A GOOD MAN by Mark K. Shriver

In June my husband, who gets lots of review copies unbidden, asked me if I wanted to read Mark Shriver's memoir about his father, Sargent Shriver, who passed away in 2011 at age 95. "Since you're a fan of all things Kennedy," he said, "I thought you might want to see it." I didn't.

True, a high point in my adolescent life was standing in back of St. Matthew's Cathedral one December morning in 1963 waiting for mass to begin when suddenly a very tall, very disheveled, very pregnant Eunice Kennedy Shriver pushed past me, wearing smudged red lipstick and a full-length fur coat. But sons are not necessarily good biographers, and anyway, I had a stack of mysteries awaiting my attention.

But then in July a Facebook friend pointed me to Reeve Lindbergh's review of A Good Man in the Washington Post, suggesting that this was a book I might want to read. Lindbergh--herself the daughter of two famous parents, Charles and Anne Morrow Lindbergh--called it "a moving and thoughtful book." Maybe I'll read this after all, I said to myself. And then a week or two later, my friend Estelle sent me a copy of the book as an early birthday present, telling me she thought I'd connect with it on many levels. I must be supposed to read this one, I thought.

Estelle was right. This is a delightful book for lovers of Camelot--those of us who lived through the suddenly shattered dream of the Kennedy administration. Mark Shriver never saw his uncle Jack--as it happens, Mark was the baby bump under Mrs. Shriver's fur coat at that mass nearly 50 years ago, exactly one month after President Kennedy's assassination--and he was only four when his uncle Bobby was shot. But he grew up with a father who founded the Peace Corps and ran for vice-president, a mother who founded the Special Olympics, four rambunctious siblings, and twenty-some cousins, most of whom were unusually energetic and competitive. Mark's childhood home often hosted the rich and the famous, and he recognizes the privilege of growing up well connected. At the same time, he is refreshingly candid about the self-doubts such an environment fostered.

The book, though, isn't about Mark. It's about Sarge, the good man of the title, the father he adored. And Mark's portrayal of Sarge's goodness is what I liked best about the book (and what Estelle knew I'd most appreciate). See, my father was a good man too. Shriver was an extroverted, energetic, Catholic politician while my dad was an introverted, often tired, Protestant professor; but at core the two men were surprisingly similar. Both were quietly but unalterably faithful Christians. Both adored their wives and children. Both, though they worked hard and accomplished much, put their families ahead of their jobs. Neither one tooted his own horn, and neither one was bothered when others moved past him into the limelight or up the career ladder. Both men were brilliant, and, sadly, both spent their final years moving into the oblivion of Alzheimer's Disease.

Mark tells a story about his father that made me gasp in recognition. The two men were in the car together. Sarge "was having one of those lucid moments that make you ... forget for a minute or two that this is all really happening." Mark seized the moment to ask his father a blunt question.

"Dad," I said, "you are losing your mind. You know that. How does that make you feel? How are you doing with that?"

"I'm doing the best I can with what God has given me," he said.

Sixteen years ago I wrote an article for U.S. Catholic magazine about my father's decline and death from Alzheimer's. Here are some lines from that article:

"Are you afraid of dying?" I asked my father several months before he died.

"Dying?" he said, considering. "No, not of dying. I live an abbreviated life."

I asked him what he meant. "A little taken away here. A little taken away there," he explained patiently, as if to a student needing help. "I do the best I can with what's left."

Sargent Shriver was born in 1915; my father, in 1910. Their age cohort is sometimes called the Greatest Generation. Both men were great. Both were exceptionally good. And I believe both had found the secret of happiness.
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A Good Man is also available as a CD audiobook (unabridged) and as an audible.com download (abridged). To listen to a five-minute excerpt read by Mark Shriver, click here.

QUIETLY IN THEIR SLEEP by Donna Leon

This sixth installment in the Commissario Guido Brunetti series raises provocative religious and political questions. The story line leads to probability, not certainty. The context of the story - corrupt churchmen and public officials - is suggested, not offered as fact.

Is one of the priests in the story a killer?

Is another priest a child molester?

Did certain directives come from the Vatican - and if so, from whom?

Is Opus Dei a venal, murderous cult - or simply a secret society of the super-pious?

In a city where only 15% of the inhabitants attend church every Sunday, how do religious authorities get so much influence over political figures?

Normally I prefer detective stories to end with the puzzle solved, the criminal(s) brought to justice, and order at least temporarily restored. I'll make an exception for Quietly in Their Sleep (whose U.K. edition is titled The Death of Faith). Maybe that's because, to skeptics like Brunetti, Paola (Brunetti's wife), Elettra (the vice-questore's personal assistant), and me, the evidence in this story for ecclesial malfeasance ranges from persuasive to conclusive.

And maybe I resonate with this story because, although it was first published 15 years ago, it seems relevant to America's 2012 political season, with all our arguing about gay marriage and abortion and contraception and the proper role of bishops in forming public policy. These are not the issues in Quietly in Their Sleep, but our political discussions today, like the plot of this book, focus on the age-old question of just how much power religious organizations should wield in a democracy.

