The Presence of a Teacher

The Presence of a Teacher

by | Apr 20, 2008

A Path Remembered: The Lives of Gerhart and Lucie Niemeyer by Paul V. Niemeyer. ISI Books (Wilmington, Del.), 402 pp., $40.00 cloth, 2006When, as a graduate student at Notre Dame, I first met Gerhart Niemeyer early in 1970, like many others I knew immediately that he...
Error Has No Rights

Error Has No Rights

by | Apr 19, 2008

Orestes Brownson: American Religious Weathervane by Patrick W. Carey. Wm. B. Eerdmans (Grand Rapids, Mich.), 2004. 448 pp., $29.00 paper.Alexis de Tocqueville, in Democracy in America, predicted that Americans “will tend increasingly to fall into one or the other of...
Sketches of Painterly Lives

Sketches of Painterly Lives

by | Apr 19, 2008

The Art of the Art BiographyRecently I met up with an agent to discuss my next book. What about writing a biography of an artist?, he suggested. What about the research?, I responded. As an editor and art critic for a monthly magazine, I just couldn’t see clearing my...
The Man Who Built Ireland

The Man Who Built Ireland

by | Apr 18, 2008

Kevin O’Higgins: Builder of the Irish State by John P. McCarthy. Irish Academic Press (Portland, Ore.), xvi/312 pp., $35.00 cloth, 2006 The subtitle of John P. McCarthy’s new biography of Kevin O’Higgins, “builder of the Irish state,” seems, at first glance, to...
An Architect for all Purposes

An Architect for all Purposes

by | Apr 18, 2008

Ralph Adams Cram: An Architect’s Four Quests: Medieval, Modernist, American, Ecumenical by Douglass Shand-Tucci. University of Massachusetts Press (Amherst), 624 pp., $49.95 cloth, 2005Ralph Adams Cram was a man of such prodigious talents that even two volumes of...