<div>National Book Award winner: This story of a family torn apart by the Vietnam era is &ldquo;a magnificent portrayal of two noble men who broke each other&rsquo;s hearts&rdquo; (Booklist). James Carroll grew up in a Catholic family that seemed blessed. His father, who had once dreamed of becoming a priest, instead began a career in J. Edgar Hoover&rsquo;s FBI, rising through the ranks and eventually becoming one of the most powerful men in the Pentagon, the founder of the Defense Intelligence Agency. Young Jim lived a privileged life, dating the daughter of a vice president and meeting the pope&mdash;all in the shadow of nuclear war, waiting for the red telephone to ring in his parents&rsquo; house. James fulfilled the goal his father had abandoned, becoming a priest himself. His feelings toward his father leaned toward worship as well&mdash;until the tumult of the 1960s came between them. Their disagreements, over Martin Luther King, Jr. and the civil rights movement; turmoil in the Church; and finally, Vietnam&mdash;where the elder Carroll chose targets for US bombs&mdash;began to outweigh the bond between them. While one of James&rsquo;s brothers fled to Canada, another was in law enforcement ferreting out draft dodgers. James, meanwhile, served as a chaplain at Boston University, protesting the war in the streets but ducking news cameras to avoid discovery. Their relationship would never be the same again. Only after Carroll left the priesthood to become a writer, and a husband with children of his own, did he begin to understand fully the struggles his father had faced. In An American Requiem, the New York Times bestselling author of Constantine&rsquo;s Sword and Christ Actually offers a benediction, in &ldquo;a moving memoir of the effect of the Vietnam War on his family that is at once personal and the story of a generation . . . at once heartbreaking and heroic, this is autobiography at its best&rdquo; (Publishers Weekly). </div>

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An American Requiem

<div>From a New York Times&ndash;bestselling author, a &ldquo;gripping and beautifully written&rdquo; novel of love and family set against the backdrop of Cold War Berlin (Bookpage). Berlin, 1961. Days before the Wall rises, three teenagers from an American school in West Germany travel to the Communist side of the divided city to join a May Day rally. One of them has brought along a flight bag belonging to his father, a US intelligence officer. Before long, the teens are in the custody of the secret East German police, the notorious Stasi. Unbeknownst to them, their parents have unfinished business, reaching back to World War II, which will pull the three friends into the vortex of an international incident. Told through flashbacks by alternating narrators, Secret Father is a novel of missed signals, cloaked motives, false postures, and panicked responses that tragically echo across borders and generations. Like the classic period thrillers of Graham Greene, James Carroll&rsquo;s politically charged coming-of-age tale provides a &ldquo;somber and evocative look at some of the most frightening times in one of the most frightening places in the Cold War&rdquo; (Kirkus Reviews). &ldquo;Carroll writes with rich, lyrical ease,&rdquo; raves Publishers Weekly. &ldquo;His characters are richly drawn, and the pieces of his impeccably paced story fit together with the cool precision of a Mercedes-Benz.&rdquo;</div>

Secret Father

<div>New York Times Bestseller: A priest struggles against the Vietnam War&mdash;and his own passions&mdash;in &ldquo;a classic page-turner&rdquo; (Chicago Tribune). Vietnam was bitterly contested not only on the battlefields of Southeast Asia but on the American home front. This novel filled with &ldquo;probing psychological detail&rdquo; follows Michael Maguire&mdash;a Catholic priest, Korean War hero, and former POW&mdash;who risks everything as he fights to be true to his heart and his conscience during the tumult of the era (The Washington Post). From the author of The Cloister, Prince of Peace is a thrilling saga of faith, truth, and honor, &ldquo;so rich and vital it leaves you breathless&rdquo; (Chicago Tribune).</div>

