CRITICS' CHOICES FOR CHRISTMAS
Reedy, Gerard & Phillips, Robert & Nobile, Philip & McCauley, Michael & Fireside, Harvey & Diamond, Edwin & Wilken, Robert L.
BOOKS Critics' Choices for Christinas EDWIN DIAMOND The Book of the Year was not widely reviewed and never made it to any of the major best seller lists. Presidentelect Jimmy Carter's...
...Since that time, more than 25 years ago, Carter tells us, he became determined to do his best at all times...
...I thought there was nothing to be added to Hitler literature until I read John Toland's biography, Adolf Hitler (Doubleday, $14.95), a dazzling project full of new and surprising material...
...By digging into old police and FBI files, Scaduto has unearthed evidence indicating that Hauptmann, the German immigrant who went to the electric chair in 1936 for the kidnap murder of the Lindbergh baby, was framed...
...For example, The Alice Crimmins Case (Knopf, $8.95) by Newsday reporter Kenneth Gross is the finest crime story I have ever come across...
...The irony of Lenin, the agent of foreign ideas and subvention, unloosening chaos on Russia is counter-pointed by Solzhenitsyn retracing the path of Swiss exile yet seeking to establish himself as the true patriot who can exorcise a nation bewitched by Lenin...
...But not candidate Carter...
...The understated title of Piers Paul Read's Alive (Avon, $1.95) reveals his approach to the story...
...Professor Mazlish is a practitioner of the new art of psychohistory, and he and I were interviewing Carter for a biography-in-depth that would use, among other insights, the ideas of Freud and Erikson to help us understand the roots of adult behavior...
...He is sharply critical of the tendency of Christian ethical thinkers to reduce Christian ethics to the act of decision as well as the pervasive stress on the individual...
...There is the hovering "liberal" mother, the stern "segregationist" father...
...Nostalgia for the world of our fathers tends to become the occasion for an indulgence in self-pity at the hollowness of our existence or a longing for a romanticized past...
...prosecutor at the Nuremberg Trials, who challenged his old Soviet contacts to live up to their better natures by pointing out to them procedural errors in the trials of Jews convicted while trying to emigrate to Israel...
...In Courts of Terror (Vintage, $1.95), Taylor supplies up with memorable accounts of brave people caught in the toils of an inhuman system, strangers in their own land...
...My students, the same age as the survivors, were their best and most sympathetic critics...
...Solzhenitsyn towers like a rocky crag, removed from the esthetic concerns of contemporary literature...
...Lenin in Zurich (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $8.95) was stitched together by Solzhenitsyn from his incomplete trilogy of Russia during World War I. He compensates for the fractured text by a passion that infuses this portrait of the monomaniac Bolshevik, ready to sacrifice love, friendship and ethical scruples for his revolutionary triumph...
...An impressive text, explaining technique and providing a history of the art (from the Middle Ages to the present), is brilliantly enhanced by almost 500 lush, full-color photographs...
...The central anthropophagous act becomes less the center of his and our attention than the interaction of the survivors...
...Yet he was deeply part of the world he inhabited and Kelly's learned and well-written account of his life is a trustworthy and fascinating guide to the life and manners of Christians when Christianity was beginning to settle down to life in the world...
...Carter answers, honestly, not always...
...Francis of Assist by Anthony Mockler (Dutton, $9.95) is a serious, well-researched new biography which contrasts the complex and disquieting Francis against the tumultuous Europe of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries...
...Certainly the most important theological work of the year is Swiss theologian Hans Kung's monumental On Being A Christian (Doubleday, $12.95...
...The poem's finest section (II) dramatizes the sailor's hallucinatory fear of claws-at once a lobster's and Cancer's...
...Such an exile assumes a tragic dimension as he reflects the dilemma of modern man torn between the demands of public roles and private truths, This existential predicament inspires the vision of literary giants, such as Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Andrei Sinyavsky, whose works from days of internal exile have, now that their authors are physically uprooted from their homeland, become accessible in translation to western readers...
