Books

Those for whom San Francisco represents a leftist and left-coast city may be surprised to learn, as William Issel contends was true for the century from 1890 to 1990, that it would be difficult to exaggerate the importance of the Catholic Church to San Francisco politics and culture. For much of that period, few important decisions were made without passing them through the chancery office. Although San Francisco Catholics made up only a third of the city’s population, they amounted to 68...

When things go wrong in Latin America, the tendency is to write new laws or a new constitution. But new laws rarely remedy the situation because Latin America’s major problems are rooted in deep historical realities that condition attitudes and practices, which in turn undermine the democratic process. In this well-researched and up-to-date study, Ignacio Walker explains to the reader in clear language why democracy has had so much difficulty taking hold from...

Antonio González, a Spanish theologian who worked for a number of years in Guatemala and El Salvador, is presently on the instructional staff of the Fundación Xavier Zubiri, a teaching and research center in Madrid. (Zubiri was a Spanish philosopher whose thinking had a profound influence upon Ignacio Ellacuría, S.J.) An earlier work, The Gospel of Faith and Justice, appeared in 2005; a number of other titles have not yet appeared in English.

This new literary biography—”not a formal biography but more than a work of literary criticism,” in the words of its author, Robert Milder, professor of English at Washington University in St. Louis—contends that Nathaniel Hawthorne was a man divided be-tween his realist perceptions and his romantic aspirations.