Jason Berry

No major book has examined the church’s financial underpinnings and practices with such journalistic force. Today the church bears scrutiny by virtue of the vast amounts of money (nearly $2 billion in the United States alone) paid out to victims of clergy abuse. Amid mounting diocesan bankruptcies, bishops have been selling off whole pieces of the infrastructure—churches, schools, commercial properties—while the nephew of one of the Vatican’s most powerful cardinals engaged in a show more lucrative scheme to profiteer off the enormous downsizing of American church wealth. show less

The 1992 edition of this book, written 10 years before the priestly abuse scandal broke in Boston is just the same thing all over again except in Louisiana: pedophile priests covered up by the hierarchy and exposed by the patient work of journalists and lawyers.

The first part of the book deals with the uncovering of the Gauthe scandal and its outcome. In the second half. Berry looks broadly at the various crisis related to sexuality in the Catholic Church, especially of the prevalence of gay show more clergy in the post-Vatican II church. Berry is clearly uncomfortable with the idea of gay priests, especially of those not committed to his idea of celebecy, but he has listened carefully to the voices defending the rights of gay people in the Catholic church and worked very hard at not victimizing gay people in general in his attempts to find a way to make the clergy more responsive to the needs of the people who are the church.

Well and thoughtfully written, I would recommend it to people who continue to struggle with the Catholicism on these issues. show less

* I would like to thank NetGalley and the publisher for the opportunity to review this book. *

Jason Berry's history of New Orleans covers a period of more than three hundred years, from the city's founding through to the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Berry's approach is to devote each chapter to a notable New Orleans citizen and, by telling their stories and those of their times, give an overview of the complicated threads of New Orleans's development. Invaders, pirates, slaves, Spanish show more and French colonists, creoles, native Americans, politicians, religious leaders, musicians and artists are profiled by Berry. In the process he takes us through the city's founding, the colonial era, the Louisiana Purchase, the Civil War, the emergence of jazz and the Mardi Gras tradition right up to the present day destruction of the city in the hurricane, and its subsequent rebirth.

Berry manages to capture what makes New Orleans unique: a blend of French, Spanish, African and Native American influences that gave rise to cultural innovations that have conquered the world, as have some of its foremost artists and musicians. Berry's optimism about the city's resurgence suggests that he believes that this culture will once again triumph. show less

I'd have liked to give a book on such an important topic as many stars as possible, but, like many other readers, I found the structure jumbled and the details given often tedious and irrelevant. It's a huge topic to tackle, and I'm sure it was difficult to find a through-line, and to choose how much detail to use, but, for me, the contextual details about what inspired someone to be a priest, or what bound a lay person to a particular church did not require leaping back to their birth, or show more tracing the history of a school of thought or movement through 200 years. The book is well researched, and the author clearly knows their stuff, it's a pity it is not written with greater efficiency and clarity of focus. show less