...Biography as Theology is a study of four modern Christian lives: Dag Hammarskjold, Martin Luther King, Clarence Jordan, and Charles Ives...
...Ignatius hardly had McNeill in mind...
...HARVEY FIRESIDE At a holiday season that commemorates a family's search for shelter, the tragedy of exile is an especially apt subject for contemplation...
...His assembly of data from Scripture studies, psychology, and moral technology will bother specialists and laymen alike...
...Dickey does not tell us, in his prefactory note or in the poem itself, how he came by Mars-man's poem of the same title, which Dickey claims to have remade until it is totally his own...
...In twelve parts, The Zodiac is based upon the life and poetical leavings of one Hendrik Marsman, sailor killed by a torpedo in the North Atlantic in 1940...
...The temptation is to recommend certain titles for specific personalities on one's shopping list-ideal for the family feminist, especially suited to the collegiate mystic, just right for the bachelor uncle, etc...
...The course of disillusionment is described by Telford Taylor, former U.S...
...But it took Watergate, the White House tapes and that incredible farewell speech on that August morning in 1974 to confirm what some of us had suspected since Helen Gahagan Douglas and Checkers- a tormented, driven soul agonized underneath the many successive masks of the "new" Nixon...
...He is a kind of Wordsworth, 100 years too late...
...Incidentally, these last three S & S products were all edited by the redoubtable Alice Mayhew, once a frequent contributer to this magazine...
...The agonies of his four years in prison and psychiatric torture chambers are documented in this moving work edited by Tatiana Khodorovich...
...His satirical targets are nothing less than all human frailties, and his surprising conclusions shock us with recognition, as when his Hansel turns on Gretel to proclaim: "You ungrateful bitch:/I wasted my life on our stupid legend/When my one and only love was the dead witch...
...The last, Voyages Down, appeared in 1967...
...Anyone concerned about belief and its manifestations will be immensely aided by Marty's cogent comments on recent religious happenings...
...The last, "A Travail Past" (inexplicably omitted from the book's Table of Contents) is a 17-page narrative based on the fate of the sailors aboard the whaling ship Essex...
...A musn't miss is Tom Mc-Hale's School Spirit (Doubleday, $7.95...
...I used this book twice in class in 1976...
...Appleman's accomplished new collection is a big book, as poetry books go-88 pages...
...classifications...
...The only ideals involved in all questions of sexual orientation," writes McNeill, "are the great transcendent questions of justice and love...
...Priest-sociologist Andrew Greeley's modest book, The Great Mysteries (Seabury, $3.95, paper), is a deliberately short, preeminently practical, "essential catechism...
...few would have had the courage and sense to assemble such an argument from such varied sources...
...Wakin has recaptured-largely through firsthand accounts-the story of more than 4.25 million Irish immigrants who arrived between the Great Famine of the late 1840s and the start of the Roaring Twenties...
...There is in these pages so profound and deeply personal a witness that On Being A Christian transcends the arid scholarly treatise of not a few theologians...
...Carter's admirers, and his detractors, can find just about anything here to confirm their feelings: the arrogance, the compassion, the grim efficiency, the down-home humor, the overarching love, the consuming ambition, the highs of victory and the bitter ranklings of defeat (which sent Carter into a severe state of depression at-yes-just about the time he had turned forty...
...Clancy's St...
...and "Jimmy What...
...I am not an enthusiast of the present fad for "narrative theology," and this may be the reason I missed James Mc-Clendon's Biography as Theology (Abingdon, $4.95) when it first appeared a year or so ago...
...The Final Days (Simon and Schuster, $10) almost made a fifth but Woodstein's calendar-style reportage told me more than I wanted to know about Fred Buzardt's backstairs shuffle...
...Finally there is Robert Lowell's Selected Poems (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $12.50), an admirable distillation, more than two hundred poems taken from Lowell's previous eight collections...
