanni

Hardback: The Vanishing (2021) reveals the plight and possible extinction of Christian communities across Syria, Egypt, Iraq, and Palestine after 2000 years in their historical homeland.

 

Some of the countries that first nurtured and characterized Christianity - along the North African Coast, on the Euphrates and across the Middle East and Arabia - are the ones in which it is likely to first go extinct. Christians are already vanishing. We are past the tipping point, now tilted toward the end of Christianity in its historical homeland. Christians have fled the lands where their prophets wandered, where Jesus Christ preached, where the great Doctors and hierarchs of the early church established the doctrinal norms that would last millennia.

 

From Syria to Egypt, the cities of northern Iraq to the Gaza Strip, ancient communities, the birthplaces of prophets and saints, are losing any living connection to the religion that once was such a characteristic feature of their social and cultural lives.

 

In The Vanishing, Janine di Giovanni has combined astonishing journalistic work to discover the last traces of small, hardy communities that have become wisely fearful of outsiders and where ancient rituals are quietly preserved amid 360 degree threats. Di Giovanni's riveting personal stories and her conception of faith and hope are intertwined throughout the chapters. The book is a unique act of pre-archeology: the last chance to visit the living religion before all that will be left are the stones of the past.

About the author: Janine di Giovanni has reported on war for 25 years. She has written seven books, including the critically acclaimed Madness Visible, The Place at the End of the World, and, most recently, a biography of the Magnum Photographer Eve Arnold. She is the Middle East Editor of Newsweek, a contributing editor for Vanity Fair and a regular contributor to the New York Times, Granta and Harper’s among many others. A frequent foreign policy analyst on British, American and French television, she has won many awards including Granada Television’s Foreign Correspondent of the Year Award, the National Magazine Award, two Amnesty International Media Awards, and the Spear’s Memoir of the Year Award for Ghosts by Daylight. She is a Fred Pakis scholar in International Affairs at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, has served as the president of the jury of the Prix Bayeux for war reporters and is a media leader at the World Economic Forum, Davos. She lives in Paris with her son. 

The Book Of All Books by Roberto Calasso

Hardback: The Book of All Books (2021) is a splendid reimagining of key stories from the Bible from the acclaimed author of The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony.

A man named Saul is sent to search for some lost donkeys and on the way is named king of his people. The queen of a remote African realm travels for three years with her multitudinous retinue to meet the king of Jerusalem and pose him a few riddles. A man named Abraham hears a divine voice speaking words that reverberate throughout the Bible: 'Go away from your land, from your kindred and from the house of your father toward the land that I will show you'.

In The Book of All Books, Roberto Calasso weaves together stories of promise and separation from one of the founding texts of Western civilisation. These tales of grace and guilt, of the chosen and the damned, cast many Biblical figures and indeed the whole book in a light as astonishing as it is disquieting.

The Book of All Books is part of a larger work which began with The Ruin of Kasch (1983) and includes The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony, Ka, and The Celestial Hunter.

About the author: Roberto Calasso was born in Florence in 1941. An author and publisher, he began working at Adelphi Edizioni from its founding in 1962 and continued as director for fifty years. The Book of All Books is the tenth part of a series that began with The Ruin of Kasch and includes the international bestseller The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony as well as Ka, K, Tiepolo Pink, La Folie Baudelaire, Ardor, The Celestial Hunter and The Unnamable Present. He died in Milan in 2021.

Rating: 2/5

The Joy And Light Bus Company (The No 1 Ladies' Detective Agency Series) by Alexander McCall Smith

Hardback: Precious Ramotswe and Grace Makutsi, Gaborone's No 1 Lady Detectives, do not always agree on important issues - one being the complex male psyche. Grace believes that food is the source of men's happiness, while Precious takes a more nuanced view: men are not so different from women, they want to be loved and needed, too. It is pride that is so often their undoing.

Mma Ramotswe is reminded of this when her husband, J L B Matekoni, is offered a daunting business opportunity; one which, if it fails, threatens their existing livelihood, including the detective agency. Somehow, Precious must guide her husband to the right decision, while being mindful of how much he wants The Joy and Light Bus Company to succeed.

Meanwhile, there are other problems to solve. A wealthy client's elderly father has changed his will, making his devoted live-in nurse a significant beneficiary, and the ladies are tasked with uncovering the woman as a fraud. And then there is the disturbing rumoured maltreatment of children living and working on a local farm, which a concerned Mma Ramotswe is intent on investigating.

