https://www.blytherandolphbooks.com/raves-reviews daily 0.75 2025-04-02 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/67a67ee8aa2bf11e28400f88/5897e1b4-ff58-4a41-87fc-4302db0eb4b9/2147617746.jpg https://www.blytherandolphbooks.com/raves-reviews/radical-rebel-masterpiece monthly 0.5 2026-02-07 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/67a67ee8aa2bf11e28400f88/e00605d2-045d-4e17-9a70-325d4d31aef9/Dorothy+Day Raves & Reviews - Biography of a Radical Rebel is the Masterpiece She Deserves - In the kind of literary alchemy most authors can only dream of, John Loughery and Blythe Randolph have blended all of these elements to produce this masterful biography of Dorothy Day, “a great anomaly in American life: an orthodox Catholic and a political radical, a rebel who courted controversy” whose life ran from the Spanish-American War to the election of Ronald Reagan. At a moment when a pandemic is bringing all the failures of unbridled capitalism into stark relief, nothing could be more timely than the biography of a convert to Catholicism who preached that the New Testament “called on all believers to fight racism, war and poverty or it meant nothing at all” and for whom “faith was less about solace than a call to action and disruption. Piety and conformity to social norms had little to do with each other.” John Loughery and Blythe Randolph achieve wonders ... With this collaboration, both have done the finest work of their lifetimes. Read More https://www.blytherandolphbooks.com/raves-reviews/saint-sinner-troublemaker monthly 0.5 2026-02-07 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/67a67ee8aa2bf11e28400f88/19ed4b85-f3bb-41ab-8181-5d469413bd3f/dorothyday.jpeg Raves & Reviews - Saint, Sinner, Troublemaker - In the early 1950s, as the Cold War began to take shape, the radical Catholic Dorothy Day protested a series of nuclear air-raid drills in New York City. Rather than staying indoors as ordered, Day and other pacifists gathered in parks and waited to be arrested. The gesture signified their refusal to participate in “psychological warfare” as well as their penance for America’s nuclear attacks on Japan in 1945. The midcentury drills look quaint in hindsight, a relic of a black-and-white era safely behind us. Yet as a pandemic upends the globe, we are reminded that disaster can and does strike and that civil preparation means the difference between life and death. One thing we can safely assume: If Day had a second chance, she would skip the drills all over again. The novelist Saul Bellow might have had Day in mind when he described a character in “The Adventures of Augie March” as “an autocrat, hard-shelled and Jesuitical, a pouncy old hawk of a Bolshevik.” Dorothy Day (1897–1980) was equal parts Mother Jones and Mother Teresa, her white hair pulled back, her gaze level and hard, and her lips pressed together until they erupted in laughter. She had a flat, Midwestern accent for a New Yorker, perhaps from time spent in Chicago and central Illinois. The founder of the Catholic Worker, a left-wing periodical, Day was a Christian first and an activist second. No target was safe, not even the church. In 1948 she cheered on the gravediggers of Calvary Cemetery in Queens during their strike against St. Patrick’s Cathedral. As John Loughery and Blythe Randolph write in “Dorothy Day: Dissenting Voice of the American Century,” “there is enough in the record of her dramatic life to alienate anyone.” It is the first full biography in nearly 40 years of an icon who may yet become a saint. (The canonization process is underway.) The authors are sympathetic yet clear-eyed in their assessment of Day’s turbulent life and maddening contradictions. “To her critics on the left, she was a distressingly loyal daughter of a reactionary Church,” they write, “but to her critics on the right, she was a rudely outspoken woman of questionable orthodoxy.” She ran a series of soup kitchens and lived among the city’s destitute; Evelyn Waugh described her as an “ascetic who wants all of us to be poor.” Her first miracle, one mourner later remarked, was to grant a morning free of hangovers to everyone who got drunk at her wake. Read More of Saint, Sinner, Troublemaker https://www.blytherandolphbooks.com/raves-reviews/saint-sinner-troublemaker-s79rn monthly 0.5 2026-02-07 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/67a67ee8aa2bf11e28400f88/6ee08339-9150-40ef-87d8-a3ea3e56266a/DorothyDay2 Raves & Reviews - 10 New Books We Recommend This Week - The new normal still doesn’t feel normal, exactly. But judging from conversations with friends and family, a lot of us are starting to settle into some kind of routine. If yours includes reading — and I hope it does — might we suggest these recent books? In fiction, Brandon Taylor’s “Real Life” gives a fresh twist to the traditional