...As a freelance writer, I am condemned to keep up with several media...
...It is becoming a truism to call attention to the religous roots of the American experiment, but it was in reading a study in Jewish history alongside of a work on the Puritans that the idea came to clearer focus...
...It wasn't as if Carter and his advisers were a bunch of quaint provincials unaware of our psychosocial quests...
...This is one of those rare books you will want to receive as well as give to others...
...By outlining a few Augustinian models for Herbert's theory of art, Taylor gives us an excellent entry into a wide range of poems...
...Jimmy Carter is going to work hard at being a full-time president for all the people...
...I can only say that the sequences Lowell has created within this volume help clarify his intentions, and that Selected Poems seems to me the volume with which all readers new to Lowell should begin...
...John Winthrop, let it be remembered, was like Nehemiah, not a clergyman, but a governor, and it was on him, and the community he ruled, that God's promise rested...
...he left behind for them an eternal memorial- the walls of New England...
...While reading McNeill, I was also moving through An Introduction to Jesuit Life, by Thomas H. Clancy, S.J...
...Don't believe the cynics...
...Before, during, and after my October excursion to the Aran Islands, I read John Millington Synge's The Aran Islands (in Works, Random House, $10.95), published in 1907 after Synge had spent several summers on the islands...
...Yet in these few pages Dickey explores the universes of light and love...
...A number of otherwise level-headed and intelligent people get very tight-"hostile" Mazlish might say -when they hear about psychohistory...
...PHILIP NOBILE I am an inordinately jaded reader, a burnt-out literary case...
...The title itself comes from an interview that naval officer Carter had with the "atomic admiral," Hyman Rickover...
...we have become a people distinguished, one from another, by our social behavior...
...Despite the marvels of the aforementioned only four books totally transported me last year...
...Philbrick died in 1971, and his widow has arranged Nobody Laughs, Nobody Cries (The Smith, distributed by Horizon Press, $6.50), a generous posthumous collection of unpublished poems...
...Tough-minded big city politicians and powerful prelates, railroad builders and rowdy miners, women in domestic service and religious life-all are here represented telling, in Wakin's words, "one hell of a story...
...By the time I'm finished with a book, it's a semi-classic at least...
...I confess this order with a heavy heart...
...While certain linguists may discredit their veracity to the originals, lovers of Lowell's work recognize in them some of his truest poetry...
...We Americans are more than Lyndon Johnson's "nation of believers...
...Clancy is in command of this literature and communicates it clearly and efficiently...
...What emerges is an altogether new understanding of this eternally popular saint...
...Riotous and outrageous as were no other immigrants-not once but twice bands of Irish invaded Canada from U.S...
...In closing, a few other books are noteworthy...
...What is essential to faith is an appreciation of the importance of such mysteries as God, Jesus, the Spirit, the Cross and Resurrection, Salvation, Grace, Eucharist, Church, Baptism, Mary, Heaven, and the Return of Jesus...
...Philip Appleman is less well known than Dickey, though other poets have known and admired his work for years...
...And it is diverse -poems on love, war, ecology, identity...
...I especially recommend "The Origins of He-terosexuality" and "The Politics of Homosexuality...
...As a tentative summary of basic principles it is a return to the core of apostolic preaching-a sharing of twelve "images" or "mysteries" traditionally associated with the Easter experience of faith-rather than a compendium of elaborate arguments in the scholastic tradition...
...During his lifetime he published three collections...
...Putnam's, $12.95), a much neglected but important correction of John Kennedy iconography...
...By nature he was a good and just man, and most zealous for the glory of his countrymen...
...Barber's hope was to be able to predict presidential performance...
...The islands still are rocky outposts of fishermen, servants to sea and wind, as Synge describes...
...His informed monograph solidly corrects that secular body of Herbertian criticism which still refuses to get beyond the rhetoric to the tradition...
...Twice before in recent times, presidential hopefuls have put their names on books to tell us something about themselves...
