Exploding Data: Reclaiming Our Cyber Security in the Digital Age by Michael Chertoff (Grove Press, £20) Peter
 Hegarty   When it comes to the protection of data “we are overdue to recast the rules of the road”, says Michael Chertoff, writing with the authority of a former US Secretary of Homeland Security. What he has to say has…

Smitten Soul: Illuminating the Dark, by Gabriel Fitzmaurice; with paintings by Brenda Fitzmaurice (Salmon Poetry, €12.00) Seamus 
Cashman “Am I going to Mass on Sundays?” Mary asks in a string of questions, and the poet remarks, “how the good are frightened of their Church”. The poem, from Gabriel Fitzmaurice’s latest collection, is called ‘Alzheimer’s Disease’ and it carries…

Kilkenny in Times of Revolution 1900 – 1923, by Eoin Swithin Walsh foreword by Diarmaid Ferriter  (Merrion Press, €19.99 pb) This is a comprehensive account of the revolutionary years in Kilkenny city and county from 1900 to 1923. As a narrative on the War of Independence and Civil War it is remarkable for its detail.…

The Family is Good News: Selections from Amoris Laetitia (The Joy of Love) by Pope Francis, prepared for the Council for Marriage and the Family of the Irish Episcopal Conference (Veritas, €9.99) The Beatitudes of Pope Francis: A Manifesto for the Modern Christian by Aidan Donaldson (Veritas, €7.99) These two books inspired by Pope Francis provide the ordinary reader with…

Historian Dr Donal Corcoran describes his lifelong fascination with the Irishmen who served the Pope in defending the Papal States during the war of Italian unification in the 19th Century, which had lead him to do extended research on the subject for his newly published book.   As a child I was fascinated with two war medals that my grandfather…

I Will Not Serve: The priest who said NO to Hitler by David Rice (Red Stag / Mentor Books, €14.99) This is a true story of Fr Franz Reinisch who was beheaded for refusing to serve in the Wehrmacht. His refusal arose from his unwillingness to swear an unconditional oath of obedience to Adolf Hitler, its…

Paris Echo by Sebastian Faulks (Hutchinson. £15.99 / €17) Peter 
Hegarty   Faulks’ explores the German occupation (1940-44), a closed subject in France for decades after the wars. That those years were off-limits for so long shows that “the human drive to ignorance…is a force as powerful as its opposite”, as Hannah, one of the two main…

Why we Need Religion by Stephen T. Asma (Oxford University Press, £20.00) Christopher
 Moriarty   The dramatic increase in secularism and fall in numbers of professed adherents to religion has been a feature of the past few generations in the western world. Its roots lie in the application of the scientific method which began to explode in…

Rich in Faith, Beauty and History: St Mary’s Church, Haddington Road, Dublin by  Patrick Claffey  (From the Parish Office, €5.00) Felix 
M. 
Larkin   One of the ways we find God – or, more accurately perhaps, how He finds us – is through the art and architecture of places like St Mary’s, in Haddington Road, a lovely church whose art is…

The Shoemaker & His Daughter by Conor O’Clery (Doubleday 2018) Conor O’Clery was the Irish Times correspondent in Russia for many years. He married Zhanna Suvorov in Moscow in 1989. His new book reads describes “one ordinary family’s remarkable journey from Stalin’s Soviet Union to Putin’s Russia”. It records the travails of Zhanna’s extended family through the Russian…