campus novel, and there’s new work from the old favorites Anne Enright, Louise Erdrich, and Emily St. John Mandel. Unlike her last novel, “Station Eleven,” Mandel’s latest does not involve a pandemic, you may be relieved to know. In nonfiction, we offer a couple of substantial biographies, of the Catholic activist Dorothy Day and the Saudi crown prince Mohammed bin Salman, along with a consideration of California’s housing crisis, a literary and cultural study of Shakespeare’s plays in America, and a historian’s look at the United States’ forced relocation of Native Americans during the 1830s. Finally, you shouldn’t need the excuse of National Poetry Month to pick up a collection of poems, but it is April after all: How about treating yourself to Victoria Chang’s “Obit”? It grapples with all sorts of endings, not just mortality, and proves to be rigorous and cleareyed, even comforting. We can all use a little poetry in our life these days. DOROTHY DAY: Dissenting Voice of the American Century, by John Loughery and Blythe Randolph. (Simon & Schuster, $30.) Day, the activist and co-founder of The Catholic Worker, is under consideration for sainthood; this timely biography wrestles with how to reconcile her religious conservatism with her radical politics. “Day’s life highlights tensions that are currently of concern to both Catholics and Americans,” Karen Armstrong writes in her review. “The authors render their subject in precise and meticulous detail, generating a vivid account of her political and religious development.” Read More https://www.blytherandolphbooks.com/raves-reviews/dorothyday-passionate monthly 0.5 2026-02-07 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/67a67ee8aa2bf11e28400f88/774b7b83-8c8a-46c4-865a-bd58fab7dd1a/DD-typewriter.jpeg Raves & Reviews - Dorothy Day was a Passionate, Stubborn, and Iconoclastic Woman - “Dorothy Day was a passionate, stubborn, and iconoclastic woman, and she lived one of the most fascinating, perplexing, and humbling lives of any American in the last century. Loughery and Randolph tell her story well, comprehensively, and fairly. In fundamental and prophetic ways, Day anticipated the current dismaying trajectory of American politics and culture. This is essential reading for our times.” https://www.blytherandolphbooks.com/raves-reviews/radical-rebel-masterpiece-ksxp2 monthly 0.5 2026-02-07 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/67a67ee8aa2bf11e28400f88/cab129c2-096a-49be-8f27-ae6fac1a18b2/05092014p20ph.jpg Raves & Reviews - Day's Story is Fascinating and Ennobling - "Dorothy Day: Dissenting Voice of the American Century is a crucial book for today. Day's story is fascinating and ennobling and is told brilliantly by John Loughery and Blythe Randolph. Day's fearless crusade for the poor is more relevant than ever in our age of billionaires." https://www.blytherandolphbooks.com/raves-reviews/radical-rebel-masterpiece-77x6a monthly 0.5 2026-02-07 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/67a67ee8aa2bf11e28400f88/bfe263f6-835e-4405-a565-fb35e57089a2/Dorothy+Day+at+House+of+Hospitality.jpg Raves & Reviews - Radical Lives: A New Biography of Dorothy Day - A GOOD BIOGRAPHY holds your attention; a great one transcends its subject and sheds light on the myriad forces bearing down on an individual at a particular point in time. John Loughery and Blythe Randolph’s Dorothy Day: Dissenting Voice of the American Century belongs, luminously, to the second. The authors brilliantly try to make sense of Dorothy’s complicated worldview. They focus on her transition to Catholicism and the questions she must have been forced to ask herself: What kind of world do we want to live in, and what sacrifices are we willing to make to achieve it? Do we believe that our primary concerns should be our physical ease, our family’s and our nation’s well-being, our happiness as individuals? Can a sense of the mystical thrive in a culture that has made sacred causes of the rights of the individual, material progress, and technology? Is a flight from suffering and struggle actually a flight from God and an escape from the fulfillment of our deepest humanity? They chart the reading she is known to have done — including Poe, De Quincey, Swinburne, Conrad, political biographies of all sorts, and her beloved Russian writers — searching for clues as to why she transitioned from a bohemian free spirit to something of a religious ascetic. They show how Gorky must have forced her to reckon with the brutal cost of poverty, how Tolstoy might have influenced her with his startling views about the difference between marriage and passion, how Chekhov might have moved her with his emphasis on empathy for all living souls, how Dostoyevsky (whom she revered) might have made her feel closer to God and given her a sense of mission, something she could