I am a religious person, a semi-lapsed Catholic who goes to mass (Episcopal) every week. I believe churches do an enormous amount of good in the world. I appreciate their call to high moral standards. But churches are made up of, and ruled by, human beings, and none of us is entirely trustworthy (cf. original sin). It is good to remember that Lord Acton's famous dictum, "Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely," referred primarily to religious power.

After centuries of abuse from religious power-holders, a number of countries fought revolutions and established secular states - that is, political systems that kept church and state separate. America was the leader of the pack. Italy, by contrast, never completely separated religious and civil power. Quietly in Their Sleep describes what goes on when the two powers are in bed with each other. It's a fascinating detective story, not a political pamphlet, but now and then one of the characters' exasperation bursts forth. Here's Paola Brunetti, for example, arguing with her husband about the opt-out religious education their children are receiving in their public school:

If you put people on a diet, they start thinking about food. Or, if you make someone stop smoking, all they think about is cigarettes. It seems logical enough to me that if you tell a person he can't have sex, he's going to be obsessive about the subject. Then to give him the power to tell other people how to run their sex lives, well, that's just asking for trouble.

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If you're new to Donna Leon's mysteries, you might want to check my reviews of book 3, Dressed for Death, and book 4, Death and Judgment; or just start reading book 1, Death at La Fenice. Many hours of enjoyment await you: book 21, Beastly Things, was published last week.

RESCUING REGINA by Josephe Marie Flynn

Here's a book you may not run across in your local bookstore (if you're lucky enough to still have one: my town has shut down Toad Hall, Barnes & Noble, and - now - Borders). My excellent public library does not yet have a copy.

Anis Shivani of the Huffington Post, however, listed Rescuing Regina among "The 20 Most Anticipated Books of Summer 2011." It is, of course, available at Amazon, where it is #5 of books about emigration and immigration and #10 of books about Central Africa. All five of its editorial reviewers loved it, as did all five of its citizen reviewers. One suggested it should be a movie.

That was my suggestion, too, in the review I've just written for Christian Century, and to which I will link once it is published and becomes available online. But that will not happen for several months, and you might want to know more about this book now.

Regina is a young woman from the Democratic Republic of the Congo who is gang raped and jailed because she has been speaking in favor of democracy. After she makes a harrowing nighttime escape to America, her husband (who has remained in the Congo) is jailed and tortured - also for being involved in a pro-democracy group. He too manages to escape to America. And here, in the form of America's grossly dysfunctional immigration system, the two of them face further trials. Stripped of the constitutional rights available to any U.S. citizen, Regina is once again imprisoned - and this time, death seems inevitable.

Note: Rescuing Regina is a true story.  The author, Sister Josephe Marie Flynn, is a Milwaukee nun who became the reluctant leader of a community effort to free Regina and send her home to her husband and two young children. You can read more about Sister Josephe, Regina, and the book here.

Note also: Rescuing Regina is not about political ideology. The story is about human rights, not politics. Sister Josephe is an old-school liberal, but many of the people who worked with her on Regina's behalf are right-wing Republicans. Regina's plight was followed by Fox News and by NPR.

Final note: Rescuing Regina is a suspense-filled adventure tale and courtroom drama. Summer is only half over, and you may not be in the mood to read a white paper on immigration reform. This is not that, thank goodness. Rather, it's an inspirational, heart-warming story about what individual heroism and community solidarity can accomplish, even against apparently insurmountable odds.

WHY STAY CATHOLIC? by Michael Leach

"Why in the hell would an intelligent Episcopalian woman choose to become a Catholic?" I had been a Catholic for less than six months when a cradle Catholic of Irish descent - a classmate of mine at a Catholic university - asked me that question. I don't remember how I answered. I'm sure I wasn't very articulate.

Today I still am not sure how to answer her question, or the more compelling question now that I've been a Catholic (more or less) for nearly two decades: Why Stay Catholic? The hierarchy's attitude toward women and children has not improved. Now more than ever, church leadership seems to run the gamut from insensitive to corrupt. So when I saw the title of Mike Leach's new book, which I first read about in an interview by Heidi Schlumpf in Publishers Weekly, I emailed an editor friend at Loyola Press and brazenly asked for a copy.

Disclaimer: I've been involved in in religion publishing for over 30 years. I know and admire Mike, who has worked in religion publishing longer than I have, and in much more exalted positions. I used to work at Loyola Press, and my editor friend there did not charge me for this book. So you are free to discount everything I'm about to say, though I'll also point out that nobody urged me to read the book or even told me it existed, and nobody asked me to write this review (if they had, I would have refused - I'm a contrarian), and - believe me - nobody is paying me for writing it.

So maybe you can trust me when I tell you that this is a good book for lapsed and semi-lapsed Catholics as well as for regular mass-attenders who nevertheless are troubled by aspects of their church ("weary Catholics," Mike calls them). I'd also recommend the book to people who are considering converting to Catholicism. And Protestants could benefit from reading it too: a lot of what Mike says in the first half of the book is true for all Christians.

Mike writes for laypersons, not clergy or academics. His style is light and breezy, but his ideas run deep. He does not have an agenda. He's not trying to defend irrelevant teachings or counterproductive practices. He's not trying to get you to go to mass every week (he admits he doesn't always go himself). He's clearly not trying to put a good spin on the church's serious faults.