...Why else all the public noise about "Jimmy Who...
...It would be presumptuous to pretend to "review" this book, representing Lowell's lifework, in this brief space...
...But it will certainly be the book of next year-a sketch, like some dream of premonition, for the Carter presidency...
...A Voice from the Chorus (Farrar, Straus & Giroux $10) lends itself to a variety of readings: a chronicle of physical mortification to test newfound faith, a brilliant critic's commentary on world literature as a survival manual, and a linguistic analysis of the banalities and deception that comfort the more common criminals...
...Since I decided not to suggest particular titles for special friends or relatives, Edward Wakin's Enter the Irish-American (Crowell, $9.95) is recommended not only for ethnics...
...The other study in biography is the splendid new book by J.N.D...
...Carter is applying for duty in the nuclear-powered submarine program and the crusty "Old Man," Rickover, asks him where he finished in his class at Annapolis...
...Several chapters are worth the price of admission...
...And then it has to have that extra kick to retain my interest...
...MICHAEL McCAULEY To suggest books for Christmas gift-giving is risky at best...
...A few weeks after Carter had seen his psycho-historians back to back, Washington Post reporter William Grieder was at the Carter door asking for-and getting-12-year-old Jimmy's school papers and scrapbooks, navy man Jimmy's diaries and son Jimmy's letters to his mother...
...Don't say that the electorate hasn't been warned...
...I hope it brings him the greater recognition he has earned...
...Although the printed word occupies most of my attention, even here I perforce divide myself among newspapers, magazines and lastly books...
...Bercovitch's book is an extended commentary on Cotton Mather's Life of John Winthrop, a work he subtitled Nehemias Americanus, The American Nehemiah...
...Broadman, $1.95) did sell over two million copies -about his margin of victory in the popular vote, if you like to play with numbers-but these sales have been primarily in paperback outlets, religious bookstores and student co-ops (where some of us put it on the required reading lists in political science courses...
...ROBERT L. WILKEN My reading of recently published works is haphazard and unsystematic because I spend most of my time reading old books written 1500 to 2000 years ago...
...James Dickey's best poems have been his longest ("Falling," "May Day Sermon to the Women of Gilmer County") and in The Zodiac (Doubleday, $6), Dickey gives us a 53-page poem which ranks with his most impressive...
...John Mack of Harvard Medical School, is a masterpiece of its type...
...But part of the pleasure comes from his skillful use of unexpected rhymes, such as "Body salty-white, she stares back at the shore, a/Lot like Lot's wife in Sodom and Gomorrah...
...GERARD REEDY Three rocky islands twenty-six miles from Galway city, Catholic homosexual morality, Jesuit history, the influence of St...
...Darwin, Dickinson, Melville, Whitman, Rocky Marciano and Winfield Townley Scott are a few of the historical personages who inhabit these pages...
...Carter has chosen to open his psyche to scrutiny at a time when social scientists have been trying to develop fresh ways of understanding public figures...
...The Blairs expose the coverup of the PT 109 fiasco, the consistently denied Addison's disease, etc...
...is a remarkable story right from the start...
...While Solzhenitsyn disturbs us by his polemical revision of history, Sinyavsky deliberately avoids politics in the journals of his six years in a prison camp to leave us with a sense of wonder at an artist's ability to transmute suffering into self-knowledge...
...Stories, poems and other essays plunge us into a debate on Russia's future that pits the atavistic Solzhenitsyn against the modernist Andrei Sakharov...
...A Prince of Our Disorder (Little, Brown, $15), a psychobiography of T. E. Lawrence by Dr...
...In closing, let me extravagently praise Dr...
...His latest collection, Open Doorways (W...
...Plyushch is the Ukrainian mathematician who jeopardized a brilliant career in cybernetics to protest Soviet repression of fellow dissidents...
...Their theological explanations of what they did and why God let them survive are extremely interesting and diverse...
