In The Way of Silence: Engaging the Sacred in Daily Life, Brother David Steindl-Rast has written a manual for living a meaningful, contemplative life outside of a religious community. Given Steindl-Rast’s age and his reliance on his earlier works, the reader may suspect that this book is a culmination of a lifetime wisdom derived from study and practice. In any case, this small tome contains a powerful message that looks beyond the surface of the major spiritual traditions and even organized religion as a whole to find eternal truths that resonant deeply with the reader. Covering such immense topics as finding God through the senses, cultivating grateful joy, and our quest for ultimate meaning, this is not a book that is readily summarized. Instead, for those seeking answers and possibly solace, this is a book to be read, pondered, and annotated over and over again. While those who align themselves with a particular tradition will have no issue with this book, those who seek a way to live in and find meaning in this world outside of an organized religion may have found all the answers they seek.
(Reviewed in exchange for copy of book for San Francisco Book Review.)
Desiree Alvarez is a poet who imbues reality with the mythic and mystical to create striking imagery. Alvarez, who created the cover art for Devil’s Paintbrush with a flamethrower, is also an artist, which may partly explain her strong visual images. For example in Yours, In Snow, she writes, “Your eyes, smoked blue, are full of mountains / and something beyond that keep me.” In Chorus of Snow Quartz, “Lichen glows as if a place could be a lover.” In Indian Elephant, the speaker slips out at night to “watch the pearls of gulls string the abandoned pier.” In Familiar where the speaker mourns her dog, “the wind blew a hole right through me in the shape of a dog running on my first night without you.” Given the beauty of her words, it comes as no surprise that Alvarez has won numerous awards, fellowships and residences, including the 2015 May Sarton New Hampshire Poetry Prize for Devil’s Paintbrush. For those who seek a haunting line, Devil’s Paintbrush provides ample material to savor.
In Charlotte Bronte: A Fiery Heart, Claire Harman tackles the life of one of the most famous women writers in British history. In just under four-hundred pages, Harman relates Bronte’s life from birth until her untimely death from what Harman believes was hyperemesis gravidarum resulting from a pregnancy during her brief, but happy marriage to Arthur Nicholls. Along the way, Harman details Bronte’s isolated childhood, her difficult years as a teacher and governess, her yearning to return to her family, her unrequited passion for two men, her and her sisters’ struggles to become published, the death of her siblings, and the celebrity her work eventually engendered. Through this biography, Harman establishes Bronte as a surprisingly strong, at times difficult, but passionate woman who relied deeply on her own experiences to create her work. As a result of Bronte’s close ties to her sisters, Harman also provides interesting insights into Emily and Anne Bronte’s lives. For those intrigued by the woman behind Jane Eyre and Villette, this meticulously researched and detailed biography is sure to please.
In Death of an Alchemist, an old man—with a macaw and a cat as his only companions—is on the verge of publishing a recipe for immortality when he suddenly dies in his sleep. Given the year is 1543, fast-acting pestilence of many types abounds. Nevertheless, Bianca Goddard, daughter of an alchemist and maker of medicines, suspects he was murdered. Was it the physician whose daughter is gravely ill, the fellow alchemist, the usurer owed money, or the alchemist’s rogue son-in-law? As people begin dropping like flies, can Goddard, with the help of her old friend Meddybemps, solve the mystery? Can she understand the recipe in time to save her own husband imperiled by the sweat?
This novel is the story of Otto Laird, an elderly, physically- and mentally-failing architect who returns after a long absence to London to save one of his buildings marked for demolition. The once brilliant, now dilapidated building mirrors Laird’s own life. As a crew films Laird returning to and living in the building for several days, Laird reviews his life: his childhood hidden in a cellar during World War II, his early joy in meeting his first wife as a student in London and designing the building in question, their later troubled marriage and his troubled fatherhood as his career soared, his reconciliation with his wife, and finally his devastation by her death.
In Other Words is the story of Jhumpa Lahiri’s passion to learn Italian. On one level, this book addresses the mundane: Lahiri’s experience with tutors, living in Italy, writing in Italian, and grappling with the intricacies and nuances of a different language. Lahiri, however, plumbs the depths of these experiences to reveal deeper insights. For example, Lahiri writes of her alienation from both the language of her birth, Bengali, and her first adopted language, English, and the independence she finds in choosing her third language. She discusses the different assumptions she cannot escape as a Bengali-American when she speaks Bengali, English and Italian. Lahiri describes both the constriction and freedom she feels as a writer in struggling to write in Italian. Most interestingly, Lahiri wrote In Other Words in Italian but refused to translate it to English to protect her limited Italian and to prevent Lahiri from changing her work in her stronger language.
In The Sunlit Night, two lost souls meet by chance ninety-five miles north of the Arctic Circle on an archipelago of tiny islands in the Norwegian Sea. Twenty-one-year-old Frances has come to intern with an artist who is painting a barn in shades of yellow. Just before she arrives, Frances broke up with her boyfriend, who bluntly informed her that what she does doesn’t help anyone, and discovered her family is on the verge of disintegrating. Seventeen-year-old Yasha arrives to carry out his father’s unusual final wishes, while his long-absent mother makes a sudden reappearance in his life.
In Karma’s a Killer, yoga instructor, Katie Davidson, agrees to teach “doga” or yoga for dogs at a local animal rescue’s fundraiser, and chaos ensues. First, the doga class goes very wrong when someone insists on bringing Alfalfa the rabbit into the class filled with dogs. Then, animal activists stage a violent protest at the event. While Katie struggles to maintain her sense of inner peace, one of the activists is found dead, and a woman named Dharma, who claims to be Katie’s long-lost mother, is arrested for the murder. With her high-strung German Shepard companion, Bella, Katie sets out to discover the truth.
One of Santiago Torres’ closest friends, Jasper Willoughs, dies in a fall from a Georgetown University dormitory. Although ruled a suicide, Santi, a Jesuit priest and a Gonzaga high school headmaster, knows his friend too well to believe that. Jasper, a fellow priest finishing his doctorate on the early history of the Jesuit order, had been excited to meet Santi because he had found something that would cause him to rewrite his thesis. Soon, Santi receives mysterious clues from The Odd Fellows Society, a Georgetown club for history and trivia geeks for whom Willoughs created an annual scavenger hunt. Is Santi crazy, or did Willoughs somehow threaten a merely rumored, Georgetown secret society called the Stewards? Either way, Santi becomes caught up in a real life scavenger hunt around the nation’s capital. To complicate matters, his partner is Abby Byrnes, the woman he has secretly loved for eighteen years, and his brother, with whom he shares a complicated history and no affection, is the FBI agent on the case. Can they figure out the clues before Santi becomes the next victim to die under mysterious circumstances?
The Song of Hartgrove Hall is the story of Harry Fox-Talbot. In alternating chapters, the reader sees Fox as a young man and as an elderly man. The young Fox reveals the struggle of the Fox-Talbot brothers to save their dilapidated ancestral home—Hartgrove Hall—and Fox’s undeniable passion for composing music, collecting folk songs, and his brother’s girl, Edie Rose. In contrast, the elderly Fox struggles with the death of his beloved wife, his inability to compose more music, and the discovery that his young, difficult grandson has an amazing gift for music.