Critics' Choices for Christmas
Cronin, Thomas E. & Fremantle, Anne & Powers, Thomas & Heidenry, John & True, Michael & Scott, Nathan A. Jr. & Sloyan, Gerard S.
government-run programs of assistance. Overall, too, less predictable than the Humphreys and Mondales. Nevertheless, there will be a report card issued by the voters on the Democrats, even though...
...Though he allows the split infinitive in some instances, Fowler would make us all literate...
...It tells how the Jews turned from agriculture to being a merchant and artisan nation in the "bourgeois revolution" of the 19th century...
...Unlike Heilbroner, however, Brown devotes substantial attention to what might be done, what the options are, what immediate steps should be taken both by America and on a world order...
...There will always be an English literature s o 6 December 1974:238 long as there are people like E. M. Forster to talk about class sensibility and "who will inherit England...
...Few will be satisfied with the Tugwell end product...
...Best autobiography alter Mills...
...His is a top-to-bottom revision, a landmark book...
...Many readers will welcome Wattenberg's analysis as soothing music to the ear, especially coming as it does in a period of national crisis of confidence and recession...
...Best Russian novel after "War and Peace...
...Like Washington he provided sober, sensible symbolic leadership to the new nation...
...None of Bernanos' books is now in print in English except for his dreariest novel, Diary o] a Country Priest...
...If he had chosen, instead, 1974, would Adams' final effort at optimism strike a less painful note...
...Long, beautifully illustrated sections reveal in detail precisely how the simplest sort of tools were used to cut out hidden dovetails, build a Windsor chair, carve a shell design on a drawer front, cut fluting on a pilaster, or reeding on a table leg...
...Commonweal Papers: 5 - I l to 9 copies, $1 each 10 to 49, 75r each 50 or more, 60r each Circulation Dept., Commonweal 232 Madison Ave., New York, N.Y...
...Moreover, I am skeptical that in any one year there are more than a dozen good books published...
...Another--perhaps not so different --way to power is described in Carlos Castaneda's fourth book about his Mexican guru, Don Juan...
...Allen Ginsberg singing Songs o] Innocence and Experience by William Blake (MGM Records, about $6...
...A reporter for the New Haven Record once described her in this way: "Abby Kelley is a Quakeress, about 25 years, distinguished by her effrontery in practically asserting the right of her sex to an equal place with men...
...Another important contribution to understanding and appreciating contemporary poetry is Denise Levertov's The Poet in the World (New Directions, $2.45), occasional essays on poets, poetics, pedagogy, and politics...
...So my first impulse is to think that my wanting to dodge the effort is prompted by something like a principled position...
...Somewhat more hopeful, but equally blunt, is Lester R. Brown's In The Human Interest (Norton $6.95...
...For, despite all the economic woes in the publishing industry, the Great Deluge it sponsors hurtles on at a dizzying rate, and, intimidated by it as we all are, the result is that we simply read too much, far more than we can actually make room for in the life of the mind...
...For he offers little hope and indeed does not spend much time discussing reforms or recommendations...
...Commonweal welcomes letters on subjects treated in its pages...
...Tugwell takes seriously Jefferson's admonition --that every generation would benefit from a political regeneration, or even revolution, of its own...
...In his old age Waugh likely thought Swift's "modest proposal" perfectly reasonable...
...If you really want to learn Spanish quickly, fluently and correctly, and if you have the courage and stamina for intensive and disciplined study, then come for at least a month to CIDOC in Cuernavaca...
...Her presence at an anti-slavery meeting' prompted a man to say: "I had enough of woman control in the nursery...
...In the novel, it is, of course, Graham Greene, who is the last great surviving figure amongst those who followed "the generation of 1914," but his book of '74--Lord Rochester's Monkey(Viking, $15.95)--is not a novel...
...The Journals o/ John Woolman (Citadel, $2.95) is one of the treasures of American literature and much too little Commonweal: 239 known...
...So things get jumbled together, to the extent of our finding any sort of stocktaking at the end of a year to be extraordinarily difficult...