...As we left his study, Doris Kearns, the author of the new psychobiography of Lyndon Johnson, came in for her interview (later she told us that she had eavesdropped on our conversation, just as if she was a little Catholic girl again waiting to go to Confession...
...Carter spells it all out, his life, his hopes and dreams for the country and himself, in Why Not...
...Only four years ago this Christmas, a group of sixteen Uruguayans were reunited with their families after seventy days of isolation in the wreck of their plane in the Andes...
...Ironically, had a council been called a mere twenty years before Trent, bloodshed, burning and doctrinal discord could have been checked if not eliminated...
...That the history of Christianity can be lucidly surveyed in a single, comprehensive volume of 556 pages is no small accomplishment...
...We may sympathize with the intrepid spirits whose platforms are presented here without sharing the author's optimism that they have a chance to affect policy...
...ROBERT PHILLIPS Since fiction and non-fiction invariably receive more critical attention throughout the year, I'll review several recent volumes of poetry which have given me pleasure and which, at the time of this writing, have not received their share of reviews...
...Besides being a collection of folk tales, many curiously morbid, Synge's work is also about himself, his attempts to experience man and nature and his dissatisfaction when he cannot feel deeply enough...
...Sinyavsky reappears as one of the contributors, virtually all East European exiles, to an anthology from the quarterly Kontinent (Double-day, $3.95...
...soil to free Ireland-the Irish have nevertheless successfully capitalized on their ethnic identity, persuading the entire country to wear green every March 17...
...if proof were needed of their authorship...
...Its coarse, bawdy language is deceptively plain...
...On Being A Christian comes at a time when it is increasingly imperative for us to appreciate what it means to he a Christian today...
...This immensely gifted woman, remembered in these quarters for her Catholic leftist portraits in Divine Disobedience, is one of our language's major stylists and therefore must be read...
...Still, it is apparent that most of the voters, and many of the political commentators, managed to miss Carter's message to America...
...I cannot remember when I had a better time reading poetry...
...It is included because it makes fascinating, enjoyable reading...
...Why else all the press chatter that the candidate was "fuzzy on the issues" or a "flip flopper" on major policies...
...We told him who we were...
...The poem demands several readings...
...He is an elemental force, to be reckoned with even in its failures...
...John Chabot Smith attempts revision-ary rescue in Alger Hiss: The True Story (Holt, Rinehart and Winston, $15...
...Although Taylor pays close attention to style, his distinct and irrefutable contribution is to raise the reader's eyes once again to the larger Christian history which Herbert integrated into his art...
...Go out, buy it, read it, think about it-and then turn on the evening news for the next episodes...
...The two works are David Vital's, The Origins of Zionism (Oxford, $22.00) and Sacvan Bercovitch's, The Puritan Origins of the American Self (Yale, $15.00...
...Richard Nixon-and Lyndon Johnson-taught us the importance of such inquiries...
...C. A. Tripp's The Homosexual Matrix (McGraw Hill, $10), the most remarkable book on sex I have heretofore read...
...Ultimately these works of "light verse," like much of Auden's, lodge in the mind long after one might have expected to forget them...
...Howard Moss's eight previous collections have been intense, intelligent, and lyrical...
...Sumptuous in every detail is Stained Glass by Lawrence Lee and Francis Stephen's (Crown, $35.00...
...Each work in its own way illustrates how among the Jews and the Puritans the primary locus for religious values is not in the religious community, in the synagogue or church, but in the national community, in the people...
...In muscular and mystical lines, Dickey recreates the sailor's lifetime failure in love and creativity, his descent into madness as his imagination ascends to the stars...
...Among the best shorter poems are "Impromptu," "Still Life: Seashore" (with its incredibly gifted last line), "Holding Things Together," and "Plaque for a Brass Bed," whieh I'd quote in full if space permitted...
...All in all it is a thoughtful and intelligent work, and it includes a brief appendix on the role of the saints in Christian piety, an unlikely, but not impossible subject for a Southern Baptist like McClendon...
