Charlie Hegarty, Author at Catholic Herald

Charlie Hegarty

Inside Demmin: the town that could not go on living

September 05, 2019

Promise Me You’ll Shoot Yourself By Florian Huber Allen Lane, 304pp, £20/$24 This is an inauspicious title for a thought-provoking book. Its subtitle, The Downfall of Ordinary Germans in 1945, provides the clue to its meaning. Huber, who was born in Nuremberg in 1967, says he was inspired to write it after reading Ian Kershaw’s

Marriage, lies and a mystical conversion

July 11, 2019

Before and After By Alison Wilson Constable, 192pp, £16.99/$25 From its cover photograph you might think this is an ordinary account of a wartime marriage. Its subtitle suggests something stranger: The Incredible Story of the Real-Life Mrs Wilson is indeed extraordinary, both in its human dimension and its supernatural one. And in an unusual twist,

A Catholic poet unskilled in the art of living

May 30, 2019

Elizabeth Jennings: The Inward War By Dana Greene OUP, 288pp, £25/$35 Dana Greene has written a sympathetic and perceptive study of the life of Elizabeth Jennings (1926-2001). In under 300 pages, she handles the major themes of Jennings’s poetry, relating them to stages of the poet’s life, and deals insightfully with the “inward war” that

The abortion worker who crossed the road

March 28, 2019

Unplanned By Abby Johnson Ignatius Press, 304pp, £12.99/$16.99 The author, formerly working for Planned Parenthood as the director of an abortion clinic in Bryan, Texas, became famous when she left her job in 2009 after watching an abortion take place on ultrasound. She joined Coalition for Life, the organisation that had for years mounted prayer

A troubled unbeliever walks to Jerusalem

January 17, 2019

The Crossway by guy stagg, picador, 400pp, £16.99/$20 Guy Stagg’s book is about a long walk he made from Canterbury to Jerusalem in 2013 when he was 25. As a cure for the severe depression from which he was suffering, it proved effective. The act of walking eight hours a day, six days a week,

A visionary defence of married love

November 08, 2018

Charlie Hegarty hails a brave minority voice from 1968 The Encyclical Humanae Vitae By Dietrich von Hildebrand, Hildebrand Press, 136pp, £8.99 This year marks the 50th anniversary of Pope Paul VI’s encyclical Humanae Vitae, explaining why the Church cannot change her teaching on the wrongness of artificial birth control. It is fair to say that

A soul forged by love, war and loneliness

October 18, 2018

The Year of Thamar’s Book by Lucy Beckett, Gracewing, 520pp, £20 In this ambitious novel of 500 pages Lucy Beckett, whose previous work has been set in the Reformation period and in East Germany before and after the last war, has chosen another unusual setting: France and the Algerian War as the French engaged in

What the abortion lobby has done to feminism

October 04, 2018

The Abolition of Women by Fiorella Nash, Ignatius Press, 240pp, £14 If readers are mystified by Fiorella Nash’s title, her subtitle explains her subject: How Radical Feminism is Betraying Women. Nash, who describes herself as a “pro-life feminist” and has 10 years’ experience researching life issues from a feminist perspective, has written a passionate, well-researched

A militant atheist businessman takes on the Faith

August 23, 2018

Dangerous Illusions by Vitaly Malkin, Arcadia, 416pp, £25 Why read a lavishly produced, glossy hardback book with the subtitle How Religion Deprives Us of Happiness? After all, it is likely to be provocative, ill-informed and written with all the passion of militant atheism. Dangerous Illusions is all these things, but I was nonetheless curious about

The free-spirited woman who found grace

August 16, 2018

Dorothy Day: An Introduction by Terence C Wright, Ignatius, 162pp, £12 The author, an academic at the St John Vianney Theological Seminary in Denver, has written an excellent short introduction to the life of this most human of women, whose Cause has been introduced. For those who do not yet know Dorothy Day, this book

The guilt-free life of Goebbels’s typist

June 21, 2018

The Work I Did by Brunhilde Pomsel, Bloomsbury, 240pp £16.99 The value of this memoir, written from interview recordings made in 2013 by the author, then aged 102, is that it shows, both by what it says and by what it omits, what it was like to be an ordinary young German woman in Berlin

A gift for capturing the essence of Devon

May 24, 2018

James Ravilious: A Life by Robin Ravilious, Wilmington Square, 248pp, £17 Some people’s lives are worth remembering not because they have played a major historical or artistic role in society but because they have lived out their vocation in life with integrity and dedication. Such is the life of James Ravilious, the photographer of rural

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