Professional and moral duty battles with female instinct and Mma Ramotswe is determined not to jump to conclusions until she has all the facts. She knows only too well how cunning people can be. After all, she herself is not beyond a little trickery - especially when it comes to righting wrongs and seeing justice served, or when innocent lives are at stake. All this and more in the twenty-second instalment of The Joy and Light Bus Company (2021).

The next and twenty-third instalment, A Song of Comfortable Chairs, will be released in September 2022.

About the author: Alexander McCall Smith, often referred to as ‘Sandy’, is one of the world’s most prolific and best-loved authors. His various series of books have been translated into forty-six languages and become bestsellers throughout the world. These include the highly successful The No 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency series, the popular 44 Scotland Street novels, the Isabel Dalhousie novels, the von Igelfeld series and the new Detective Varg novels. He also writes stand-alone novels, children's fiction and libretti for short operas.

Alexander has received numerous awards for his writing and holds thirteen honorary doctorates from universities in Europe and North America.  He is Professor Emeritus of Medical Law at the University of Edinburgh. In 2007, he received a CBE for services to literature and in 2011 was honoured by the President of Botswana for services through literature to the country.  In 2015, he received the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction and in 2017, The National Arts Club (of America) Medal of Honour for Achievement in Literature.

Rating: 5/5

How To Raise An Elephant (The No 1 Ladies' Detective Agency Series) by Alexander McCall Smith

Paperback: It was a sound from the old Botswana - the Botswana of her childhood, when everything was quieter and more certain; when people had time for one another. It made her sad to think about that - how people had stopped having time for each other. Well, they hadn't altogether, but it did seem that we all had less time for others in our lives. People had more material things than they used to: they had more money; they had cars; they had more food than they could eat; they had fridges purring away in their kitchens, but what had they lost? What silences, rich and peaceful, had been pushed out of the way by humming machinery?

In this twenty-first instalment - How To Raise an Elephant (2020) - in the cherished No 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency series, Mma Ramotswe must balance family obligations with the growing needs of one of Charlie’s pet projects.

 

Precious Ramotswe loves her dependable old van. Yes, it sometimes takes a bit longer to get going now, and it has developed some quirks over the years, but it has always gotten the job done. This time, though, the world - and Charlie - may be asking too much of it, for when he borrows the beloved vehicle, he returns it damaged. And, to make matters worse, the interior seems to have acquired an earthy smell that even Precious can’t identify.

 

But the olfactory issue is not the only mystery that needs solving. Mma Ramotswe is confronted by a distant relative, Blessing, who asks for help with an ailing cousin. The help requested is of a distinctly pecuniary nature, which makes both Mr J L B Matekoni and Mma Makutsi suspicious. 

And there is no peace at home, either, as the new neighbours are airing their marital grievances rather loudly. Still, Mma Ramotswe is confident that the solutions to all of these difficulties are there to be discovered - as long as she is led by kindness, grace, and logic and can rely on the counsel of her friends and loved ones.

About the author: Alexander McCall Smith, often referred to as ‘Sandy’, is one of the world’s most prolific and best-loved authors. His various series of books have been translated into forty-six languages and become bestsellers throughout the world. These include the highly successful The No 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency series, the popular 44 Scotland Street novels, the Isabel Dalhousie novels, the von Igelfeld series and the new Detective Varg novels. He also writes stand-alone novels, children's fiction and libretti for short operas.

Alexander has received numerous awards for his writing and holds thirteen honorary doctorates from universities in Europe and North America.  He is Professor Emeritus of Medical Law at the University of Edinburgh. In 2007, he received a CBE for services to literature and in 2011 was honoured by the President of Botswana for services through literature to the country.  In 2015, he received the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction and in 2017, The National Arts Club (of America) Medal of Honour for Achievement in Literature.

Rating: 5/5

How I Survived A Chinese 'Re-education' Camp: A Uyghur Woman's Story (Biography/History/Geopolitics) by Gulbahar Haitiwaji and Rozenn Morgat

Hardback: In the camps, the 're-education' process applies the same remorseless method to destroying all its victims. It starts out by stripping you of your individuality. It takes away your name, your clothes, your hair. There is nothing now to distinguish you from anyone else. Then the process takes over your body by subjecting it to a hellish routine: being forced to repeatedly recite the glories of the Communist Party for eleven hours a day in a windowless classroom. Falter, and you are punished. So you keep on saying the same things over and over again until you can't feel, can't think anymore. You lose all sense of time. First the hours then the days. - On the madness of the concentration camp system

Since 2017, more than one million Uyghurs have been deported from their homes in the Xinjiang region of China to 'reeducation camps.' The brutal repression of the Uyghurs, a Turkish-speaking Muslim ethnic group, has been denounced as genocide, and reported widely in media around the world. 

