Rita Buettner speaks with Ilka Knüppel, author of “Finding Ruth: A Personal Story of Hitler’s Secret Euthanasia Program, Action T4.”

Herewith, some suggestions for your own reading pleasure this summer, which I hope you’ll pass along to friends:

Now 90, the Cumberland native has self-published “The Cumberland Mission,” a 316-page archival study of the Catholic Church’s efforts to minister to Catholics in Western Maryland during the region’s frontier period from 1778 to 1853. Father Burkey said he began writing the book about 20 years ago, drawing on archival research he had accumulated over decades.

Pope Leo XIV said the conscience of just one person can “be worth the entire world” when it comes to preventing a nuclear catastrophe, in a new book foreword that also quotes an unpublished Bob Dylan song about the atomic bomb.

For a university founded in 1808, Emmitsburg’s Mount St. Mary’s University has surprisingly few books telling its story. That bothered alumnus John Singleton, Class of 1986, enough that he wrote one himself.

Pulitzer Prize winners, a Nobel laureate, celebrated novelists and authors from nearly a dozen countries met at the Vatican June 24 for an audience with Pope Leo XIV, who reflected on the importance of books to reveal who we are and “our inner dialogue with God.”

Vice President JD Vance’s new book, “Communion: Finding My Way Back to Faith,” is a story of several of his conversions: from Protestant Christian to atheist to Christian again as a Catholic; from Appalachia to Washington; from a vocal skeptic of President Donald Trump to his running mate.

On June 16, Vice President JD Vance will release his second book, “Communion: Finding My Way Back to Faith” (HarperCollins). As a presumed 2028 U.S. presidential candidate, the timing couldn’t be more critical for Vance, who joined the Catholic Church in 2019.

Longtime fans of Karina Fabian’s “Rescue Sisters” stories will be quick to point out that the review of this month’s novel is a decade overdue. To them one can only reply that, after all, Christ gave the full day’s pay to the latecomers in his parable of the vineyard workers, and this reviewer is similarly grateful to have discovered such an excellent work of speculative fiction, even if a bit belatedly. Discovered, of course, being the operative word, as in any good work of science fiction.

It’s a slim volume; the Ascension Press edition of “The Practice of the Presence of God” by the 17th-century French Carmelite friar Brother Lawrence of the Resurrection runs just 131 pages in the print edition, with notes.