In 2015, the beautiful jazz funeral in New Orleans for composer Allen Toussaint coincided with a debate over removing four Confederate monuments. Mayor Mitch Landrieu led the ceremony, attended by living legends of jazz, music aficionados, politicians, and everyday people. The scene captured the history and culture of the city in microcosm--a city legendary for its noisy, complicated, tradition-rich splendor. In City of a Million Dreams, Jason Berry delivers a character-driven history of New Orleans at its tricentennial. Chronicling cycles of invention, struggle, death, and rebirth, Berry reveals the city's survival as a triumph of diversity, its map-of-the-world neighborhoods marked by resilience despite hurricanes, epidemics, fires, and floods. Berry orchestrates a parade of vibrant personalities, from the founder Bienville, a warrior emblazoned with snake tattoos; to Governor William C. C. Claiborne, General Andrew Jackson, and Pere Antoine, an influential priest and secret agent of the Inquisition; Sister Gertrude Morgan, a street evangelist and visionary artist of the 1960s; and Michael White, the famous clarinetist who remade his life after losing everything in Hurricane Katrina. The textured profiles of this extraordinary cast furnish a dramatic narrative of the beloved city, famous the world over for mysterious rituals as people dance when they bury their dead.

In the autumn of 1984, Jason Berry heard reports of the sexual abuse of boys by a priest in rural Louisiana. As an expectant father, he was horrified for the children. As a Catholic he reasoned that even a priest can commit crimes. As a reporter, he wanted to find out what had happened. In this ground-breaking book, first published in 1992 and still used in many newsrooms, Berry exposed a culture of corrosive secrecy in which bishops concealed a criminal sexual underground. One of Berry's sources accurately projected $1 billion in church losses by century's end. Lead Us Not Into Temptation is the masterful narrative of an epic crisis as it unfolds. The story begins in one Cajun community numbed by the realization that a single priest abused dozens of children. A brave weekly newspaper reports that the bishop reassigned more predator priests, and for its effort finds itself counter-attacked by the daily press. As church officials sit in silence, lawyers battle over the price of victims' suffering. As the prosecutor bears down, Berry finds an eerie church insider who guides him into a labyrinth. The story moves to the Vatican Embassy in Washington, D.C., where a secret pedophilia report warns American bishops of the staggering implications if a forthright policy is not soon adopted. Yet cases keep surfacing. New York City, Minneapolis-St. Paul, Chicago, Cleveland, Honolulu, Seattle, New Orleans and in Canada as Berry unpeels a web of suffering and struggles for justice. While abusive priests are reshuffled, Berry follows a Vatican crackdown on liberal theologians. As Vatican officials attack gays, Berry profiles gay priests and seminarians. Lead Us Not Into Temptation is as much about journalism as the cover-up culture the author exposed a decade before The Boston Globe's major series. In this updated edition, Lead Us Not Into Temptation stands as a fair and fearless portrayal of the Catholic Church's worst crisis in centuries. Jason Berry's book stands too as a haunting affirmation of faith. "The greatest scandal in the history of religion in America." -- From the foreword by Andrew M. Greeley " Has] the same narrative excitement as Woodward and Bernstein's All the President's Men. There is even a mystery whistle-blower, equivalent to Deep Throat, whom Berry dubs "Chalice" and who meets a sorry fate in the denouement." -- The Nation "Berry is the rare investigative reporter whose scholarship, compassion, and ability to write with the poetic power of Robert Penn Warren are in perfect balance... T]he church itself could not have asked for a more fair-minded instrument of its own indictment." -- USA Today "Lead Us Not into Temptation is frequently as compelling as a novel, but it is also a thoughtful, restrained examination of an explosive subject that in less skilled hands could easily have been exploited and sensationalized." -- Cleveland Plain Dealer

Going deep behind the headlines about scandals in the Catholic Church, Jason Berry and Gerald Renner's "Vows of Silence "follows the staggering trail of evasions and deceit that leads directly to the Vatican and taints the legacy of Pope John Paul II. Based on more than six years of investigative reporting and hundreds of interviews, this book is a riveting account of Vatican cover-ups. Both a profound criticism and a wake-up call to reform by two Catholic writers, "Vows of Silence "reveals an agenda of top-down control under John Paul II and a hierarchy so obsessed with secrecy as to spawn disinformation. It is not a book about sexual abuse; it is a book about abuse of power, throughout the Vatican.