...Flexaer is the author of a previously published prize-winning four-volume study of Washington...
...Henry Adams was crippled all his life by that sense of regret, of having been educated in and for a time which could not survive, or even much inform, the sudden expansion of American commerce and boundaries after the Civil War...
...Kenneth Rexroth's Assays (New Directions, $2.25) is a good introduction to the most iconoclastic and encyclopedic man of letters since anybody...
...Shannon cites specific cases (Bad laws, after all, should be disobeyed...
...Best English prose stylist of all time...
...9. Best living minor poet...
...Brown's book also centers on the question of human survival in an age of overpopulation and scarce resources...
...Power is hardly controlled, and yet the resignation of Nixon seems to promise a check to the growth of Presidential power, at least...
...He contends that the doctrine of self-restraint, only implicit in the Constitution but essential to its smooth funcioning, has been badly shattered by all branches, and furthermore, that the nation has been living with an increasingly outmoded, baroque Constitution...
...Vol...
...now available in paperbound editions, ranks as one of the most sensible interpretations of the modern presidential condition...
...The pessimism he expresses in his second novel, Dog Soldiers (Houghton Mifflin, $8.95), is of the darker Henry Adams 6 December 1974:240 sort...
...Contributions are tax-deductible...
...Unfortunately her Don't Never Forget is out of print, but check it out next Library Week...
...In doing so, he makes a valuable contribution to our understanding of Church-State relations as they apply to the individual conscience...
...And this "becoming" was wrought by overcoming his physical problems-near-blindness--and his "natural appetites"--a Jansenist disgust, a patrician contempt...
...You find the other...
...If the next two years become government by drift, Americans' interest in voting may dwindle further...
...Best re/erence work...
...Waiting for the friend, and for the heroin, are two psychotic, homosexual killers who are working for a corrupt agent of an unnamed federal bureau...
...Collected Poems (Dodd, Mead, $3.95...
...But, in the former field, I don't at the moment think of anything of the vintage of '74 that, off in a corner at a cocktail party with an agnostic stranger, I might be inclined to cite as exemplifying the power of (Christian) theological perspectives to deal arrestingly with contemporary experience in the context of the Western scene of our time...
...Much of the credit for his unmaking must go to Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, who tell how they did it in All the President's Men (Simon & Schuster, $8.95...
...His inventions and contributions to higher education are legend...
...Participation in other CIDOC events $3 weekly...
...Letters o] not more than 250 or 300 words naturally have a better chance o/ being published...
...In this connection, President Ford in mid-November sent word through his Press Secretary that he intends to seek a term as President in his own right...
...So many of the books dealing with power require physical and financial power in their readers just to buy & lift them: 1245 pages in The Power Broker by Robert A. Caro (Knopf, $17.95), 469 pages in Sex and Power in History by Amaury de Riencourt (McKay, $12.95), 769 pages in Aldous Huxley by SybiUe Bedford (Knopf-Harper, $15) Mr...
...ANNE FREMANTLE Power, this year, seems to be where it's at--abuse of power by Presidents, use of power by the CIA to murder other people's presidents, oil-power, food power, population (people) power...
...THOMAS POWERS I don't know which was the worthiest book published in 1974 but the one which gave me more pleasure than any other was Aldren A. Watson's Country Furniture (Crowell, $7.50...
...Yet, as Spender ranges from the time of Emerson and Hawthorne to that of Dwight Macdonald and Norman Mailer, the very animus of the reportage produced by this gifted and fundamentally well-intentioned man makes an interesting case of how things are likely to go between ourselves and our friends in London and Sussex and Oxford and Cambridge--in a time when the manifestly greater vitality of literary, and intellectual life in the States is perhaps bound to provoke bad temper (even in gentle men) on the other side...
...Rosengarten here seeks to make permanent the memories of a tough, proud, magnificently intelligent (though quite illiterate) black peasant of Alabama who died in his eighties in 1973, four years after Mr...