The Xinjiang Papers, revealed by The New York Times in 2019, expose the brutal repression of the Uyghur ethnicity by means of forced mass detention­ - the biggest since the time of Mao.

 

Her name is Gulbahar Haitiwaji and she is the first Uyghur woman to write a memoir about the ‘reeducation’ camps. For three years, Haitiwaji endured hundreds of hours of interrogations, torture, hunger, police violence, brainwashing, forced sterilization, freezing cold, and nights under blinding neon light in her prison cell.

 

These camps are to China what the Gulags were to the USSR. The Chinese government denies that they are concentration camps, seeking to legitimize their existence in the name of the “total fight against Islamic terrorism, infiltration and separatism,” and calls them “schools.” 

But none of this is true. 

Gulbahar only escaped thanks to the relentless efforts of her daughter. Her courageous memoir is a terrifying portrait of the atrocities she endured in the Chinese gulag and how the treatment of the Uyghurs at the hands of the Chinese government is just the latest example of their oppression of independent minorities within Chinese borders.

 

The Xinjiang region where the Uyghurs live is where the Chinese government wishes there to be a new “silk route,” connecting Asia to Europe, considered to be the most important political project of president Xi Jinping. 

How I Survived A Chinese 'Re-education' Camp (2022) shows the hypocrisy and perversity of the Chinese concentration camp system, which seeks not to punish an extremist Uyghur minority, but instead to eradicate an entire ethnicity, right down to those of its members living in exile abroad, like Gulbahar. How I Survived a Chinese 'Re-education' Camp is translated from the French by Edward Gauvin. 

About the authors: Born in 1966 in Ghulja in the Xinjiang region, Gulbahar Haitiwaji was an executive in the Chinese oil industry before leaving for France in 2006 with her husband and children, who obtained the status of political refugees. In 2017, she was summoned in China for an administrative issue. Once there, she was arrested and spent more than two years in a re-education camp. Thanks to the efforts of her family and the French foreign ministry she was freed and was able to return to France where she currently resides.

Rozenn Morgat is a journalist with Le Figaro. She helped Gulbahar to tell her story, in the hope of alerting the world to what is happening to the Uyghurs.

About the translator: A 2021 Guggenheim fellow, Edward Gauvin has translated in various fields from film to fiction, with a personal focus on contemporary comics (BD) and post-Surrealist literatures of the fantastic. His work has appeared in The New York Times, Harper, and World Literature Today, and twice placed in the British Comparative Literature Association’s John Dryden Translation Competition. It has also been shortlisted for several major awards - the Oxford Weidenfeld Translation Prize, the Albertine Prize, the Best Translated Book Award, the National Translation Award - and twice nominated for French-American Foundation Translation Prize. He has received fellowships from the NEA, PEN America, the Fulbright program, and the Centre National du Livre, as well as residencies from Ledig House, the Lannan Foundation, the Banff Centre, and the Belgian government. A multiple grantee of the French Voices program from the French Embassy, he is a frequent contributor to their cultural initiatives. As a translation advocate, he has written widely, spoken at universities and festivals, and taught at the Bread Loaf Translation Conference. The translator of over 400 graphic novels, he is a contributing editor for comics at Words Without Borders.

What Is True Freedom?

Mirari Vos: On Liberalism And Religious Indifferentism by Gregory XVI

Paperback: "From this poisoned source of indifferentism flows that false and absurd, or rather extravagant, maxim that liberty of conscience should be established and guaranteed to each man - a most contagious error, ..." - Pope Gregory XVI in Mirari Vos.

In the early 1800s, the Church in France, infected by the Revolution of 1789, turned to its charismatic philosopher and apologist, Abbe Félicité-Robert de Lamennais, promoter of a movement to "catholicize liberalism." He expounded an alien philosophy based on a new theory of certitude claiming truth does not belong to individual reason, but to the universal consent of mankind. According to him, certainty of truth was not determined by evidence, but by the authority of mankind. The true religion, he concluded, is that which can put forth on its behalf the greatest number of witnesses.

