books in order

James Carroll Books In Order

Standalone Novels In Publication Order

  1. Madonna Red (1976)
  2. Mortal Friends (1978)
  3. Fault Lines (1980)
  4. Family Trade (1982)
  5. The Prince of Peace (1984)
  6. Supply of Heroes (1986)
  7. Firebird (1989)
  8. Memorial Bridge (1991)
  9. The City Below (1994)
  10. Secret Father (2003)
  11. Warburg in Rome (2014)
  12. The Cloister (2018)

Non-Fiction Books In Publication Order

  1. An American Requiem (1996)
  2. Constantine’s Sword (2001)
  3. Toward a New Catholic Church (2002)
  4. Crusade (2004)
  5. House of War (2006)
  6. Practicing Catholic (2009)
  7. Jerusalem, Jerusalem (2011)
  8. Christ Actually (2014)
  9. Village Vets (With: Anthony Bennett) (2015)
  10. Calving Straps and Zombie Cats (With: Anthony Bennett) (2016)
  11. The Truth at the Heart of the Lie (2021)

Standalone Novels Book Covers

Non-Fiction Book Covers

James Carroll Books Overview

Mortal Friends

Sweeping from the Irish Rebellion of the early 1920s to the tumultuous Boston of Mayor James Michael Curley and the Kennedys, Mortal Friends is the saga of Irish revolutionary Colman Brady and the choices that shaped his fate. James Carroll is the author of five novels and two acclaimed works of nonfiction, including the National Book Award winning An American Requiem.

The Prince of Peace

Vietnam: bitterly contested on the American home front and on the battlefields of Southeast Asia. Risking his vows to the priesthood and his status as a Korean War hero, Michael Maguire struggles with God and country in this thrilling novel of faith, truth, and honor, ‘so rich and vital it leaves you breathless’ Chicago Tribune.

The City Below

In this compelling family saga set during a tumultuous era in Boston history, 1960 1984, James Carroll chronicles the lives of two brothers, Nick and Terry Doyle, as they strive to move beyond the strictures of their working class Charlestown neighborhood to’ The City Below.’ Though one brother is drawn to the worlds of politics and real estate and the other to the underworld of organized crime, their fates remain inextricably linked as each struggles to break free of the blood tie holding him captive to the past. As in his previous best selling novels Mortal Friends and Family Trade, James Carroll seamlessly blends fiction and history to create a gripping tale of family bonds and ethnic violence, vows and betrayals, and political intrigue in the inner sanctums of both church and state. Publishers Weekly called The City Below a’ superbly detailed vision of Boston…
an excellent chronicle of three decades during which starry eyed idealism was brought low by political cynicism and pe

Secret Father

It is 1961. Khrushchev is hurling threats, a U.S. spy plane has been shot down over the Soviet Union, tensions are rising. Berlin has been cut off from the West: it’s only a matter of weeks until the Wall will be erected. The United States and Americans abroad face dangers they had never imagined. Against this backdrop, the best selling novelist and historian James Carroll tells an unforgettable love story that illuminates a key moment in history with the passions of those who lived it. Three teenagers from an American school in West Germany travel to Berlin to join a May Day rally on the Communist side of the divided city. Propelled by nadve ideals and in rebellion against preordained futures, they stumble into the center of an international incident. Paul, the father of one of the boys, and Charlotte, the elegant German born mother of another, set off to rescue their children from the East German Stasi, which has detained them. Over the course of a weekend, Paul and Charlotte struggle with personal secrets, growing passion, and the weight of a generation that survived World War II only to face the loss of its children to the engulfing paranoia of the Cold War. Secret Father inexorably pulls the reader into the heart of flashpoint Berlin. In this powerful tale, missed signals, cloaked motives, false postures, and panicked responses echo tragically across borders and generations.

An American Requiem

An American Requiem is the story of one man’s coming of age. But more than that, it is a coming to terms with the conflicts that disrupted many families, inflicting personal wounds that were also social, political, and religious. Carroll grew up in a Catholic family that seemed blessed. His father had abandoned his own dream of becoming a priest to rise through the ranks of Hoover’s FBI and then become one of the most powerful men in the Pentagon, the founder of the Defense Intelligence Agency. Young Jim lived the privileged life of a general’s son, dating the daughter of a vice president and meeting the pope, all in the shadow of nuclear war, waiting for the red telephone to ring in his parents’ house. He worshiped his father until Martin Luther King, Jr., the civil rights movement, turmoil in the Catholic Church, and then Vietnam combined to outweigh the bond between father and son. These were issues on which they would never agree. Only after Carroll left the priesthood to become a writer and husband with children of his own did he come to understand fully the struggles his father had faced. In this work of nonfiction, the best selling novelist draws on the skills he honed with nine much admired novels to tell the story he was, literally, born to tell. An American Requiem is a benediction on his father’s lief, his family’s struggles, adn teh legacies of an entire generation.

Constantine’s Sword

In a bold and moving book that is sure to spark heated debate, the novelist and cultural critic James Carroll maps the profoundly troubling two thousand year course of the Church’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’s failure to protest the Holocaust the infamous ‘silence’ of Pius XII 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’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’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. Drawing on his well known talents as a storyteller and memoirist, and weaving historical research through an intensely personal examination of conscience, Carroll has created a work of singular power and urgency. Constantine’s Sword is a brave and affecting reckoning with difficult truths that will touch every reader.