...and of the part the domestication of the camel played in creating a separate Arab people from their northern neighbors...
...Jefferson The President: Second Term (Little, Brown, $14.50) by the noted Jefferson biographer Dumas Malone offers us a splendid companion volume...
...Spender wants to take a very spacious historical perspective on the relations over the past hundred years between English and American literary culture...
...Jews and Arabs...
...5.50), which features whole-earth being Jewish...
...Zhivago (New American Library, $1.50) is noble, theatrical, poetic, more spiritual than Tolstoy...
...For a person who deals in religious myth he is strangely insensitive to the way it operated in the Christian church...
...Many children of tenant farmers and seasonal workers have actually never known what it is like not to be hungry...
...Though "Byzantine women behaved with forceful assurance" their Latin sisters never enjoyed, on the whole woman-power, paramount there, could not withstand the masculine Arab and barbarian (Crusaders) western attacks...
...Economic power surpasses their political authority...
...Still, Wattenberg is a skillful analyst of census data, political polls and any other available data supporting his thesis that Americans are coping, and indeed coping rather well...
...J. P. Donleavy's The Ginger Man (Berkley, $1.25) is not a small masterpiece but a memorable first read...
...Stone, in clean, relentless prose, says, simply, no: it is too late...
...Only for bibliophiles and people who never get tired of Borges...
...Let down your hair...
...II Grace and the Human Condition Vol...
...SISYPHUS BOOKS 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 Critics' Choices for Christmas THOMAS E. CRONIN As we begin to move into our Third Century as a nation we are witnessing, understandably enough, a considerable amount of nostalgia about America and a more meaningful searching reappraisal of how it all began...
...This close acquaintance with the extant Jewish literature of, or going back to, the time of Jesus puts the author ahead of the many scholars who knew their Maccabees, Alexander-cycle, Josephus, and Dead Sea scrolls but who in tracking down talmudic citations can scarcely be described as in control of the material...
...Brigid Brophy has taken over this British institution from G.B.S...
...The verse language is simple and direct, especially effective in recounting Beecher's experiences as a steelworker Commonweal: 245 Segundo's complete set is ready...
...it is a lucidly written new appraisal and doubtless the best single volume available on this central political architect...
...MersCommonweal for Christmas WITH SUCH FACTORS as a new Democratic Congress, inflation and unemployment, the food and energy crisis and the threat of war in the Middle East, the analyses of Commonweal make it an especially welcome gift this Christmas and for the year ahead...
...It is a simple fact that furniture used to be made a good deal better than it is now, which has always puzzled me...
...Best short story...
...It lays out the linguistic evidence and the reader is free to choose...
...For Tugwell is a visionary, a dreamer of dreams, a firm believer in national planning...
...Adams felt he had been educated for a world with intellectual and spiritual moorings...
...I The Community Called Church Vol...
...Under the federally sponsored Food Stamp Plan, $1 buys as much as $40 or more in Food Stamps...
...While some of his reforms may appear lame or ill-advised, Novak is at his best when dissecting America's self-understanding and the rich symbolic role the president plays...
...Though somewhat inaccurate, there is nothing to compare with the antique cadences of John Florio's englishing of Montaigne (Essays, 3 vols...
...Nor are his poems merely chauvinist or campy...
...The book is short, and sometimes difficult, but essential reading...
...She shows, in her superb biography, how Aldous moved from being a great writer to becoming a saint...
...In his predictions about the future he is often eerily right, and even when he is wrong, he is eerily wrong, as when he says, struggling free of his pessimism for a moment at the end, that perhaps things will not turn out so badly, that perhaps the world in 1938, the centenary of his birth, will be a world in which power is controlled and human values ascendant...
...It's a pretty serious business and I hope the absence of Leo Rosten's The .toys o/ Yiddish (Pocket Books, $1.95) reflects only a decision to omit a section on Yiddish language and literature...
...The world has turned too far...
...Unlike Washington, however, he was willing to forge political coalitions, aggressively to formulate public policy and personally to bridge the gap between executive and legislative branches...