grab hold of and never let go. Loughery and Randolph do a strong job depicting the urgency and intensity of her thinking, but they also reveal the blind spots that prevented her from seeing her own serious shortcomings, particularly regarding her daughter Tamar, whom she rarely saw and of whom she was extremely critical. Read More https://www.blytherandolphbooks.com/raves-reviews/radical-rebel-masterpiece-77x6a-97e3e monthly 0.5 2026-02-07 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/67a67ee8aa2bf11e28400f88/18733011-7eee-4168-b782-baf3601f6c20/Dorothy+Day+Activist Raves & Reviews - The Courage and Compassion of Catholic Activist Dorothy Day - Day, a former Bohemian and communist sympathizer who converted to Catholicism at age 30, built the Catholic Worker Movement, which still runs “hospitality houses” that care for the homeless, the mentally ill and all manner of disadvantaged people, and which publishes the Catholic Worker, a radical newspaper. As a political activist, Day denounced America’s entry into World War II, as well as President Harry Truman’s nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki as America’s “mortal sin.” She also believed that capitalism was destroying countless American lives, arguing even in the midst of McCarthyism that, because of America’s racial segregation and its role as the world’s arms supplier, “our way of life, as we are living it, is not worth saving.” Before joining the church, she had an abortion and gave birth to a child out of wedlock. Once baptized, she frequently attacked the Catholic Church hierarchy for its silence or complicity on matters of injustice. Despite this colorful past, nobody in the U.S. House chamber seemed to react to her inclusion. I wondered if this was because people were unfamiliar with her complex and altogether gripping life story. With “Dorothy Day: Dissenting Voice of the American Century,” John Loughery and Blythe Randolph — each an author of an acclaimed previous biography — add to a growing canon on Day, whom the Vatican has been considering for sainthood since 2000. Read full review https://www.blytherandolphbooks.com/contact daily 0.75 2025-02-18 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/67a67ee8aa2bf11e28400f88/ac725e1f-8da9-4a1e-b275-4233ae8b2ce4/19552.jpg https://www.blytherandolphbooks.com/about daily 0.75 2025-03-01 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/67a67ee8aa2bf11e28400f88/82e5cb6e-94bc-4dd3-b81f-ab6d99826a56/John+Loughery+Large.jpeg About https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/67a67ee8aa2bf11e28400f88/069f0733-96f0-48fe-aa7c-552ec403514e/simon-and-schuster.png About https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/67a67ee8aa2bf11e28400f88/d02c718e-bcf0-44c9-b542-4a8d6104fcaa/mmqlit.jpeg About https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/67a67ee8aa2bf11e28400f88/41b6461f-b7f3-4104-97c2-c6d876bb5126/br_headshot.jpeg https://www.blytherandolphbooks.com/home daily 1.0 2026-02-11 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/67a67ee8aa2bf11e28400f88/a7b29cce-ac45-48be-b198-8e945efc6ff8/freepik__expand-background__18221.png https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/67a67ee8aa2bf11e28400f88/e5da1728-b42d-4723-a5fa-a45f5b40eb30/BRBMockup.png https://www.blytherandolphbooks.com/literarywork daily 0.75 2025-05-29 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/67a67ee8aa2bf11e28400f88/b30a9a0e-feec-4b57-b978-3e03866daad0/dorothyday.png https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/67a67ee8aa2bf11e28400f88/b2492afa-0582-4597-9818-d965b3471fe6/2.png https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/67a67ee8aa2bf11e28400f88/44cee951-341b-496a-8d3c-681cc7558990/3.png https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/67a67ee8aa2bf11e28400f88/5897e1b4-ff58-4a41-87fc-4302db0eb4b9/2147617746.jpg https://www.blytherandolphbooks.com/dorothy-day daily 0.75 2025-03-06 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/67a67ee8aa2bf11e28400f88/1eda6eec-f6ca-498f-8877-287a94bb621c/03Armstrong1-mediumSquareAt3X.jpg https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/67a67ee8aa2bf11e28400f88/05667a16-9b27-4323-a2c7-2e49c686e364/Dorothy-day-catholic-activist-civil-disobedience-s.jpeg https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/67a67ee8aa2bf11e28400f88/bfe263f6-835e-4405-a565-fb35e57089a2/11.12.22+Dorothy+Day+at+House+of+Hospitality.jpg https://www.blytherandolphbooks.com/dorothy-day-excerpt daily 0.75 2025-02-20 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/67a67ee8aa2bf11e28400f88/b30a9a0e-feec-4b57-b978-3e03866daad0/dorothyday.png https://www.blytherandolphbooks.com/talks-discussions daily 0.75 2025-04-02 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/67a67ee8aa2bf11e28400f88/5897e1b4-ff58-4a41-87fc-4302db0eb4b9/2147617746.jpg