Colm Tóibin -- THE SIGN OF THE CROSS

It would be easy to dislike this book. The Sign of the Cross: Travels in Catholic Europe opens with vivid descriptions of pilgrims who have come to Lourdes to healed juxtaposed with memories of Tóibin's Irish Catholic upbringing, hinting at mysteries and beauties that the rest of the book will, one hopes, elaborate on. This is not that book, though.The purpose of this book isn't to illuminate the Church or a part of Europe. Its stories of finding bars and beers and lunches and flights and hotels and interviews with whatever English speakers he happened to run into, it feels at times like a look behind-the-scenes of the making of that book.

But gradually it becomes clear that the book is actually about Tóibin's failed struggle to understand what he is seeing, whether a pilgrimage site, an abandoned church in the former Soviet Union, or the mass appeal of Pope John Paul II, who makes frequent appearances.

Max Weber: THE PROTESTANT ETHIC AND THE SPIRIT OF CAPITALISM

Max Weber's great essay of 1904 has suffered from its own success. It does have a catchy title. People throw around the phrase "the Protestant ethic" constantly. It is written with an appealing (though for some, off-putting) combination of simplicity and grandiosity. And, I think, people just like they idea they think the work represents, the basic version of which is familiar to everyone. It is usually put rather crudely: Protestantism somehow led to capitalism. For many it explains how we good Protestants became good capitalists. So it provides an explanation of how, in general, we've gotten just so darn good. But this version, an optimistic description of the progress that led inevitably to our own time, misses a large part of the value of this book.

Steven Ozment: THE REFORMATION IN THE CITIES

In this book, Steven Ozment has attempted a new look at the history of the very earliest phase of the Reformation, running from 1517, the date of Luther's famed 95 theses, up to about 1520-21, when reforms started to be instituted in the German towns. His concern is to find out the why Luther's ideas were so appealing to city dwellers of Germany, and his answer is that it appealed for positive worldly and "urban" reasons. In doing this, Ozment paints a particular picture of Protestantism, making it free of its later religious excesses, its Calvinist strictness, its occasional Messianism, its later concrete forms with their organized rituals too reminiscent of Catholicism. He is sometimes overly eager to separate this undeveloped, early phase from the later developments within the churches.