Prince of Peace

<div>In post-WWII Italy, an American uncovers a Vatican scandal in a &ldquo;thriller with deeply serious historical undertones&rdquo; by a National Book Award winner (Alan Cheuse, NPR, All Things Considered). David Warburg, newly minted director of the US War Refugee Board, arrives in Rome at war&rsquo;s end, determined to bring aid to the destitute European Jews streaming into the city. Marguerite d&rsquo;Erasmo, a French-Italian Red Cross worker with a shadowed past, is initially Warburg&rsquo;s guide&mdash;while a charismatic young American Catholic priest, Monsignor Kevin Deane, seems equally committed to aiding Italian Jews. But the city is a labyrinth of desperate fugitives: runaway Nazis, Jewish resisters, and criminal Church figures. Marguerite, caught between justice and revenge, is forced to play a double game. At the center of the maze, Warburg discovers one of history&rsquo;s great scandals: the Vatican ratline, a clandestine escape route maintained by Church officials and providing scores of Nazi war criminals with secret passage to South America. Turning to American intelligence officials, he learns that the dark secret is not as secret as he thought&mdash;and that even those he trusts may betray him&mdash;in this &ldquo;complex and compelling novel of the Vatican and morality during World War II&rdquo; (Library Journal). Warburg in Rome has &ldquo;the breathtaking pace of a thriller and the gravitas of a genuine moral center&mdash;as if John LeCarr&eacute; and Graham Greene collaborated&rdquo; (Mary Gordon). &ldquo;A high-stakes battle between good and evil [and] a plot full of twists and turns.&rdquo; &mdash;The Boston Globe &ldquo;A suspenseful historical drama set in Rome at the end of WWII and centering on Vatican complicity in the flight of Nazi fugitives to Argentina.&rdquo; &mdash;Publishers Weekly &ldquo;Recommend this utterly engaging thriller to fans of Joseph Kanon&rsquo;s The Good German and James R. Benn&rsquo;s Death&rsquo;s Door.&rdquo; &mdash;Booklist, starred review</div>

Warburg in Rome

<div>A &ldquo;masterful&rdquo; history of the city and its holy wars past and present, from the New York Times&ndash;bestselling author of Constantine&rsquo;s Sword (The Boston Globe). How did this ancient Middle Eastern city become a transcendent fantasy that ignites religious fervor unlike anywhere else on earth? Jerusalem, Jerusalem journeys through centuries of conflict among Jews, Christians, and Muslims, right up to the present-day Israeli-Palestinian struggle&mdash;with fascinating examinations of how the idea of the holy city has shaped not just the region&rsquo;s history but the world&rsquo;s. </div>

Jerusalem, Jerusalem

<div>This historical saga of a patriotic man and his son &ldquo;tackles those dangerous, wrenching issues of morality, political ethics, and family ties&rdquo; (Alice Hoffman). From the New York Times&ndash;bestselling and National Book Award&ndash;winning author of The Cloister, this decades-spanning novel tells the story of Sean Dillon, who escapes from the rough world of the Chicago stockyards to become an agent in J. Edgar Hoover&rsquo;s FBI, and then rises to the very top of military intelligence on the eve of its greatest challenge&mdash;and the nation&rsquo;s greatest failure. An Irishman, a Catholic, and a lawyer obsessed with justice, Dillon is a man whose fierce integrity has always set him apart. His indomitable wife, Cass, can see what his defiant adherence to principle is costing him, especially when he is charged with an impossible duty as an air force general. As America becomes more deeply entangled in Vietnam, Dillon will discover that his son has inherited his merciless conscience&mdash;and that he is deeply opposed to the war. From the gangster-ridden politics of Depression-era Chicago to the intrigue and glamour of wartime Washington; from the triumph of virtue in World War II to the moral chaos of Vietnam; from turf battles in the Pentagon to tear-gas conflict in the streets; from a man&rsquo;s inbred solitude to the story of an extraordinary love&mdash; Memorial Bridge is both a journey through twentieth-century history and a tale of one family trying to span the divisions of the American heart. &ldquo;[Carroll] writes with sweep about faith, redemption, truth, honor. . . . There is beauty and power in his characters and themes, and there is mystery in the big questions that inform Carroll&rsquo;s moral fiction.&rdquo; &mdash;The Boston Globe</div>