But neither does he spend much time complaining. Mike is in love with the church. It's his family. It's where he meets God. It's where he rubs shoulders with people of faith who have changed the world for the better. It's where he sees the realities - the Reality - that lies beneath the surface, what Jesuit poet Gerard Manley Hopkins called "the dearest freshness deep down things." What Mike wants to do, I think, is to talk about God's presence everywhere in the world, God's unimaginable love and grace for everyone, and some of the people who make that love and grace visible.

In Part 1, "Ideas," Mike leads with what Andrew Greeley has dubbed the "sacramental imagination." In the next 24 short chapters, he looks at a wide range of great Catholic ideas:  God's all-embracing arms, the seamless garment of life, everyday faithfulness, social justice, the presence of Jesus in the Eucharist, and even the Catholic penchant for parties ("Wherever the Catholic sun doth shine, / There's always laughter and good red wine./ At least I've always found it so. Benedicamus Domino!" - Hilaire Belloc). Each chapter in this section ends with an "I stay Catholic" sentence or two. For example, a chapter on inclusiveness ends, "I am still Catholic because the story of Bethlehem teaches me we are all welcome. I stay in the church because I know this is true no matter what anybody says."

Underlying just about every chapter is what must be Mike's favorite scriptural passage (and is certainly mine): "Neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor ruler, nor things present, nor things to come, nor power, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord!" - Romans 8:38-39, NRSV. Mike puts hands and feet on this love in Part 2, "People," and Part 3, "Places," where he offers vignettes of 15 contemporary Catholic Christians and 10 admirable Catholic institutions. In these days when so much of the news about the Catholic church is truly dreadful, it's great to be reminded of so many good Christians, mostly working under the radar. And for readers who want to know more, he ends each chapter in these two sections with one or more URLs.

A two page article that begins "If I were Pope" is worth the price of the book, as is the concluding chapter on how a third Vatican council could unleash a tidal wave of forgiveness. The most moving chapter, however, is the one about Vickie, the love of Mike's life. Over 40 years ago he left the priesthood to marry her. Seven or eight years ago she was diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease. In sickness and in health, their love affair continues. Mike loves her, and he is faithful.

That's probably also how Mike relates to his church, and why he is still a Catholic.

CIRCLING MY MOTHER by Mary Gordon

When my father died in 1995, he immediately strode back into my imagination as the healthy, middle-aged man of my childhood, adolescence, and young-adult years. When my mother died four months later, my imaginary clock refused to turn back. For a long time I had a hard time seeing her any way except the way she was during her painful last years - unable to speak, unable to walk, profoundly depressed.

I've spent a lot of time going through old photos since then, and I can now - at least part of the time - see both my parents as the intelligent, attractive, well-respected people I knew throughout most of my life. I also enjoy imagining their life during their 17 years together before I was born (hint to mothers: if you have kept the shoebox full of letters you wrote your husband during your engagement, you might want to consider the merriment they will someday provide your children). I came to understand that my parents were not supporting actors in my personal drama, but leading actors in their own. I now realize that, though my mother and I were close in many ways, I never really knew her.

That realization was one reason I particularly enjoyed Ruth Reichl's Not Becoming My Mother, happily renamed in the paperback edition For You, Mom, Finally. And that was also why, when a friend recommended Circling My Mother by novelist Mary Gordon, I expected an equally satisfying read.

I immediately identified with Gordon's story. Her mother was born in 1908, mine in 1910. I was born in 1948, she in 1949. Both mothers suffered from dementia; both spent their last years in nursing homes. My mother died at age 85; hers lived to be 94. Gordon, like me, was trying to get her mother back. Explaining the book's title, she writes:

I came to realize that I couldn't see my mother properly by standing in one place, by standing still. For the last eleven years of her life, the years marked by dementia, she was much more a problem to me than a joy. I wanted to move from the spot where I thought of my mother as a problem. To do this, I had to walk around her life, to view it from many points - only one of which was her career as my mother.

Gordon does this through ten essays, three of which were previously published. Many of the essays' titles begin "My Mother and ...", as in "My Mother and Her Bosses," "... Her Sisters," "... Her Friends," " ... My Father." In them, Gordon gives us a composite view of Anna Gagliano Gordon, daughter of a Sicilian immigrant father and an Irish immigrant mother, first of five daughters (there were also brothers), crippled by polio at age 3, a hard worker from age 17, married at 39, a mother at 41, widowed at 49, extremely devout Catholic, eventual alcoholic, and wearer of Arpège.

In the end, though, we learn a lot more about Mary than about Anna.

This is Mary's memoir, not Anna's. It is the story of a relationship as perceived by the daughter, not a portrait of the mother. It's the kind of book that all of us who have lost our mothers should write for our personal catharsis, but that few of us should publish.

Fortunately, Anna's daughter is a fine writer who entertains us with tales about mid-century Catholic immigrant life, moves us with stories of injustice and dysfunction and missed opportunities, and lets us share her pride as she pays tribute to a flawed but decent, imaginative, and self-giving woman.

Still, Mary Gordon knows she has not yet found her mother:

I will try to keep my mother from vanishing. I will try to understand distance, but to understand that I will also have to understand closeness. I must enter a world of undulations. A world where everything is moving, nothing is forever still....

