The world was a “terrible mess” in October 1962, when the Catholic Church opened the Second Ecumenical Council of the Vatican—commonly known as Vatican II—says Catholic scholar and author George Weigel. In his book To Sanctify the World: The Vital Legacy of Vatican II (Basic Books, October 2022), Weigel explains how the council wanted to reenergize the church to be of service to a hurting world in the wake of two world wars. “By raising up Christ-centered humanism as an alternative proposal to how we should understand who we are, the Catholic Church was responding to a genuine crisis in world civilization that produced terrible results,” says Weigel, who lives in North Bethesda and is a distinguished senior fellow of the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C.
As an art teacher at Ashburton Elementary School in Bethesda, Jonathan Roth says he listens to and jokes with kids all day long. That helps inform his side gig as a writer and illustrator of children’s books. “Being a teacher is also being a performer—knowing how to entertain them, knowing what makes them laugh, knowing what makes them tick,” says Roth, who lives in Rockville and is the author of Rover and Speck: This Planet Rocks! (Kids Can Press, October 2022), a graphic novel for elementary school kids that blends humor and science to tell the story of two lost planetary explorers who become friends on a Mars- like planet. Roth says the next book in the series, coming out in 2023, takes place in a water world, and the third, due out in 2024, is set on a giant planet similar to Jupiter.
Martha Anne Toll has worked as a lawyer, chief executive officer of a social justice philanthropy, and book reviewer. Now, with the release of Three Muses (Regal House Publishing, September 2022), she’s a published novelist. The book is a love story between a prima ballerina and a Holocaust survivor, a relationship that’s complicated by the dancer’s abusive relationship with her choreographer. Toll, who lives in Chevy Chase, hopes the novel will prompt readers to consider: “What can our memory teach us? What do we learn from historical experience?
What does it mean to be disciplined? I also wanted to honor the stories that I grew up hearing about the Holocaust and tell it forward,” she says.
In retirement, people with attention-deficit/ hyperactivity disorder
may find it hard to follow a schedule or keep their house in order, putting them at risk of social isolation and a shorter life span, says psychologist Kathleen Nadeau, founder and clinical director of the Chesapeake ADHD Learning and Behavioral Health Center in Bethesda. She says Still Distracted After All These Years: Help and Support for Older Adults with ADHD (Hachette Go, October 2022) aims to build public awareness of the condition and be a wake-up call for mental health professionals who often lack training in adult ADHD. “It’s never too late to benefit from diagnosis and treatment,” Nadeau says. “It’s dangerous to leave ADHD untreated in your later years.”
This story appears in the November/December 2022 issue of Bethesda Magazine.
