Ann Neumann
Thank God for Charles Marsh’s Strange Glory. This new biography definitively wrests the legacy of the World War II–era German theologian from the fact-defying clutches of Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy, the wildly popular 2010 book by evangelical self-promoter extraordinaire Eric Metaxas. As Metaxas’s subtitle suggests, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who was killed in 1945 by the Nazis for his work with the resistance, has lately emerged as an all-purpose hero to the evangelical Right, as it harbors outsize fantasies about its own acute cultural persecution in the age of Obama. Marsh, a professor of religious studies at the University of Virginia, 
Two rather astute voices were in my ear as I read Megan Hustad’s beautiful but ultimately unsatisfying new memoir: that of the “worker in song” who’s giving Leonard Cohen head in the Chelsea Hotel; and that of Joan Didion, circa Slouching Towards Bethlehem, who delivers a characteristically morbid appraisal of herself, and the rest of us, in “On Self-Respect.”