Writer seeks to restore
Bible's Jewish roots

It's the day after Thanksgiving in the bustling kitchen of Willis Barnstone's book-filled home in Oakland's Piedmont Avenue neighborhood. The 82-year-old poet, translator and literary critic has just typed out a poem about what happened the day before yesterday - when he tripped at the Chinese restaurant just down the street from City Lights bookstore in North Beach, bumping his head and nearly knocking out his lights.
Friday, December 25, 2009
Click to read the full review

The Case for God


Armstrong has written another big book about the various ways people throughout history and across cultures envision and explain what they can neither see nor understand.
Sunday, October 18, 2009
Click here to read the full review

The Original Christian
Media Star

Photo courtesy USC
A pre-TV televangelist/
McPherson was the original
Christian media star.
Sunday, May 13, 2007
Click here to read the full review

God and His Demons

There is so much religious hypocrisy in the world today, so much violence committed in the name of the God. So let us give thanks for the few shining lights we have had on the public stage - people like Mother Teresa and the Dalai Lama.

Unless you are Michael Parenti, who spares neither the late nun from Calcutta nor the spiritual leader of Tibet in his relentless diatribe against people of faith.
Monday, April 5, 2010
Click to read the full review

What is God?

Coming of age in the 1950s and early 1960s, Jacob Needleman was part of a generation that spent much of their lives running away from God. Even people in the God business - priests, ministers and especially seminary professors -challenged traditional Judeo-Christian ideas about the nature of God.
Sunday, February 7, 2010
Click to read the full review

Strength in What Remains

Journalists and writers of narrative nonfiction have more or less the same job. They tell stories - true stories. Their importance in the scheme of things is to let us know what's really going on in the world. The best ones are great reporters and fine writers. Their job is to inform, entertain and enlighten. It comes as no surprise to fans of Tracy Kidder that the man does it all in his new book, “Strength in What Remains: A Journey of Remembrance and Forgiveness.”
Sunday, October 4, 2009
Click here to read the full review

The Big Ideas Behind the
Institute of Big Sur


Photo by Kate Wade
Intellectual history of Esalen
explores creation of a place where spirituality, not religion, could flourish.
Sunday, April 15, 2007
Click to read the full review

Jesus Freak – Feeding, Healing, Raising the Dead
Sara Miles is out with a memoir about her life and ministry. It's titled "Jesus Freak: Feeding, Healing, Raising the Dead," and it is a book that manages to be inspiring without sentimentality - serious and funny, sacred and profane.
Wednesday, March 17, 2009
Click to read the full review

Practicing Catholic

James Carroll's new book, like the Roman Catholic Church and life tself, starts to get interesting in the early 1960s. In Rome, the winds of reform were sweeping through the Vatican as the world's bishops convened a
historic council to finally bring the church into the modern world. In Washington, D.C., a young, vibrant and downright sexy Roman Catholic had just been inaugurated - for the first (and still only) time - as president of the United States.
It was a time of hope for church and state.
Monday, May 11, 2009
Click to read the full review

Fingerprints of God
The Search for the Science
of Spirituality


Religion is a collection of stories. Moses parted the Red Sea. Jesus rose from the dead. Muhammad recorded the final words of God.
Saturday, June 13, 2009
Click to read the full review

Waiting for the Apocalypse:
A Memoir of Faith and Family Kids who grow up in ultra religious families often have great tales to tell, but the stories of Veronica Chater make you shake your head, laugh out loud and joyfully turn the page. Chater, who lives in Berkeley, was raised in a large, traditionalist Catholic family in San Jose and Pleasant Hill.
Sunday, March 1, 2009
Click to read the full review