...The title is significant: the book reveals an openness to experience, to travel, to history...
...But John F. Kennedy's Profiles in Courage was really an abstract biographical exercise-and mostly ghost-written at that...
...For young and old, Alive is a classic tale of moral choice which forces each reader to meditate anew on providence, survival, and the way we rationalize our own decisions...
...Marty's years of astute observation of America's religious trends and developments have yielded six informal but clearly defined clusters around which people attempt to find not only basic group identity but also some kind of power...
...Augustine on George Herbert, and anthropophagy in the Andes-a 1976 miscellany of reading matter if there ever was one...
...But the publication of another work by McClendon (with James M. Smith) this year, Understanding Religious Convictions (Notre Dame, $4.95) drew my interest...
...Why Not...
...Enhanced by a guide for discussion and personal meditation-several questions for each chapter-The Great Mysteries is original, helpful and refreshingly unlike other catechisms...
...The regime's perverse impulse to stifle that sort of dialogue while dangling the lure of improved relations before the West is the intriguing subject of Frederick Barghoorn's Detente and the Democratic Movement in the USSR (Free Press, $12.95...
...Utilizing contemporary letters, diaries, newspapers and magazines, Wakin details the degradation which forced so many to emigrate as well as the rancor and discrimination that greeted them on these democratic shores...
...This is classic Kiing-not the radical firebrand of legend but, in the words of a Notre Dame University theologian, "the last great conservative to shore up the foundations of orthodoxy...
...His The Soul in Paraphrase: George Herbert's Poetics (Mouton, $9.50) deals with, among other things, the Augustinian background...
...Presidentelect Jimmy Carter's autobiographical Why Not The Best...
...John Dean's Blind Ambition (Simon and Schuster, $10), however, never lets up...
...McNeill's work still seems to be the sort of intellectual wedge into history which Clancy highlights in Jesuits of the past...
...McNeill asks not for toleration but for moral and intellectual decision...
...Although Smith fails to bring it off, his splendid book is a sine qua non for Cold War watchers like myself...
...But Rickover asks Carter if he did his best...
...I regret that he chose to include nothing from the ninth, his Imitations, in all probability regarding those works as translations, rather than the Lowellian re-creations which they surely are...
...the "surround" of Plains and growing up middle class and white where the majority are poor or black...
...What kind of people are these candidates anyway...
...A predominant theme is nostalgia or regret -a longing for a time before cement covered everything, for sounds of train whistles moaning in the dark...
...Now a volume must be sinfully good before I'll consider it...
...Nehemiah was a Jewish cupbearer at the court of the Persian king Artaxerxes and he led his people back to Jerusalem, rebuilt the temple, and re-established the state...
...Appleman's language is as tough as many of his subjects which, in "Alive," includes a painful plea for mercy killings of the likes of his Uncle Jimmie, who became "whittled down like a dry stick, but living: the heart, in its maze of tubes, pumps on...
...Plyushch, Solzhenitsyn, Sinyavsky, Jewish and Christian "activists"-these are the exiles who point the way to our spiritual home this season...
...For economy of style combined with a sympathetic understanding of the nearly 2000 years of Christianity's conflicts as well as its glorious achievements, Johnson's History is exceptional...
...Charles Philbrick is a poet who also turns to historical documents to inspire and inform some of his best poetry...
...No self-respecting heterosexual should miss this classic...
...His attempt to take Marxist promises of justice literally caused him to be diagnosed mentally ill...
...Johnson provides a panoramic overview of events which have shaped our twentieth century Western lifestyle far more than we realize...
...Yet I prefer Philbrick's shorter lyrics, many of which are quite fresh and never trivial with the exception of the "sound" poem "Pre-Solstice Catalogue," which reads as if written for just plain fun...
...Jimmy Carter has written it all down...
...The author persuasively proves that Alice Crimmins, a swinging young mother sensationally tried for murdering her two young children in 1965, was really convicted for her fallen-away lifestyle by conservative Catholic police and prosecutors in Queens, New York...
