TikTok, the viral social media app, is all the rage with young people around the world, including Amber-Rose Schneider, who first joined Tik-Tok to find other young Catholic teenage creators like herself. 

A self-described "cradle Catholic" and graphic design student at Liberty University, Schneider, now 21, began using her TikTok as "@the_religious_hippie," a fun moniker her friends gave her. She was posting casually, but had what she calls a "turning point" in her faith, and began posting openly about her beliefs. 

For young U.S. Catholics like Schneider, TikTok is more than an app for dances, funny memes and challenges in 60 seconds or less. It's a community dedicated to evangelizing and defending the faith as well as a place for networking and recreation, especially during the coronavirus pandemic, as more young people are seeking connection and answers in a particularly divisive year.

Originally published in Russian in 1985, now in English, Svetlana Alexievich's Last Witnesses listens to adults looking back on their experiences as children during World War II in the Soviet Union. 

Its U.S. appearance in paperback this past summer, after a hardback release last year, was perhaps intended to coincide with this year's commemorations of the 75th anniversary of the end of World War II in 1945. 

Those commemorations have been muted, given the global health pandemic. But that development actually works to the book's advantage, drawing attention away from official history and sites of battle to the lesser-known locales of violence where civilians were vulnerable to horrific acts.