His opinions on liberty of press, conscience, revolt, and democratization of the Church, were receiving popularity. This caught the attention of Pope Gregory XVI, who condemned them in Mirari Vos (15 August 1832). 

De Lammenais refused to submit and renounced his priesthood and Catholicism. He died unrepentant and unreconciled with the Church.

About the author: Pope Gregory XVI (Latin: Gregorius XVI; Italian: Gregorio XVI; born Bartolomeo Alberto Cappellari; 18 September 1765 – 1 June 1846) was head of the Catholic Church and ruler of the Papal States from 2 February 1831 to his death in 1846.

Saint Valentine (175AD - 269AD)

We Lived In A Time When

Chief of Staff: Notes From Downing Street by Gavin Barwell

Hardback: Once a more sedate affair, since 2016, British politics has witnessed a barrage of crises, resignations and general elections. 

As Brexit became logjammed, Theresa May's premiership was the most turbulent of all. In her darkest hour, following the disastrous 2017 election, she turned to Gavin Barwell to restore her battered authority. He would become her Chief of Staff for the next two years - a period punctuated by strained negotiations, domestic tragedy, and intense political drama.

In this gripping insider memoir, Barwell reveals what really went on in the corridors of power - and sheds a vital light on May, the most inscrutable of modern prime ministers. He was by her side when she negotiated her Brexit deal, met Donald Trump, heard about the poisoning of the Skripals in Salisbury, responded to the Grenfell Tower fire, met Jeremy Corbyn and Keir Starmer to broker a cross-party Brexit agreement - and ultimately made the decision to stand down as Prime Minister. 

Revealing how government operates during times of crisis, Chief of Staff: Notes From Downing Street (2021) will become the definitive record of a momentous episode in Britain's recent political history.

About the author: Gavin Barwell served as Minister of State for Housing, Planning and Minister for London at the Department for Communities and Local Government from July 2016 until June 2017. He was elected Conservative MP for Croydon Central in May 2010.

Gavin previously served as Government Whip, Comptroller of HM Household from May 2015 until July 2016, Lord Commissioner, Whip from July 2014 until May 2015 and as Assistant Whip from October 2013 until July 2014. He was Parliamentary Private Secretary (PPS) to the Secretary of State for Education, Michael Gove, from 2012 to 2013 and PPS to the Minister of State for Decentralisation and Planning Policy, Greg Clark, from 2011 to 2012. He has been a member of the following Select Committees: Science and Technology 2010 to 2012 and Draft House of Lords Reform Bill (Joint Committee) 2011 to 2012.

Literature Is Its Own Republic

Père Lamy 1855-1931 by Comte Paul Biver

Paperback: Père Lamy 1855-1931 (1936) by Comte Paul Biver is translated from the French by Monsignor John O'Connor in 1973. 

The author Comte Paul Biver was a very close friend of Père Lamy, Apostle and Mystic. He conducted numerous informal interviews of Père Lamy in his house not long before his death in 1931 (in fact, Père Lamy died in the house of the author on 1 December 1931). 

These interviews are contained in this extraordinary saintly biography full of spiritual inspiration. Concerning Père Lamy, his bishop said: “I have in my diocese another Curé of Ars.” 

This holy priest had visions of the past and of the future, of Our Lord, the Blessed Mother, St Joseph, the Angels and even Lucifer. He founded the Religious Congregation of the Servants of Jesus and Mary, built a Chapel to our Lady of the Woodlands, cared for countless wounded soldiers and sick people during World War I, was called the Priest of the “ragpickers” and hooligans for having directed a Youth Movement and cared for countless street boys in Troyes and La Courneuve. 

Père Lamy was a Parish Priest for over 30 years. The many accomplishments of his life are an amazing proof to us of what one priest can do. Profound and enlightening are his statements on religious subjects. He said the Rosary almost continually, slept but one or two hours a night, could smell sin even through a penitent's perfume, conversed regularly with his guardian angel, effected miracles and made prophecies.

To Paradise by Hanya Yanagihara

Hardcover: The problem, though, with trying to be the ideal anything is that eventually the definition changes, and you realize that what you'd been pursuing all along was not a single truth but a set of expectations determined by context. You leave that context, and you leave behind those expectations, too, and then you're nothing once again. - p269.

