This Common Secret
By Susan Wicklund
Reviewed by Ruth Douillette
Abortion. A loaded word. It slashes like a scalpel, leaving a raw gash across the country.

The Bible: A Biography
By Karen Armstrong
Reviewed by Peter W. Webster
For many people the Bible is a dry, dusty tome filled with peculiar stories and a rigid morality.

Montgomery
By Nigel Hamilton
Reviewed by William A. Percy and
Aidan Flax-Clark
“A big book is a bad book!” Taking to heart the quip of the Alexandrian librarian Callimachus, Nigel Hamilton summarizes in this small volume Field-Marshal Bernard Law Montgomery’s role in some of World War II’s greatest events.

Where Have All the Soldiers Gone? By James J. Sheehan
Reviewed by Carter Jefferson
“No More War!” The peace battalions gather, wave their signs, march, go home.

Bananas
By Peter Chapman
Reviewed by Bob Sanchez
United Fruit is dead. Chiquita lives.

Ad Infinitum
By Nicholas Ostler
Reviewed by Gary Presley
Members of Opus Dei (meaning “work of God”) won’t need Ad Infinitum.

America 1908
By Jim Rasenberger
Reviewed by Jack D. McNamara
All in all, 1908 was not a great year.

The Great Awakening
By Thomas S. Kidd
Reviewed by Nancy R. Davison
The Great Awakening is a comprehensive, deeply researched overview of the beginnings of Evangelical Christianity in the United States.

Fiction

His Illegal Self
By Peter Carey
Reviewed by Jane Woodward Elioseff
Australian writer Peter Carey, who was awarded the Booker Prize for Oscar and Lucinda in 1988, and again in 2001 for True History of the Kelly Gang, has now given us a novel centered on the experiences of a twice kidnapped seven-year-old boy.

The Monsters of Templeton
By Lauren Groff
Reviewed by Julie McGuire
Twenty-eight-year-old Wilhelmina Sunshine Upton, the engagingly witty primary narrator of Lauren Groff’s The Monsters of Templeton, is in trouble.