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 Life in the Neighborhood
Sarah Fontaine ’08
One of the greatest books I have ever read is Random Family, by Adrian Nicole LeBlanc. LeBlanc—a journalist who tells the story of an inner-city family living in the Bronx over a 10-year period. This heartbreaking book literally changed my life, inspiring me to become a sociology major and perhaps even consider a vocation in ministry in order to meet and be with other families like the main characters of LeBlanc’s tale. I highly recommend Random Family to anyone who ever wondered what it would be like to live in the Bronx.
 Classical Suspense
Christine Coch
Assistant professor, English
For someone interested in the ways the words of another age speak to modern readers, Donna Tartt’s The Secret History offers a lush, dark tragedy of literary learning detached from moral sensibility. A friend leant it to me last term. With apologies to those spring classes that didn’t get their first papers back quite as expeditiously as usual, I’ll confess to having been utterly immersed in the novel for a week, the kind of experience that drove me to study literature in the first place.
 Epiphanous Pages
Jonathan Mulrooney
Assistant professor, English
One measure of a great book is that it can change your life each time you encounter it—not just the first. For me, Dickens’ Great Expectations, Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov and Jane Austen’s Persuasion fall into that category. And I never stop returning to John Keats’ letters, which have taught me more about living than almost any other thing I’ve read. As far as recent discoveries, I was entirely absorbed by Garry Wills’ superb What Jesus Meant, and I’m fast becoming a fan of Ian McEwan.
 The God of Greenland
Marjorie Corbman ’09
The best book I read in the past year was The End of the Affair, by Graham Greene—an impulse buy at the thrift store in which I was working, it was a $1.60 well spent. The novel chronicles Maurice Bendrix’s attempts to discover why his married lover, Sarah, broke off their affair five years before the start of the book. In the process, one is treated to what I found to be the most honest and heartbreaking depiction of love—both human and divine—that I have ever read.
 The Science of Being Human
Sarah Luria,
Associate professor, English
Intuition, the latest novel from Allegra Goodman, whose stories appear regularly in The New Yorker, takes place in a laboratory involved in the high-stakes race for a cancer cure. An exciting discovery is made, but—Is it real or did the ambitious young scientist who made it see what he wanted to see rather than what was really there? With exquisite sensitivity and insight, Goodman explores this classic dilemma and the intense relations among members of the lab, sparked as they are by jealousy, and love—of science, research and each other. Intuition is a suspense-filled novel that fully satisfies both mind and heart.
 A Summer In Donegal
Paige Reynolds,
Associate professor, English
I’d like to recommend a favorite book that’s being reissued by Blackstaff Press this summer. The Dancers Dancing, by the Irish writer Éilís Ní Dhuibhne, is a coming of age novel that vividly depicts life in 1970s Ireland by chronicling the experiences of teenagers attending Irish language camp in Donegal. The novel offers readers meaty issues, experimental form and beautiful language—as well as an engrossing beach read.
 Writers and Readers
Steven Hickey ’08
Ian McEwan’s Atonement is a novel that I especially enjoyed reading. On a fateful day in 1935, 13-year-old Briony makes a stunning accusation against her housekeeper’s son—an act that forever tarnishes his good name and alters the course of his life. The novel is both engaging and literate, with a masterfully crafted narrative that singularly captures the intricacies of human perception. Ultimately, the book underscores the notion that what we do in life cannot be undone and that however much we may regret our decisions, absolution lies beyond temporal grasp.
 The Soldier Assesses
Ward Thomas
Associate professor, political science
I recommend Andrew Bacevich’s The New American Militarism: How Americans Are Seduced by War. Bacevich defies convenient stereotypes: a former Army officer who laments Americans’ infatuation with the military and military power; a conservative who is scathingly critical of the Bush administration. Unlike many critics of the Iraq War, however, Bacevich sees the problem not only as arrogant overreaching after Sept. 11, but the culmination of trends that date back three decades, including the U.S. commitment to protect the flow of Middle East oil (embodied in the Carter Doctrine), and the adulation of military institutions even as the idea of uniformed service as an obligation of citizenship has all but disappeared. Tragically, the story has an ironic postscript: Bacevich’s son, who followed his father into the Army, was killed in action in Iraq in May.
What was the book that changed your life? What was the best book you read in the last year? The editors of Holy Cross Magazine invite you to share your recommendations and read suggestions made by other members of the Holy Cross community.
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