I am trying to see my mother. I must begin now to learn how to look.

Memoir aficionadas will find Circling My Mother a treat. Women looking for ways to understand their own aging or dead mothers may also enjoy it, though it offers no advice beyond Gordon's own approach: To understand our mothers, we must circle them repeatedly. We must learn how to look.

LIT by Mary Karr

If you like Anne Lamott's nonfiction, you'll love Lit. If you find Lamott's essays just a teensy bit irritating, try Lit anyway - you may like Mary Karr's approach better. If you've never heard of Lamott, this genre - kickass spiritual memoir - may not be high on your wish list. But there are other reasons to read Lit ...

Lit - what does it mean?

When I first saw the title of the best-selling 2009 memoir, I figured it had something to do with literature, as in Mary Karr is an important poet in contemporary American lit.

I quickly realized that it also had a lot to do with alcohol, as in Karr couldn't function unless she was lit.

Toward the end of the book, I saw that it could also refer to light, as in Once Karr accepts the universe, and God, and love, she sometimes feels lit from within.

Two chapters into Lit, I already knew why it was named a best book of 2009 by the New York Times, "the New Yorker (Reviewer Favorite), Entertainment Weekly (Top 10), Time (Top 10), the Washington Post, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Chicago Tribune, the Christian Science Monitor, Slate, the St. Louis Post Dispatch, the Cleveland Plain Dealer, and the Seattle Times." Another chapter or two, and I couldn't put the book down.

Admittedly, as memoir, Lit has two strikes against it. Only a tiny percentage of memoirs submitted to publishers ever become books (an editor once told me that when she sensed a memoir coming over the transom, she hid under her desk), and most published memoirs go out of print quickly. Memoir is an extremely difficult genre to get right. Our own stories, endlessly fascinating to us, rarely appeal to a broader audience. But Mary Karr's memoirs - this is her third - are lit.

Take, for example, her description of inner light, which I summarized so prosaically above. "Every now and then," Karr writes,

we enter the presence of the numinous and deduce for an instant how we're formed, in what detail the force that infuses every petal might specifically run through us, wishing only to lure us into our full potential. Usually, the closest we get is when we love, or when some beloved beams back.

Such lovely writing would have made this book a succès d'estime even if almost nobody ever bought it. But Karr is not just a poet, she's also a story teller and the creator of unforgettable characters. Her mother, for example:

Maybe any seventeen-year-old girl recoils a little at the sight of her mother, but mine held captive in her body so many ghost mothers to be blotted out. If my eyelids closed, I could see the drunk platinum-blond Mother in a mohair sweater who'd divorced Daddy for a few months and fled with us to Colorado to buy a bar. Or the more ancient Mother in pedal pushers might rise up to shake the last drops from the gasoline can over a pile of our toys before a thrown match made flames go whump, and as the dolls' faces imploded so the wires showed through, the very air molecules would shift with the smoke-blackened sky, so the world I occupied would never again be fully safe.

I could go on and on, pointing out Karr's Texas diction, wacky humor, eye for detail, and flashes of insight. You already know her story is about bad parenting, substance abuse, recovery, and conversion; I could add that it's also about depression and divorce and kind mentors and writing. But why describe dinner when food is already on the table? Put down the menu, pick up the fork, and dig in.

Though if you still need convincing, here are three fine reviews:

• Susan Cheever, "The Morning After," New York Times
• Valerie Sayers, "Was Blind Drunk But Now She Sees," Washington Post
• Francine Prose, "A Knife at the Door," New York Review of Books

THRIFT STORE SAINTS by Jane Knuth

Publishers will tell you that it's hard to interest people in books about social justice. Most of us feel guilty enough already. Besides, let's face it - so many books in that category are not only guilt-producing, they're mind-numbingly dull. Phrases like "the preferential option for the poor" do not roll trippingly off the tongue.

Thrift Store Saints, however, is one book about helping the poor that won't make you feel bad about yourself and won't put you to sleep. In fact, it may make you chuckle, if you're the chuckling sort. And if you'd like to get involved with serving the poor but don't have a clue where to start, this is the book for you.

Some 15 years ago, while looking for a rosary for her daughter's First Communion, Jane Knuth somehow ended up at a St. Vincent de Paul store. Noticing the mixture of used merchandise and holy hardware - "as if someone set up a chapel inside a garage sale" - she briefly wondered if the store was "a front for illegal activity."

After waiting an eternity while a small, elderly clerk dealt with a gigantic, stinking drunk, Knuth discovered that St. Vincent de Paul didn't accept credit cards. The clerk cheerfully offered to let her take the rosary anyway and pay later - and then asked if she'd consider volunteering to work at the store. Amazed, Knuth agreed, and then immediately regretted her words.

"Being Catholic," she writes, "I'm all for martyrs, but not as a personal vocation." But she went ahead, reluctant and ill at ease, and that is how Knuth's long involvement with the poor of Kalamazoo began.