...Right here in the U.S.A...
...The feeling it inspires is not easy nostalgia, but genuine regret...
...Here power is freedom from the slavery imposed on us by our fellowmen...
...It has already occasioned debates across the nation...
...The book is at its best when tracing the awesome growth of the president's foreign policy powers in the nuclear era...
...Several of this year's more significant books deal with the nature of leadership now and when our country began, and with the problems that yet await us...
...A long introductory essay is especially helpful...
...One is sufficiently put on notice, I should think, by a writer who is able to distinguish with absolute clarity between the psychology of religion and its history...
...1. Best English literary polemicist...
...The Hungarian-born Oxford professor presents himself as an historian of the Jesus of the gospels and has certain important tools for his historian's craft...
...It recounts a trip by motorcycle that father and his elevenyear-old son undertake westward, from Minneapolis to Santa Rosa and the Bay...
...Bail him out by buying Buckshee (Pym-Randall, about $5), where you can look up "L'Oubli--, Temps de S~.cheresse...
...So, in its invasion of the great American hinterlands, it belongs to the mode of pastoral than which--from the time of Kerouac to the time of Brautigan-none would seem to be more centrally fixed in our recent fiction...
...Catholic Library World Hardbound $7.95 Paperback $4.95 Faith for Today by Edmond Barbotin "A prescription for living an authentically Christian life...
...This is the fifth and penultimate volume in what will clearly be the classic Jefferson series...
...Power over "what cometh out of a man"--words, actions----can be wholly good...
...Laurie Lee is a throwback to England's nature poets and if you ever visit the Cotswolds you will see why...
...The first is Eugene Genovese's Roll Jordan, Roll (Pantheon, $17.50), which is surely the most trenchant attempt any American historian has made at rendering the ante-bellum South from the perspective of the slaves...
...479, Cuernavaca, Mexico...
...Fowler's Modern English Usage (Oxford University Press, $4.95...
...And, given his familiarity with the American situation (through numerous long periods of residence here) and the great breadth of his learning, it might have been expected that his book would b c a kind of definitive statement...
...This is no secret, of course, and books about antique furniture, which appear in the pre-Christmas season with the predictability of a fact of nature, tend to be breathless with admiration for early American craftsmanship...
...Best bathroom book of all time...
...Modern Church teaching has begun to challenge that tradition, however, with assistance from John XXIII, Jacques Maritain, John Courtney Murray, and others...
...Nevertheless, there will be a report card issued by the voters on the Democrats, even though they speak with many voices...
...Commonweal 237 Brown is a leading authority on the world food shortage problem, and his book helps make intelligible this often opaque international crisis...
...A most informative recent book is The lewish Catalogue...
...From hearsay, bookstore browsing, and the few reviews I have read the new novel I most want to read is Anthony Burgess' Napoleon Symphony (Knopf, $7.95...
...For, in the life of the strange ddbauch~, John Wilmot, second Earl of Rochester, who is one of the most fascinating poets of the English Restoration, this great "poet" in our own time of the Fall and the mystery of sin found while still a young man a subject pat to his purpose...
...Though Montaigne and Browne were more exalted, William Hazlitt is a better friend...
...Still I do recommend all of the books below and I think they compare favorably with any bestseller list ever compiled...
...r voL) A Theology for Artisans of a New Humanity by Juan Luis Segundo, S.J...
...The book is not as free of dogmatism as its author supposes...
...For the most part, in other words, they have chosen me...
...But 1 suspect that my discomfiture at being asked to look back over the past year's reading may also be felt by many others, and not necessarily because of their misgivings about Matthew Arnold's highly judicial" program...
...in Howards End (Vintage, $1.95), whose closest rivals are all the other books he wrote...
...Where else to read in snatches about the original of Tolstoy's Natasha, Alexander Woollcott, Thackeray's letters, or Baudelaire than in Edmund Wilson's Classics and Commercials and Shores o/ Light (Noonday, $2.65 and $2.95...
