Cold Type

The New Pope, Without Prejudice

Martin Sieff reviews Michael S. Rose's Benedict XVI: The Man Who Was Ratzinger, in the Washington Times:

Michael Rose's deceptively slim but solidly researched, documented, and robustly argued book, coming hard on the heels of Benedict XVI's election to the Throne of St. Peter, comes as a rapid and welcome corrective to dispel so many hostile, wildly inaccurate, and even contemptible clichés.
    Like the religious leader it celebrates, this book does not indulge in any cheap sentimentality but is both substantive and admirable.

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Is the Honeymoon Over?

Michael S. Rose suggests a place to honeymoon:

Two days after I was married in January of 1994, my bride and I left our hometown of Cincinnati for New England. I was in between semesters in my first year of graduate school. With all our belongings stuffed into a rented powder-blue Taurus Wagon, we drove 15 hours only to be greeted in Providence, Rhode Island, by four feet of snow left behind several days earlier by one of the decade’s fiercest blizzards.

It was 1:30 in the morning, dark, and 13 degrees when we unloaded the bulk of our worldly possessions into our three-room, third floor apartment. Fortunately, the snow plows and sidewalk shovellers had already finished their work.

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Benedict XVI

Booklist reviews Michael S. Rose's Benedict XVI: The Man Who Was Ratzinger:

Rose scrubs the mud off Ratzinger's reputation as he literately, carefully, and persuasively argues that Benedict XVI will be "of tremendous significance."