The rest of the book covers what she learned from working with the poor (and with other volunteers, which could be even more challenging), but it's not your typical social justice book. Most books about poverty present a lot of facts, data, theory, and theology, interspersing the sober exposition with occasional anecdotes in hopes of keeping the reader's attention. This book turns that approach inside out. Knuth tells story after story, only occasionally supplementing her tales with commentary, as she gently and with self-deprecating humor leads readers into a new way of seeing.

The book, says its author, is "about recognizing God among us when the language is rough, the labor seems mindless, and everybody is wearing old clothes." An engaging storyteller, Knuth invites us to come inside with the customers, learn about their lives, and be changed.

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Disclaimer: I used to work for Loyola Press, and Jane Knuth graciously included my name among the acknowledgments. However, I was not involved with editing the book, I have no financial interest in it, and Loyola didn't ask me to promote it. I just think it's an unusually winsome introduction to volunteer ministry. See for yourself - you can read the first two chapters here.

THE MEMOIRS OF MARY QUEEN OF SCOTS by Carolly Erickson

Is it too much to ask of a historical novel that it be, well, historical?

Alas, The Memoirs of Mary Queen of Scots, soon to be released in paperback, is not.

Never mind that the author, Carolly Erickson, has a PhD in medieval history from Columbia University, or that she has written some fine biographies from the Tudor period including Great Harry and The First Elizabeth. If you want to learn more about the doomed queen on France, Scotland, and (in her mind, at least) England, don't start here.

To be fair, Erickson never claims historical accuracy for her novel. In fact, in a note to the reader at the back of the book, she writes:

Just a reminder that in this historical entertainment, authentic history and imaginative invention are blended, so that fictional events and circumstances, fictional characters and fictional alterations to the past intertwine. Fresh interpretations of past personalities and events are offered, and traditional ones laid aside.

Of course. That's how every historical novelist operates. In my review of Brenda Rickman's The Heretic's Wife, for example, I point out that she gives a biased Protestant interpretation of Sir Thomas More and I suggest that she too easily disregards the religio-political context of her time. Still Rickman, for the most part, sets her story within a real historical framework.

Erickson, by contrast, plays fast and loose with events. She begins by having Bothwell, Mary's third husband, present at her execution, though he is believed to have died nine years earlier. She admits this "whimsy" in her note, as well as other "thick-coming fancies" that "crowd out sober evidence": Mary and Bothwell's island trip, Mary's meeting with Elizabeth, and the circumstances surrounding the death of Mary's second husband, Darnley. She doesn't mention some of her other fancies: Riccio and Darnley's gay relationship, for example (in reality, Darnley hated Riccio, who was widely believed to be the father of Mary's son).

These are mere peccadilloes, however, compared to her entirely made-up account of Mary's sabbatical from captivity, to which Erickson devotes some 70 pages.

Mary lived in England as Elizabeth's prisoner from 1568 until her execution in 1587. In this novel, notwithstanding, Mary escapes to Rome in 1575, spending two years consorting with the pope and a famous general. She then follows the general to Flanders. When it becomes obvious that he is not going to rescue her, she proceeds to Normandy, where she spends a couple more years with her grandmother and daughter. Eventually she returns to England and begins searching for some letters Elizabeth allegedly wrote to her lover Leicester, proving Elizabeth's complicity in his wife's murder and thus her unsuitability to be queen.

Virtually none of this last third of the book is based on what actually happened. Mary never escaped from her well-guarded house arrest. Even the letters turn the real story inside out. Yes, letters were involved in Mary's trial - but they weren't by or about Elizabeth. Instead, they were allegedly written by Mary to her lover Bothwell, proving her complicity in Darnley's murder and thus her own unsuitability to be queen.

It's easy to understand why Erickson would choose to stray so widely from the historical record. The last 18 years of Mary's 44-year life were, except for a few abortive plots, extremely boring, as critics of Philippa Gregory's The Other Queen have pointed out. No doubt Erickson, who knows her history, decided to have a little fun and spice up the story.

Well, we all know that memoirs aren't necessarily factual, and we expect historical fiction to include invented characters and conversations and events. But we also expect memoirs - even fictional ones - to elucidate a character's inner workings, and we anticipate that historical fiction will bring a long-ago period to life. By building so much of Mary's story on an invented historical framework, Erickson shows us too little of Mary or of the Tudor/Stuart period.

She does, however, give us some charming Scottish ruffians.

THE POOR CHRIST OF BOMBA by Mongo Béti

If you're interested in African colonial history or cross-cultural evangelism or feminist sociology, or if you'd just like to read a good character study told from an interesting viewpoint, you might want to try to find a copy of Mongo Béti's shocking 1956 novel, The Poor Christ of Bomba. It probably won't be in your library, but you can get an English translation from Amazon or the original French from www.amazon.fr.

The Reverend Father Superior Drumont is a complicated man. He is a true believer, a Frenchman who has devoted over 20 years of his life to working in rural Cameroon. He is also a rigid moralist, a self-righteous minor despot, and a criminally negligent administrator. He knows something is terribly wrong, and he feels tired and confused and guilty. But he fails to understand his own role in a shocking web of corruption that comes to light during three weeks in February.