...Well, many of the clues to the next four years are there in Why Not the Best...
...W. Norton, $2.95) demonstrates real growth and an admirable dedication to craft...
...He lifts up the notion of an "ethics of character" and a "theology of character" to stress the place of the individual in community and the formative influence of Christian experience, the Scriptures and views of the atonement...
...Since I am partial to legend-busting, I was much impressed by Joan and Clay Blair's The Search for J.F.K...
...Hammarskjold and King have often been discussed because of their extraordinary witness, but Clarence Jordan, the founder of Koinonia Farm, an experimental missionary community in southern Georgia (not far from Plains) and Charles Ives the famous nineteenth century American composer are striking and unusual choices, a mark of McClendon's sensitivity ta the variety of Christian experience as well as insightful studies in the art of Christian sainthood, but McClendon has a point to make...
...It reads with all the suspense of a good horror story...
...What can be described as a modern-day Summa, Father Kung's imposing (720 pages) and exhuastive examination concentrates on discovering what is permanent in the midst of undeniable upheaval in doctrine, morality and church discipline...
...It is also a pleasure observing Moss flex his muscles in classical forms (there are even three double dactyls...
...Institute of Jesuit Sources, $5.50...
...Having read about The Church and the Homosexual by John McNeill, S.J...
...The last thirty years have seen a rapid growth of first-rate scholarly writing on the Society of Jesus...
...Quoting Josephus's words about Nehemiah over John Winthrop Mather concludes...
...Sheed Andrews and McMeel, $10) in several European papers, I went down to the Paraclete Book Shop and bought a copy on my return home...
...The reason is Moss's acute psychological acumen...
...But the economy of my crowded life disallows the incontinence of my grad school days in Europe where a light class schedule and the wonder of birth control permitted hours of uninterrupted book reading of the most profligate kind...
...In place of the stridency and liberation-rhetoric I had been led to expect, I found an honest, self-effacing voice speaking of a problem-the morality of homosexuality-about which all thinking Christians now must make up their minds...
...Although Clancy writes for Jesuit novices and tional, apostolic, and intellectual his-tional , apostolic, and intellectual history will also fascinate the non-Jesuit...
...You can't go home again" spells an adolescent declaration of independence rather than a dread sentence of banishment...
...The latter is predictable in a bicentennial year, but the former was fortuitous...
...This former Kinsey associate lucidly explains everything you (I) always misunderstood about inversion...
...It is a pale copy of the genuine terror that grips the solitary Soviet artist who refuses to march with the masses toward a materialistic, if egalitarian, future...
...Highlighting the major confrontations, Johnson graphically conjures the heady atmosphere of Renaissance Europe engaged not only in New Learning and reformed Christianity, but also being torn apart as medieval Roman Catholic hierarchies reluctantly yield to a more egalitarian society...
...It should have been the book of the year...
...That their judges turned a deaf ear to appeals drafted by American attorneys is not as shocking as it seems to Taylor when one recalls how easily the Weimar judiciary yielded to the New Order...
...But as I looked back over the books I read in the last year, several came to mind grouped around two themes: biography and national destiny...
...That Moss has a wicked sense of humor goes without saying...
...Assessing the sweeping impact on belief of other world religions-particularly Eastern forms -as well as the challenge of humanism, science, technology and political revolution, Kung points up the continuing vitality and uniqueness of the Christian tradition centered on a passionate, dynamic belief in Jesus...
...Much of the time he was either drunk or spacedout...
...Vital shows that Zionism is not so much an ideology as it is an attempt to reshape the social, economic and political life of the Jews in response to the situation Jews faced in the late nineteenth century...
...the "born-again" experience that so mystified non-evangelical Christians and Jews- and the messianic Baptist Christianity that appears to frighten still other Christians and Jews...
...Some of the poems are quite long...
...Regular readers of Commonweal may be surprised that Mark Taylor, its columnist on contemporary literature, is also a practicing, seventeenth-century specialist...