Memorial Bridge

<div>The National Book Award&ndash;winning author &ldquo;seizes the moment of Catholicism&rsquo;s sexual-abuse crisis&rdquo; to call for a Vatican III (Publishers Weekly). Elaborating on &ldquo;A Call for Vatican III&rdquo; from his New York Times&ndash;bestseller Constantine&rsquo;s Sword: The Church and the Jews, James Carroll proposes a clear agenda for reform, to help committed but concerned Catholics understand the most essential issues facing their Church. Carroll moves beyond current events to suggest new ways for Catholics to approach Scripture, Jesus, and power, and he looks at the daunting challenges facing the Church in a world of diverse beliefs and contentious religious fervor. His thought-provoking case for democracy within the Church illustrates why lay people have already initiated change. Carroll shows that all Catholics&mdash;parishioners, priests, bishops, men and women&mdash;have an equal stake in ensuring the Church&rsquo;s future. &ldquo;The boisterous collapse of trust in the Catholic hierarchy during the pedophile scandals makes it not only important but imperative to heed this eloquent call for a new Ecumenical (this time truly ecumenical) Council.&rdquo; &mdash;Garry Wills, author of Why I Am a Catholic </div>

Toward a New Catholic Church

<div>The &ldquo;monumental&rdquo; New York Times bestseller in which a Catholic explores the problem of anti-Semitism through Church history (The Washington Post).A Los Angeles Times Best Book of the Year and a New York Times Notable BookIn this &ldquo;masterly history&rdquo; (Time), National Book Award-winning author James Carroll maps the profoundly troubling two-thousand-year course of the Church&rsquo;s battle against Judaism and faces the crisis of faith it has provoked in his own life as a Catholic.More than a chronicle of religion, this dark history is the central tragedy of Western civilization, its fault lines reaching deep into our culture. The Church&rsquo;s failure to protest the Holocaust &mdash; the infamous &ldquo;silence&rdquo; of Pius XII &mdash; is only part of the story: the death camps, Carroll shows, are the culmination of a long, entrenched tradition of anti-Judaism. From Gospel accounts of the death of Jesus on the cross, to Constantine&rsquo;s transformation of the cross into a sword, to the rise of blood libels, scapegoating, and modern anti-Semitism, Carroll reconstructs the dramatic story of the Church&rsquo;s conflict not only with Jews but with itself. Yet in tracing the arc of this narrative, he implicitly affirms that it did not necessarily have to be so. There were roads not taken, heroes forgotten; new roads can be taken yet. Demanding that the Church finally face this past in full, Carroll calls for a fundamental rethinking of the deepest questions of Christian faith. Only then can Christians, Jews, and all who carry the burden of this history begin to forge a new future.&ldquo;Carroll discusses the history of Christian-Jewish relations honestly, touchingly, and personally&hellip;Carroll investigates his own prejudices as a believing Christian, a former Catholic priest, and a long-time civil rights activist. As he unearths history (using all the best sources), he also encounters emotions he didn&#39;t realize he had and shows how his historical journey was also a personal pilgrimage of faith.&rdquo;&mdash;Booklist &ldquo;A triumph.&rdquo;&mdash;Atlantic Monthly</div>

Constantine's Sword

<div>A personal examination of the Catholic faith, its leaders, and its complicated history by a National Book Award–winning, New York Times-bestselling author. James Carroll turns to the notion of practice—both as a way to learn and a means of improvement—as a lens for this thoughtful and frank look at what it means to be Catholic. He acknowledges the slow and steady transformation of the Church from its darker medieval roots to a more pluralist and inclusive institution, charting along the way stories of powerful Catholic leaders (Pope John XXIII, Thomas Merton, John F. Kennedy) and historical milestones like Vatican II. These individuals and events represent progress for Carroll, a former priest, and as he considers the new meaning of belief in a world that is increasingly as secular as it is fundamentalist, he shows why the world needs a Church that is committed to faith and renewal. “Carroll, a former Catholic priest who wrote of his conflict with his father over the Vietnam War in An American Requiem, revisits and expands on that tension in this spiritual memoir infused with church history . . . Readers who, like Carroll, remain Catholic but wrestle with their church’s positions on moral issues will most appreciate his story.” —Publishers Weekly “Thought-provoking.” —San Francisco Chronicle “[An] engrossing faith memoir . . . a page-turner.” —Kirkus Reviews</div>

James Carroll

Books By James Carroll (9 Books)