Toward a New Catholic Church

Elaborating on ‘A Call for Vatican III’ in his best selling book Constantine’s Sword: The Church and the Jews, James Carroll proposes a clear agenda for reform to help concerned Catholics understand the most essential issues facing their Church. He 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 case for democracy within the Church illustrates why lay people have already initiated change. Carroll shows that all Catholics parishioners, priests, bishops, men and women have an equal stake in the Church’s future.

Crusade

A devastating indictment of the Bush administration’s war policies from the bestselling author and respected moral authority With the words ‘this Crusade, this war on terror,’ George W. Bush defined the purpose of his presidency. And just as promptly, James Carroll Boston Globe columnist, son of a general, former antiwar chaplain and activist, and recognized voice of ethical authority began a week by week argument with the administration over its actions. In powerful, passionate bulletins, Carroll dissected the President’s exploitation of the nation’s fears, invocations of a Christian mission, and efforts to overturn America’s traditional relations with other nations and its own citizens. Crusade, the collection of Carroll’s searing columns, offers a comprehensive and tough minded critique of the war on terror. From Carroll’s first rejection of ‘war’ as the proper response to Osama bin Laden, to his prescient verdict of failure in Iraq, to his never before published analysis of the faith based roots of current U.S. policies, this volume displays his rare insight and scope. Combining clear moral consciousness, an acute sense of history, and a real world grasp of the unforgiving demands of politics, Crusade is a compelling call for the rescue of America’s noblest traditions.A cry from the heart, a record of protest, and a permanently relevant analysis, Carroll’s work confronts the Bush era and measures it against what America was meant to be.

House of War

From the National Book Award winning author of An American Requiem and Constantine’s Sword comes a sweeping yet intimate look at the Pentagon and its vast often hidden impact on America. This landmark, myth shattering work chronicles the most powerful institution in America, the people who created it, and the pathologies it has spawned. James Carroll proves a controversial thesis: the Pentagon has, since its founding, operated beyond the control of any force in government or society. It is the biggest, loosest cannon in American history, and no institution has changed this country more. To argue his case, he marshals a trove of often chilling evidence. He recounts how ‘the Building’ and its denizens achieved what Eisenhower called ‘a disastrous rise of misplaced power’ from the unprecedented aerial bombing of Germany and Japan during World War II to the ‘shock and awe’ of Iraq. He charts the colossal U.S. nuclear buildup, which far outpaced that of the USSR, and has outlived it. He reveals how consistently the Building has found new enemies just as old threats and funding evaporate. He demonstrates how Pentagon policy brought about U.S. indifference to an epidemic of genocide during the 1990s. And he shows how the forces that attacked the Pentagon on 9/11 were set in motion exactly sixty years earlier, on September 11, 1941, when ground was broken for the House of War. Carroll draws on rich personal experience his father was a top Pentagon official for more than twenty years as well as exhaustive research and dozens of extensive interviews with Washington insiders. The result is a grand yet intimate work of history, unashamedly polemical and personal but unerringly factual. With a breadth and focus that no other book could muster, it explains what America has become over the past sixty years.

Practicing Catholic

From a National Book Award winning and bestselling author, James Carroll’s examination and explaination of why he is till a Practicing Catholic, set against the history of the Catholic Church in America and the sometimes glorious, sometimes discouraging actions of its leaders. Practicing Catholicis a personal history of the American Catholic Church during James Carroll’s lifetime. It traces the transformation of a medieval institution suspicious of American ideas of freedom and democracy into a church that has begun to embrace basic American principles of pluralism and respect for conscience. The book tells the story of heroes Pope John xxiii, Thomas Merton, Cardinal Richard Cushing, William Sloane Coffin, and great events Vatican ii, the Kennedys, the end of the Cold War. Considering the new meaning of belief in a secular world, it stands against the fundamentalisms of neo athetists as well as of born again Christians. The book shows how and why the world needs a renewed, rational, vital Catholic Church. All of this is centered in the life long journey of its author, who embraced the priesthood in his youth, but who finds in the writing life a renewal of religious belief. For James Carroll faith is a practice like all practice, it aims at getting better.

Jerusalem, Jerusalem

James Carroll’s urgent, masterly Jerusalem, Jerusalem uncovers the ways in which the ancient city became, unlike any other in the world reaching deep into our contemporary lives an incendiary fantasy of a city. In Carroll s provocative reading of the deep past, the Bible s brutality responded to the violence that threatened Jerusalem from the start. Centuries later, the mounting European fixation on a heavenly Jerusalem sparked both anti Semitism and racist colonial contempt. The holy wars of the Knights Templar burned apocalyptic mayhem into the Western mind. Carroll s brilliant and original leap is to show how, as Christopher Columbus carried his own Jerusalemcentric worldview to the West, America too was powerfully shaped by the dream of the City on a Hill from Governor Winthrop to Abraham Lincoln to Woodrow Wilson to Ronald Reagan. The nuclear brinksmanship of the 1973 Yom Kippur War helps prove his point: religion and violence fuel each other, with Jerusalem the ground zero of the heat. To the standard set by Constantine s Sword, Jerusalem, Jerusalem is again a rare book that combines searing passion…
with a subject that has affected all our lives Chicago Tribune.

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