On the surface, The Poor Christ of Bomba is about Father Drumont. On the very first page Denis, the 15-year-old narrator, says that according to his father, Jesus Christ and Drumont are one and the same. The book's title probably refers to the priest, though it could be an ironic commentary on the collapse of the Bomba mission. Denis, however, does not foresee the impeding crisis. He is loyal to the Catholic church and adores Father Drumont. Through his naively admiring eyes, the reader comes to know the conflicted priest.

Besides being an engaging character study,  the novel is a trenchant commentary on colonialism. The setting is Southern Cameroon in the 1930s, a country that became a German colony in 1884 and then lived under French rule from World War I until 1960. Father Drumont has been trying to turn Cameroon people into Christians without understanding their traditional religions, their social systems, or their mores. At the same time his friend Vidal, a French administrator, is trying to turn the colony into a profitable venture without understanding or caring about the effects his actions will have on the indigenous people.

Reading the novel over 50 years after it was written, I was struck by its women. From the outset,  Drumont is unsympathetic to them. During mass he drags a woman to the altar and forces her to kneel in penance; the narrator has no idea what she has done. He demands that mothers immediately take fussy babies outside. He campaigns (unsuccessfully) against unwed mothers, and he insists that polygamous men abandon all their wives except the one they like the best.

By the end of the book, his rigidity has turned into something close to sadism, though Drumont doesn't see it that way. In fact, he almost seems to understand the sin he and the other men have been committing against women. Listen to him muse to another white priest:*

The indigenous woman, the docile little black woman - what an ideal machine! No need to oil her, you see! No need even to check from time to time to be sure she isn't rusting in the little garage we've stuffed her in.. .. She takes care of her own maintenance, and she  asks for work to do.... The worst thing is that we figured this out. Long before we came, the natives already knew that women make a fine machine; don't think for a minute that they're stupider than we are. So here we come - Christians, Christ's messengers, bearers of civilization. And what do you think we do? Do we give women back their dignity? Not a chance. Oh no. We keep them in servitude. But now we're the ones who profit.

Drumont's understanding does not seem to improve his behavior, however. When he finally figures out that something terrible is happening on his watch, he summons over 50 women who live on the compound to tell him what is going on. Predictably, they are afraid to talk - they have already been repeatedly victimized and fear reprisals. So Drumont has them beaten until they give in. But when they finally tell him what has been going on, he sends them away, even if they have nowhere to go. Knowing that many of them are ill, he provides no medical care. They are at the bottom of the food chain, and it seems not to occur to Father Drumont that his whole approach to evangelization has created a truly hellish situation for his most faithful followers.

Mongo Béti's characters may be literally black and white, but this story is not about villains and saints. Father Drumont's perceptions change as the story progresses, and at times he is almost sympathique. The colonist Vidal is often likable. The narrator's sidekick, Zacharie, is both amusing and appalling. Only the catechist Raphaël comes across as totally corrupt, and he is African - though, to be sure, an African who works for white missionaries. Evil lies not so much in the individuals as in the way power is allocated and used in colonial Cameroon. And in the end, the women suffer more than anyone else.

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*I don't have a copy of the English translation, and neither does my public library. This is my own loose translation of a paragraph I found striking.

THE HERETIC'S WIFE by Brenda Rickman Vantrease

Here's a page-turning historical novel that will appeal to women who like Tudor England, chaste romances, and a clear demarcation between good and evil, especially if they identify Protestantism with good and Catholicism with evil.

The setting of The Heretic's Wife is England under Henry VIII, mostly between 1528 and 1533, and Antwerp, a major trade center where heretics could live and work in relative safety. The underlying conflict is between England's chancellor, Thomas More, and proponents of the "new learning" - scholars intent on translating the Bible into English and reinterpreting the church's traditional theology. The protagonist is Kate, a bookseller whose great-grandmother owned a Wycliffe Bible, whose father died in a Lollard prison, and whose brother has been forced to abjure and abandon his bookshop. Not surprisingly, she soon finds herself part of a network of Lutherans including the famed Bible translator William Tyndale.

The Heretic's Wife has a lot going for it. Vantrease is a fine storyteller. She deftly interweaves several stories that eventually intersect without ever confusing the reader or letting any of the multiple plots lag. Her characters are well drawn. Though Kate strikes me as a bit insipid, she's a nice person that readers can identify with - unlike fiery Anne Boleyn, disgusting Henry VIII, and sado-masochistic Thomas More. Vantrease uses period detail well: food, clothing, streets, pageants, prisons all come to life without overwhelming the story. And she usually writes conversations that are formal enough to sound historic while colloquial enough to sound real.

Vantrease used to be an English teacher and a librarian; she holds a PhD in English, and she has traveled widely in Britain. She has done her homework, and it shows. I wish I could give the book a glowing recommendation, but I can't.

Her portrayal of Thomas More - and, by extension, all those who opposed the reformers - is simplistic and misleading. Her Sir Thomas, the villain of the piece from beginning to end, is a monomaniacal heretic hunter propelled by a perverted need to inflict pain on himself and others.

To be sure, More was not the gentlemanly saint portrayed in A Man for All Seasons - at least not by contemporary standards. As Peter Ackroyd notes in his brilliant biography, The Life of Thomas More, the chancellor hated heresy, threatened heretics, approved of burning them, and sent several to the stake. "In that respect," Ackroyd writes, he "was no different from most of his contemporaries.... Burning was the natural remedy for those who refused to recant or who later relapsed."