...Kelly, Jerome, His Life, Writing, and Con-troveries (Harper and Row, $15.00...
...It is a succession of "good parts," and easily the most valuable work on the entire Watergate shelf...
...But to save myself numerous letters from angry or embarrassed book-givers whose relatives hated their presents-and said so immediately-I will just mention a handful of my personal favorites from which readers may freely make their own selections...
...Marsman (the name seems strangely prophetic) lived more in space than on earth...
...As it happens, Carter finished 59 in a class of 820...
...A weird tale revolving around an avenging angel in the person of a prep school football coach, this powerful, ironic, black-humor novel is hilarious-and not a little disturbing...
...He was also self-centered, irascible, pedantic and petty...
...A Swim Off the Rocks (Atheneum, $4.95) reveals Moss to be a master of light verse as well...
...This is a brave and good book which shatters bad myths...
...And Rickover says why not...
...Yet the tone is not soft...
...Sinyavsky's chronicle of internal exile is, finally, a tour de force demonstrating the author's esthetic of fantasy as a more adequate response to the mindless horrors of our age than was the realism still constricting the scope of Solzhenitsyn...
...Francine Gray does not need another testimonial to her autobiographical novel Lovers and Tyrants (Simon and Schuster, $8.95) but I offer it anyway...
...To Paul Johnson's credit, A History of Christianity (Atheneum, $13.95) neither skimps on significant details nor wallows in scholarly fussiness...
...Home-lessness is a feeling generally alien to the members of our restless society whose lives revolve around their automobiles, with rest stops at motels and replenishment at shopping centers...
...During this isolation, as is well known, the sixteen survived by eating the flesh of their dead comrades...
...That professionals in the healing arts are no more immune to the temptation to sell out is part of the same sad story, placed in a Russian setting by The Case of Leonid Plyushch (Westview Press, $10.95...
...Richard M. Nixon's Six Crises, it is true, did contain brief clues to the real Richard Nixon...
...He lived long, traveled all over the ancient world, knew everyone there was to know, fought with friends and enemies, enjoyed the generosity of wealthy Roman ladies, carried on a vast correspondence...
...The words are his own, or so he told Professor Bruce Mazlish and me when we interviewed him in Plains last August-and we know he would never lie to us (besides he also told us he had saved all the pages of the mss...
...Like Sinyavsky now an exile in Paris, Plyushch continues his fight to restore sanity to a world dominated by those whom the lust for power has made truly mad...
...he had already read Kearns's book and Grieder explained that he would be using the psychological typology of Professor James David Barber (the Active Negative, Active Positive etc...
...Zionism gave to the people a sense of national destiny...
...His essay on Russian literature opens with the symbolic figure of Anatoly Kuznetsov sealing manuscripts that have no hope of publication in glass jars, to bury them in his garden like so many time bombs...
...he is also like us, in a suspicion that primitive life has a healing mystery to offer, from which technology and sophistication have cut us off...
...Jerome, a much less attractive figure than Martin Luther King or Charles Ives, is nevertheless a marvelous character for a biography...
...Particularly compelling is Johnson's chapter on the Reformation/Counter-Reformation debacle of popes, protesters, princes, Jesuits and inquisitions- both Roman Catholic and otherwise...
...Through a study of the star's stupefying designs, he (and Dickey) explores life's mysteries...
...A visual feast of color and light embracing the world's best stained glass, this oversized gem is especially appropriate at Christmas...
...Anthony Scaduto's Scapegoat: The Lonesome Death of Bruno Richard Hauptmann (Putnam's, $12.50) performs a similar revamping of history...
...National Book Award-winning author and historian Martin E. Marty's A Nation of Behavers (University of Chicago Press, $8 95) is a characteristically perceptive new map of American religion...
...Marsman moves among the stars, mad "with connecting and joining things that lay their meanings...
Vol. 103 • December 1976 • No. 25