...By doing so, he is able to hear what is happening in contemporary poetry in a way that few critics do and to recognize its full originality and beauty...
...or a True Picture of the American Church and Clergy (1843...
...James Thomas Flexner's onevolume biography of George Washington, Washington--The Indispensable Man (Little, Brown, $12.50), is a stunning performance...
...I find myself so untouched by Matthew Arnold's passion for ranking books and authors (in his case, in accordance with some ineffable he called "high seriousness") that I feel even a little defeated by the invitation to sift and weigh only the material I've paid attention to over past year...
...6 December 1974:244 His suggestion, however, that in the opposition of priestly elements to Jesus we may have a case of the "insolent man in a complicated case" (suggested by Leviticus 17:8-13) is not without merit...
...The President, well-acquainted with the wily ways of these chieftains of which he was once one, was probably obliged to say something along these lines in terms of his political future, even if he hadn't quite made up his mind...
...It is, in truth, about as good as a book can be...
...P. Dutton, $4.95) illustrated by the author, proves that some (blessed) people can "become as little children," and enchant both grownups and children too...
...So my choices are all about power, used, misused, or abused...
...Richard Gilman's book, however, is one for which I have nothing but praise...
...At first there is an exhilarating high which makes things seem reassuringly simple...
...and he lays out the reasoning and the logic for a new constitution...
...In the first place I am not up on literature in any special field and on the whole I am only a hundredth as well read as I ought to be...
...Best novel in last ten years...
...And indeed upon completion many a reader will want to repair to the larger fourvolume version...
...Beware of disappointment...
...Dutton, $3.50 each...
...But, in the customary work of fictionists over the past year, I've found nothing especially captivating--apart from a wonderfully engaging novel that appeared several months ago, Robert M. Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values (Morrow, $6.95...
...Commonweal: 241 a civilized hospitality toward the literary life...
...However, the other things of his I have read I find gross...
...In many respects 6 December 1974:236 Jefferson was the father of our political party systesn...
...Stone feels that going to war in Vietnam was, for the United States, more than a little like doing heroin...
...Best minor French novelist...
...If it does not contain all one needs to know on earth, it does give a pretty good estimation of what is out there in the dark...
...10016 ACADF~I|C DEAN Sm~ll Urb~:t Llbera4 A r t s College CANDIDATE SHOULD BE ekn e s t a b l i s h e d u n i v e r s i t y - l e v e l teacher and s c h o l a r , w i t h e x p e r i e n e e In college a d m i n i s t r a t i o n ~ F~rned doctorate p r e f e r r e d . CaAholie, C o - e d u e a t | o n a l I n s t i t u t i o n . Appointment e f f e c t i v e J u l y 1, 1975...
...and, given the charm of the narrative and the extraordinary cunning with which Mr...
...To these ends, Ford will probably be successful...
...This new effort is much more than a condensation...
...It is one thing to strum unrealistically on a people's aspirations...
...After awhile the exhilaration wears off and the complications set in but by that time it is too late...
...JOHN HEIDENRY After some reflection I have found it impossible to come up with recommendations for six or seven books published during the year...
...2.45) is the kind of book one should have read years ago---nineteen, to be exact, when it first appeared...
...I rather doubt it...
...Schlesinger's volume is both history and advocacy...
...They felt, in a word, helpless against power...
...When Houghton Mifflin published a new edition this year, with an introduction and notes by Ernest Samuels ($10), I picked it up (at least partly because it is printed and bound so well, other arts which are in decline) and discovered that Adams knew a great many things which lesser writers have struggled for words to say not half so well ever since...
...As his close friend Richard Scammon warns, Wattenberg's style is "happily pugnacious...
...His charting of the movement of modern theatre from Biichner to Strindberg and from Ibsen to Chekhov and on to A great book teenagers an young adults 000 Commonweal: 243 Pirandello, Brecht, Beckett and Peter Handke makes the richest account of his subject in recent criticism...
...Ernest Jones' Freud is a close second...
...But what intrudes itself more forcefully with each major Presidential action--or inaction--is whether Gerald R. Ford of Grand Rapids isn't over his head...