This does not mean, however, that England's air was black with the smoke of burning martyrs, as one might think from reading The Heretic's Wife ("Tidings from England grew ever more disturbing. With each new ship, frightened refugees brought stories of burnings"). During More's three years as chancellor (1529-32), only six heretics were burned.

That's six too many, but bear in mind that in 1525 Luther published a tract urging people to "smite; slay, and stab" intransigent peasants, "secretly or openly, remembering that nothing can be more poisonous, hurtful, or dev­ilish than a rebel." Calvin famously burned Servetus at the stake, and he also burned quite a few women as witches. Sixteenth-century ideas of justice were not the same as ours, and More was a man of his times.

If More was not a crazed executioner, neither was he the sadistic torturer portrayed in this novel. As Ackroyd argues, it is highly unlikely that he tied heretics to a tree in his garden and whipped them mercilessly, though this was the claim of some detractors. As for self-flagellation, Vantrease's descriptions make More sound like a sexual pervert, not an ascetic penitent following a discipline also practiced by men such as Francis of Assisi, Ignatius Loyola, and John Paul II.

Vantrease is a novelist, not a historian, and she's entitled to invent characters any way she likes. (Hilary Mantel, this year's Booker Prize winner with Wolf Hall, also depicts a thoroughly disagreeable Thomas More.) What Vantrease loses in her characterization of More, though, is any sense of why he might have behaved as he did, apart from his own moral flaws. Thomas More seriously believed that the church, England, and the world were teetering on the verge of hell. And for people living in the 16th century, hell was more real than London.

How can we, in our secular society, imagine More's fears? Think of Thomas More as the secretary of the Department of Homeland Security. Think of Martin Luther as Osama bin Laden and William Tyndale as one of his agents. Think of all Protestants as terrorists, and think of the English Bible as a nuclear weapon. What would you expect More to do?

C.J. Sansom's four Tudor novels (which I reviewed here, here, and here) convey the chaos of the era and the suspicion, terror, and misdeeds that characterized all sides of the conflict - Roman Catholic, English Catholic, and Protestant. By contrast, The Heretic's Wife is a simple tale of good and evil in which pure-minded lovers of God and Scripture bravely combat bad doctrine, repression, and cruelty. It's propaganda, not history - but it's a good read.

THE ABSTINENCE TEACHER by Tom Perrotta, THE BODY AND SOCIETY by Peter Brown, and I DON'T by Susan Squire

This review was originally published in Books and Culture online  (October 2008) as "Abstinence Now and Then."

In Tom Perrotta's more-or-less comic novel The Abstinence Teacher, published last year and now out in paperback, an odd attraction develops between Ruth, a divorced feminist sex-ed teacher who hasn't been to bed with a man for two years, and Tim, an evangelical ex-doper whose wife is studying a book her pastor's wife gave her, Hot Christian Sex.

"Considering the somewhat puritanical character of the Tabernacle, the book turned out to be surprisingly racy," Perrotta writes. "The authors, the Rev. Mark D. Finster and his wife, Barbara G. Finster, proclaimed the good news right in the Introduction: 'For a Christian married couple, sex is nothing less than a form of worship, a celebration of your love for one another and a glorification of the Heavenly Father who brought you together. So of course God wants you to have better sex! And He wants you to have more of it than you ever had before, in positions you probably didn't even know existed, with stronger orgasms than you believed were possible!' "

There are no characters even remotely like the Rev. and Mrs. Finster in Peter Brown's magisterial The Body and Society: Men, Women, and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity. I had been reading some of the saints and doctors of the ancient church, and I was puzzled. Why, I wondered, did early monastics think they were honoring the Creator when they shunned the company of others and gave up most food, all sex, and even clothing and shelter? Why did a great saint, Jerome, write, "I praise wedlock, I praise marriage; but it is because they produce virgins"? Why did an even greater saint, Augustine, believe he had to be "continent," that is, to give up marriage and sex, in order to follow Christ? Why are there so few married people on the list of Catholic saints, even post-Vatican II saints? Hoping for answers, I picked up Peter Brown's recently reissued classic.

The answers he provided were not the ones I had hoped for. Brown didn't unearth any church fathers with "healthy"—that is, 21st-century—attitudes about the human body. He found no model marriages, no godly gourmands. But instead of criticizing our forebears for supposedly unenlightened attitudes, he emphasizes the difference between the early Christians' philosophical context and our own. "I wrote this book so as to instill in its readers … 'a sense of salutary vertigo' about the Christian past," Brown explains in the introduction to the book's 20th-anniversary edition. "I wished to make them aware of a gulf between themselves and their own past that was wider than they, perhaps, expected it to be. It was a gulf that could be bridged only by showing, to that distant, Christian past, the same combination of wonder and respect that makes for fruitful travel in a foreign land."

If ancient Rome and Alexandria are foreign to most readers today, the world depicted in The Abstinence Teacher is depressingly familiar. Marriages fail. Children rebel. Coworkers fight. Most people drink too much. Almost nobody abstains from sex, which is likely to be recreational, impulsive, or adulterous (if other people are involved at all). Marital sex is either sad (Tim can't stop lusting after his first wife) or silly (see Hot Christian Sex above). If you enjoy a book whose characters are likely to live happily ever after, The Abstinence Teacher is not for you.