Hanya Yanagihara, the author of the classic A Little Life, is back with another massive tome! 

To Paradise (2022) is a bold, brilliant novel spanning three centuries and three different versions of the American experiment, about lovers, family, loss and the elusive promise of utopia.

In an alternate version of 1893 America, New York is part of the Free States, where people may live and love whomever they please (or so it seems). The fragile young scion of a distinguished family resists betrothal to a worthy suitor, drawn to a charming music teacher of no means. 

In a 1993 Manhattan besieged by the AIDS epidemic, a young Hawaiian man lives with his much older, wealthier partner, hiding his troubled childhood and the fate of his father. 

And in 2093, in a world riven by plagues and governed by totalitarian rule, a powerful scientist’s damaged granddaughter tries to navigate life without him - and solve the mystery of her husband’s disappearances.

These three sections are joined in an enthralling and ingenious symphony, as recurring notes and themes deepen and enrich one another: a townhouse in Washington Square Park in Greenwich Village; illness, and treatments that come at a terrible cost; wealth and squalor; the weak and the strong; race; the definition of family, and of nationhood; the dangerous righteousness of the powerful, and of revolutionaries; the longing to find a place in an earthly paradise, and the gradual realization that it cannot exist. What unites not just the characters, but these Americas, are their reckonings with the qualities that make us human: Fear. Love. Shame. Need. Loneliness.

To Paradise is a fin de siècle novel of marvellous literary effect, but above all it is a work of emotional genius. The great power of this remarkable novel is driven by Yanagihara’s understanding of the aching desire to protect those we love - partners, lovers, children, friends, family and even our fellow citizens - and the pain that ensues when we cannot.

About the author: Born in Los Angeles, Hanya Yanagihara spent her childhood between Hawaii, New York, Maryland, California and Texas. After graduating from Smith College in Massachusetts, she settled in New York and worked in publishing before becoming a journalist and the editor for Condé Nast Traveler and subsequently the New York Times style supplement, T magazine.

Her debut novel The People in the Trees, published in 2013 to wide critical acclaim, draws from the true story of Nobel Prize-winning medical researcher Daniel Carleton Gajdusek, who was later convicted of child abuse. Yanagihara’s second novel rocketed her into the literary scene: an enduring bestseller and a modern classic, A Little Life (2015) won the 2015 Kirkus Prize and was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. Her third novel, To Paradise (2022), spans three centuries and explores three alternate versions of America and the American experiment.

Rating: 5/5

A Short History Of The Catholic Church by J Derek Holmes and Bernard W Bickers

Paperback: The period covered by this edition of A Short History of the Catholic Church (1983, 1992) ranges from the origins of the Church in the New Testament through to 1992.

"The Church is an institution or society made up of human beings," the authors write; "in its growth and development, in its attempt to penetrate and influence human civilization, the Church has used historical circumstances and adapted itself to them. Whatever understanding of the Church, or interpretation of its past, historians might wish to adopt, they must always respect the academic demands of their discipline in spite of possible tensions between theological and historical opinions and claims."

A Short History of the Catholic Church is divided into seven broad chapters, while the appendixes provide a table of major events in Church history, a list of popes, and valuable 'Notes on further reading' covering not only general histories but important individual studies, and a full index.

Throughout the authors write with liveliness, clarity and independence of mind, in such a way as will provide students with a strong basis of knowledge and reference and more advanced readers with a broad and helpful summary that places the procession of events in Church history in clear, objective perspective. Their hope is that the book "will contribute the necessary historical background to the deeper ecclesiastical, ecumenical and theological reflection which is still widespread in this "post-Christian" age."

For this revised edition, the well-known papal biographer and writer on church affairs, Peter Hebblethwaite, has contributed a 'Postscript' covering the papacy of Pope John Paul II up to his illness in July 1992.

About the authors: Rev Dr J Derek Holmes, former Lecturer in Church History at Ushaw College, Durham, is the author of More Roman than Rome, a study of English Catholicism in the nineteenth century; of The Triumph of the Holy See, which describes the fundamental changes that took place in the structures of the Catholic Church in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; and of The Papacy in the Modern World, 1914-1978, a study of the policies and the politics of the papacy in the age of mass political movements.

Rev Bernard W Bickers was educated at Ushaw College, read Honours Theology at Durham University and was ordained in 1973. He then went to Cambridge for further studies and after two years of parish work, returned to Ushaw as Lecturer in Church History.