The Catholic Church Through the Ages, 2nd ed. (Fr. John Vidmar, OP, 2014)

Astute readers of this blog will know right away this one was for class. I read it, so it counts! I actually read it over the course of about eight months. Sure, I could have torn through it back in 2015 and added it to my last year book count, but that wouldn't have served me well in class. So, consider this, in terms of the book count, an exercise in delayed gratification.

Although the book served as our textbook in the class, Fr. Vidmar wrote this book for a general audience. In the introduction, he explains the work is in part a way to make church history more accessible to the average parishioner and address criticism over history-based homilies that "the sheep were not fed." As far as being a classroom text, it has good and bad points related to this intent. On one hand, it is a very friendly volume and reads quickly. Although there are some holes and some parts are overemphasized, it generally managed the two-thousand year sweep in a reasonable number of pages. Also, unlike other church history books, Vidmar is relatively agenda-free, though he does presume most of his readers are Catholic. The danger with the book, however, is that he sometimes slips into a "golly gee" tone with lots of exclamation marks. Also, as stated in the introduction, he is targeting the parish, not the classroom. Therefore he readily anticipates what a priest may have to reckon with when he gets hard questions in church history: the Inquisition, the Crusades, "Hitler's Pope", and Luther, Calvin, Zwingli and company all trigger a more defensive writing style. All of these are understandable in providing the reader with tools to answer those tough questions, but in the classroom they can suck all of the oxygen out of all the other topics.

All in all, it's not a bad book to pick up if you are curious about the long history of the Catholic Church, and it certainly won't hurt if you are Catholic, though I didn't find myself being frozen out. Hitchcock's history (read a couple years back) is much more academic and opinionated, but also more thorough. It all depends on how in-depth you are ready to go.

I read my copy through my place of employment, liberally borrowing the reserve copy. Even though it is a general history, it is published by Paulist Press, which means public libraries probably don't have it on their active watch lists to acquire. The 2005 edition is more widely held than this edition, and you probably won't suffer too badly if that's what you can find, unless Popes Benedict XVI and Francis are the end-all be-all of your interests in the Church, or plan to rely on Vidmar's bibliographies for future reading. Check out Worldcat to find a holding library near you, or shell out $20 to Paulist or, of course, there's always "Earth's largest store" for the unimaginative.

Obasan (Joy Kogawa, 1981)

It's a national pastime to announce your are moving to Canada in protest of some political thing or person you don't like. A lot of times the person who says this clearly didn't do the research since whatever it was they hated about the United States so much was even more present in the Great White North. While I don't know anybody planning on leaving for Canada over the treatment of Japanese-Americans during World War II, if there were such a person, they would find nothing in Canada to make them feel better.

That's what brings us to the thrust of the featured book, Obasan. The book's title means "aunt" in Japanese, although, especially with the counterpart word for "uncle", it can also be a term of respect to an elder member of the community. Although the book advertises itself as a tale of one family's dealings with Canada's traumatic Japanese relocation policy from the eyes of a child, it is actually framed around that child in her adult years putting together the pieces through memories and the collected evidence of her activist aunt. However she is not the "Obasan" the gives the book its title. Rather it is her great-aunt, the ancient, strong, silent type, who is both a pillar of strength and frustration for the protagonist.

Farewell to Manzanar is fairly standard-issue reading in high schools around here. There are a lot of parallels between the two books, and where they diverge is in the post-war period. It took a lot longer for Canada to come around on their internment policy, whereas the United States declared the camps illegal in 1944. Sure, there was extensive aftermath in both countries, but Manzanar takes a more personal approach, detailed the family's struggles after leaving the camp, overcoming prejudices, and so forth. Obasan, on the other hand, features a family that is not only booted from their British Columbia home, but also kicked out of their adopted wartime home in the mountains after the war ended and forced even further into the interior into truly wretched living conditions. Canada's anti-Japanese laws were so entrenched that Japanese-Canadians weren't allow back to the West Coast even after the war was over, which had a permanent impact on moving Japanese-Canadian culture well into the Canadian heartland.

On a style note, Obasan can be a little confusing. If you like to read stories that maintain a consistent tense, you are going to be a little frustrated by this book. The present tense is employed both in the novel's "present" (1972) and "past" (around 1940 onward) and it isn't always immediately clear when the action changes back. Just to really mess with the inattentive reader, the past tense sometimes slips in when there is a direct memory that doesn't fall in the primary "past" setting.

Like many of the books I've been reading this year, I got my copy of Obasan from the public library. It must have been one of those "core" books that falls pretty darn close to the original publication date and will probably remain in the library collection until it falls apart. It was Godine hardcover with zillions of checkout stamps, but it still seemed pretty sturdy after 35 years of library use. As a core title, copies exist at nearly every public library in the United States, but you can check Worldcat and locate one for yourself!

Story of a Soul: The Autobiography of St. Thérèse of Lisieux (1898)

This is the first of a few books you will see posted here relating to the course I'm taking in Church History. Although this isn't the first book we read, it's the first one I completed all the way through. After the semester ends, I'll "mop up" the remainders of a couple books we only read part of, just because I'm a suffering completionista.

Carmelite spirituality is very effusive! You are best friends with Jesus and use a lot of exclamation points to convey your faith! I'm not sure I could even channel a tenth of Thérèse's enthusiasm, which is saying a lot (for her), because her health was pretty awful through most of her 24 year lifespan. However, even without the bubbly prose, Therese had a lot to teach the world. As featured in the thesis statement of my paper, the late nineteenth century, the backdrop of the First Vatican Council, was one where the "regular human" was getting reduced to a speck in the sea of huge systems of industrial capitalism and nascent Marxist models of society. While Pope Leo XIII address these big concepts in his encyclical Rerum novarum, Thérèse, just a few years later, looked to the smallest things in her search for God. That is what makes her important: she makes the small things significant in a time where small things might as well have been invisible.

I read my copy from my own library, but you needn't go on an epic quest to a theological library to find your own copy. Not only is this ICS Publications's bestselling title (in fact their whole publishing house was founded on it), but it is also available from numerous public and academic libraries.

The Impeachment of Abraham Lincoln (Stephen L. Carter, 2012)

Well, this seems like a nice little historical novel about....wait a second. Impeachment? Don't you mean "assassination"? What's going on here? This is the same Stephen Carter that brought the world well-regarded historical novels such as The Emperor of Ocean Park, no?

In all fairness, if you knew nothing about American history, you might think this actually is an historical novel. Unlike other works of alternative history, Dr. Carter feels no need to introduce time travel, alien invaders, or even overt humor. He subscribes to the very "soft" side of the genre, where even big events ultimately do not rupture the timeline. In fact, aside from perhaps a couple big differences from our own history, it is likely this could have served as the history of our present reality.

The notion that had Lincoln survived the assassination attempt, he would have been impeached (and likely convicted) by the radical wing of the Republican party is not a new idea. However, it is still shocking to modern ears to think that one of the most well-regarded presidents in history could easily have ended up as one of the worst. It all hinges on how much one can believe that Andrew Johnson, Lincoln's successor who actually was impeached (and missed conviction by one vote), was just following Lincoln's Reconstruction plans for the South.

This is one of those books where it is important to read the afterword. The author goes through it exacting detail how he diverged his fictional world from the historical record. Even though I felt like I was on top of all the changes, he made many minute changes I wasn't aware of. Thankfully, this didn't distract from my enjoyment of the book in its own right. As I have noted in the past, I get easily annoyed with authors who change large events for the sake of making their books more interesting.

I picked up this copy from a branch of my local library system. It is readily available from numerous libraries. Find one near you by steering yourself over to Worldcat.