...451 (third) ecumenical Council at Chalcedon which ruled that "the Virgin Mary was indeed Theotokos the mother of God" (not just of Christ's human body...
...3. Best novel about England...
...Best biography after Boswell...
...Fortunately the editors of Commonweal don't ask you to name books anyone else might enjoy but only what you've been reading lately and liked...
...This past year has certainly ushered in a reawakened appreciation of our nation's precarious position in an imminent age of scarcity...
...Best curiosity book...
...Best poem o~ the 20th century a/ter Yeats and Eliot...
...But it merits scrutiny, if only as a marked contrast to the Heilbroner and Brown books to which we shall now turn...
...fccling this just now as acutely as I do, about all I can produce for Commonwears Christmas List are a few notations on books by which-within recent weeks--I've been impressed...
...Margaret Hope Bacon's 1 Speak for My Slave Sister (Crowell, $5.50), written primarily for young readers, is the first full-length study of Abby Kelley Foster (1811-1887), the great Massachusetts abolitionist, pacifist, and feminist...
...Reconsiderations of national leadership are also found in three provocative and original examinations of the presidency and constitutional requirements...
...One thinks of his choice of a year, and is not hopeful...
...Fresh style, inordinate range of topics, untoppable wit, improbable enthusiasms...
...Missing is Best anthology o[ poetry...
...13.50) Bowker translates and edits 183 selections, many of them brief, from Josephus and the talmuds...
...He himself views it as but the point of departure for a nation that would live up to George Washington's 1787 urging: "Let us raise a standard to which the wise and the honest can repair...
...It is a moving story: at the end Huxley's house and manuscripts were burned, and he died of a painful cancer...
...That most underpraised of great writers, Ford Madox Ford, is in danger of becoming a cult writer...
...and Morton, pushing the oil companies' fortunes...
...This total package comes to about $100 plus a few library fines...
...Of the fifty or so new books I bought or received this year only one was outstanding: A. O. J. Cockshut's Truth to Life: The Art o f Biography in the Nineteenth Century (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, $7.50), which is not s o dull as it sounds...
...One can learn that Medina was a Jewish priestly town well before Muhammads flourished there and that the earliest stratum of the Koran was patterned on the Torah only, while a knowledge of Jesus and the Baptist (derived from apocryphal JewishChristian sources) came later...
...But spiritually, all was well...
...Yet, nonetheless, it runs such large risks in its breedings on the American soulscapc as not to make altogether incredible George Steiner's comparison of it with Moby Dick...
...1V The Sacraments Today Vol...
...it is a revelation...
...There is no prospect of increasing energy supplies for at least I0 years, yet except for WIN buttons and other exhortatory declamations, there is no effort to insist on a policy of fairshares conservation--i.e., rationing...
...At the heart of All the President's Men is a mystery...
...No one who begins reading it will want to set it aside...
...For complete catalog, write CIDOC, Apdo...
...Robert Heilbroner's An Inquiry Into Human Prospect (Norton, $5.95 cloth, $2.25 paper) is a brilliant, penetrating and devastating assessment of where we are, and where we are going...
...Second half is prolix and the reader should fortify himself with a little Guinness...
...Opening scene is about the baptism of a baby German shepherd...
...New Book Review Hardbound $6.95 Paperback $3.95 At your local bookstore ORBIS BOOKS MARYKNOLL, NY 10545 in the Thirties and as a Civil Rights activist in the Fifties...
...Random House has just announced the first posthumous volume--Thank You, Fog ( $ 5 ) - - o f its great poet, and since, in these years after Stevens and Eliot, we've needed to think of Auden as the master in our time of the English tongue (most especially in the work from Nones on), one awaits his last statements with especial interest, but Fve not yet had a chance to see this book...
...The story he tells is simple: a failed writer in Vietnam buys two kilos of heroin and gives it to a friend in the Navy to deliver to his wife in California...
...These are chiefly an acquaintance with the full range of talmudic materials and the manuscripts from the Judaean desert...
