The story of four modern American Catholics who made literature out of their search for God
In the mid-twentieth century four American Catholics came to believe that the best way to explore the questions of religious faith was to write about them-in works that readers of all kinds could admire. "The Life You Save May Be Your Own" is their story-a vivid and enthralling account of great writers and their power over us.
Thomas Merton was a Trappist monk in Kentucky; Dorothy Day the founder of the Catholic Worker in New York; Flannery O'Connor a "Christ-haunted" literary prodigy in Georgia; Walker Percy a doctor in New Orleans who quit medicine to write fiction and philosophy. A friend came up with a name for them-the School of the Holy Ghost-and for three decades they exchanged letters, ardently read one another's books, and grappled with what one of them called a "predicament shared in common."
A pilgrimage is a journey taken in light of a story; and in "The Life You Save May Be Your Own" Paul Elie tells these writers' story as a pilgrimage from the God-obsessed literary past of Dante and Dostoevsky out into the thrilling chaos of postwar American life. It is a story of how the Catholic faith, in their vision of things, took on forms the faithful could not have anticipated. And it is a story about the ways we look to great books and writers to help us make sense of our experience, about the power of literature to change-to save-our lives.

Barbara Rogers came of age as an artist during the battle between figuration and abstraction. Never declaring full allegiance to the figurative movement or to pure abstraction, Rogers forged a style that placed the figure in a setting that includes rich foliage, creating tension through the suggestion of allegorical content. This first documentation of Rogers' life and work details her earliest influences and education, the shift following the storm, and her work that has grown increasingly complex and ambitious. The book documents not only the progress of an individual artist, but reflects the trajectory of women working in the arts in the latter part of the twentieth and early twenty-first century.

In the past decade 141 of the world's 192 countries have abolished or ceased to use capital punishment. Some have outlawed the death penalty for the first time; others, having outlawed it decades ago, have taken resolutions never to adopt it in the future. Meanwhile, NGOs, citizens' groups, progressive politicians, and church people have inspired a popular opposition to the death penalty, so that many American cities and states are now anti-death-penalty zones: not just Cambridge and Berkeley, but New Jersey, New Mexico and Michigan.
The United States is the largest western nation where the death penalty is still in use, but the movement for abolition has taken place out of our view. Attention here has focused on technical questions: Is it legal? Color-blind? Cost-effective? A real deterrent to violent crime?
Marazziti, an Italian, sheds light on the inhumanity of the death pealty in thirteen vivid, pointed episodes. They include a Swiftian tour of the Museum of Execution in Huntsville, Texas; the story of Dominique Green, a black man who was sentenced unfairly in Texas by an all-white jury, and made friends worldwide while on death row; conversations with exonerated prisoners and with family members of murdered people who stand against the death penalty despite their own loss; and an unforgettable profile of the prison warden who, after carrying out dozens of executions in Huntville, became convinced that the death penalty is an inhuman crime.
It is time to imagine the United States without the death penalty, and this original and powerful book shows us how to do so.

The story of a revolution in music and technology, told through a century of recordings of the music of Johann Sebastian Bach

In "Reinventing Bach," his remarkable second book, Paul Elie tells the electrifying story of how musicians of genius have made Bach's music new in our time, at once restoring Bach as a universally revered composer and revolutionizing the ways that music figures into our lives.

As a musician in eighteenth-century Germany, Bach was on the technological frontier--restoring organs, inventing instruments, and perfecting the tuning system still in use today. Two centuries later, pioneering musicians began to take advantage of breakthroughs in audio recording to make Bach's music the sound of modern transcendence. The sainted organist Albert Schweitzer played to a mobile recording unit set up at London's Church of All Hallows in order to spread Bach's organ works to the world beyond the churches. Pablo Casals, recording at Abbey Road Studios, made Bach's cello suites existentialism for the living room; Leopold Stokowski and Walt Disney, with "Fantasia," made Bach the sound of children's playtime and Hollywood grandeur alike. Glenn Gould's "Goldberg Variations" opened and closed the LP era and made Bach the byword for postwar cool; and Yo-Yo Ma has brought Bach into the digital present, where computers and smartphones put the sound of Bach all around us. In this book we see these musicians and dozens of others searching, experimenting, and collaborating with one another in the service of Bach, who emerges as the very image of the spiritualized, technically savvy artist.

"Reinventing Bach" is a gorgeously written story of music, invention, and human passion--and a story with special relevance in our time, for it shows that great things can happen when high art meets new technology.

In May 1904, the residents of Halcyon-a small utopian community on California's central coast-invited their neighbors to attend the grand opening of the Halcyon Hotel and Sanatorium. As part of the entertainment, guests were encouraged to have their hands X-rayed. For the founders and members of Halcyon, the X-ray was a demonstration of mysterious spiritual forces made practical to human beings. Radiance from Halcyon is the story not only of the community but also of its uniquely inventive members' contributions to religion and science. The new synthesis of religion and science attempted by Theosophy laid the foundation for advances produced by the children of the founding members, including microwave technology and atomic spectral analysis. Paul Eli Ivey's narrative starts in the 1890s in Syracuse, New York, with the rising of the Temple of the People, a splinter group of the theosophical movement. After developing its ideals for an agricultural and artisanal community, the Temple purchased land in California and in 1903 began to live its dream there. In addition to an intriguing account of how a little-known utopian religious community profoundly influenced modern science, Ivey offers a wide-ranging cultural history, encompassing Theosophy, novel healing modalities, esoteric architecture, Native American concepts of community, socialist utopias, and innovative modern music.

Rescuing the Children is the memoir of Vivette Samuel, who at age twenty-two began working for the OEuvre de secours aux enfants (OSE, or Society for Assistance to Children). The OSE and similar organizations saved 86 percent of Jewish children in France from deportation to Nazi concentration and extermination camps.