And yet it is a sweet book whose flawed, wistful characters look for, and occasionally find, love. Though religious people are teased, they are not ridiculed. A Jewish environmental lawyer with a "Don't Blame Me—I Voted for Kerry" sticker on his Audi says to Ruth, "You gotta give credit where credit's due. These Christians turn a lot of lives around. From what I hear, Tim was a complete wreck before he found Jesus."

Turning wrecked lives around—this is where the second century meets the 21st. Even more than Tim, who gave up drugs and alcohol and one-night stands but hung on to music and soccer and marriage, the early Christians believed that conversion to Christ meant literally passing from one mode of existence to another, moving from death to life. "Christ's victory over death had brought about a stunning reversal of the crushing flow of irreversible negative processes that made the tyranny of the demons seemingly irresistible on earth," Brown writes. "Sexuality edged itself into the center of attention, as a privileged symptom of humanity's fall into bondage. Consequently, the renunciation of sexual intercourse came to be linked on a deep symbolic level … with man's ability to undo the power of death."

While their neighbors fought death by founding families and perpetuating their names from generation to generation, some Christians believed they had already entered the immortal realms and therefore had no need to marry and produce children. For these Christians, abstinence was a sign of their new life. Others believed that it was acceptable to marry and beget children, but only in one's youth—and even then, the sexual act should be miraculously completed without any accompanying passion. "By the year 300," Brown writes, "Christian asceticism, invariably associated with some form or other of perpetual sexual renunciation, was a well-established feature of most regions of the Christian world."

No longer. Nowadays even celibate Catholic priests avoid appealing to asceticism as an explanation for their unusual lifestyle, and the Catechism of the Catholic Church notes that "the marriage covenant, by which a man and a woman form with each other an intimate communion of life and love, … is ordered to the good of the couple, as well as to the generation and education of children." What happened to cause such an attitude shift? When did Christians decide that "God wants you to have better sex"? Peter Brown doesn't say: his interest is more historical and philosophical than practical. For the ancient theologians he quotes, the body is strangely detached from everyday concerns such as hunger or pain or sexual desire. Instead, it is made "to bear the symbolic weight of mighty aspirations."

There are no mighty aspirations in The Abstinence Teacher, nor is there much intentional abstinence. There is, however, a great deal of isolation. By contrast, abstinence was the ideal of just about everyone quoted in The Body and Society, yet the would-be abstainers were far from isolated. Most lived in families or monasteries, and even the desert hermits formed clusters of like-minded ascetics. Tom Perrotta enjoys such dichotomies, but I'm still looking for ancient Christians who valued marriage and community, sex and passion, children and animals, good food and wine, all things bright and beautiful. I may have to give up: the attitude I seek apparently developed during the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance, not the Roman Empire.

That, at least is Susan Squire's view in I Don't: A Contrarian History of Marriage. Though the delightfully sassy Squire romps through the history of sex with nary a thought of "symbolic levels," much of her raw data matches Brown's: "All [first-century Christians], as fervent believers in Jesus as Christ, are certain that in the next five minutes, hours, days, weeks (soon, anyway), earthly life will end. Urging people to conceive more of it is not going to be part of their game plan. In an apocalyptic frame of mind, the value of marriage and children would be approximately nil."

It's a downhill slide from St. Paul, who thinks it is better to marry than to burn; to Tertullian, who suggests that it is even better to do neither; to St. Augustine, who connects lust with original sin; to Innocent III, who writes that men and beasts, being made of slime, are the vilest of God's creations, and that this "vileness is reproduced 'from the filthiest sperm … in the stench of lust.'" The flesh will out, of course—medieval kings and queens, for example, seem not to listen much to theologians, and troubadours sing of loves that the church does not sanction—but only a theological tsunami will change the tone of official ecclesial pronouncements.

The tsunami comes in the form of Martin Luther, "a 40-year-old virgin wearing a monk's cowl" who blasts celibacy's theological proponents, starts a matchmaking service for priests and nuns, and eventually marries and fathers six children. In his wake, love becomes not the sin but "the expectation. Romantic, compassionate, erotic, intellectual, emotional, physical—hopefully, and delusionally, all at once and all the time. No surprise that divorce is common, or that hope continues to triumph over experience. The cure for lust is now the cure for loneliness, that cure being love."

Tim and Ruth, the protagonists of The Abstinence Teacher, take the love cure for granted, yet they remain lonely and isolated. One believes in abstinence, at least under certain circumstances, but can't live up to his beliefs. The other thinks abstinence is an aberration, but can't find the love she craves. Offering neither self-help nor salvation, Perrotta accepts them as they are: "standing side by side, not quite touching, but close enough that she could breathe in the sleepy smell of his body and feel a gentle current moving between them. They kept staring straight ahead for a long time, almost as if they were afraid of looking at each other, the silence gathering around them, thickening, until the world outside the window disappeared—the sky, the houses, the trees, the airborne leaves, even the man on the car [Tim's pastor]—and they were alone."