...Best dead minor poet...
...and his account of how in the life of this seventeenth-century libertine, God helplessly fumbled at the latch is absolutely fascinating...
...but Oscar Wilde's The Selfish Giant...
...Still, perhaps most important was his contribution to statecraft and the art of presidential leadership during a period of political upheaval and testing...
...Then there is one other book I would speak of which also rehearses American Negro experience in a very great way - - a book called All God's Dangers: The Li/e o/Nate Shaw (Knopf, $10), which was put together with tape recorder by Theodore Rosengarten...
...Nor is it really a book of the present year, for it was actually written over forty years ago...
...He may shame you into pacifism, vegetarianism, and not paying your taxes...
...Bacon had no need to write Shakespeare's plays...
...Pirsig makes his novel talk (in the way its sub-title promises) about this country's present condition and prospects, it is a little surprising that the book has gotten so mixed a press, being sometimes given large praise and sometimes 6 December 1974:242 treated with a strangely bilious kind of carping...
...Despite its title this is not a book about Nixon's agents but an account of how Woodward and Bernstein first suspected, and then proved, that there was more to the break-in at the Democratic National Committee headquarters than the "third-rate burglary" described by Ronald Ziegler...
...In the process he persuades us of the compelling need for radical departures in national policy...
...Michael Novak's Choosing Our King (Macmillan, $7.95) is one of the freshest and most insightful books on the presidency to be written in a long while...
...In Jesus and the Pharisees (Cambridge, 1973...
...Somehow, the government, both executive and legislative branches, seems demoralized as well as ineffective...
...My nomination for the year's most neglected book (which, .to my good fortune, found its way to my door) is Thomas A. Shannon's Render Unto God: A Theology o/ Selective Obedience (Paulist Press, $4.50), with a Foreword by Gordon Zahn...
...6.95) gave me pleasure and sent the adrenalin coursing through my system...
...A Do-It-Yoursell Kit compiled and edited by Richard Siegel and Michael and Sharon Strassfeld (Jewish Publication Society of America, 1973...
...4. Best novel about America...
...Nor am I particularly moved to commend any work of poetry or prose fiction of the past few months...
...it is another for political authority to play chopsticks when a concerto is called for...
...The Imperial Presidency (Houghton Mifflin, $10), by Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr...
...One must find a way of living in time without being completely swallowed up in time," he wrote...
...Read As 1 Walked Out One Midsummer Morning (Atheneum, $5.95...
...7. Best prose translation into English...
...Try Selected Essays (Random House, $10.00...
...In his essays you will find language put to every u s e for which it is made...
...with few exaggerations or lapses...
...And it surely is in part, for I am persuaded, however much a sort of literary barometrics may be the specialty of the kind of commentator the English speak of as a Bookman, that "bookmanship" dose not represent anything resembling Your gift can go a long way this Christmas...
...Our Sunday Visitor Hardbound $3.95 Letters from the Desert ~/ Carlo Carretto "This book is a gem--from the sands of the Sahara...
...People who like The Little Prince will prefer Dostoevski...
...Malone's book is sometimes dry, but always detailed in scholarship and rich in interpretation...
...He thus foresees an emerging repression by governments everywhere...
...of the days when Arabic was the chief language of most Jews except for synagogue service...
...Modern woodworking tools--routers, joiners, radial arm saws, lathes and the l i k e - - are marvels of exactitude...
...Three notable new books that deserve a close reading in this light come to different conclusions but each in its own peculiar way is likely to shape national debates as we approach the 1976 elections...
...On the other hand federal office-holders operating as a national coalition of conscience with moral baggage and open-faced idealism would reverse this downward trend...
...He had...
...Using "after" here in the sense of "besides those of...
...and it ought not to go unread...
...But now, though a work of his youth, it strikes us indeed as "vintage" Greene...
...Right now...
...The relationship between politics and poetry is the subject also of James F Mersmann's Out o[ the Vietnam Vortex: A Study o[ Poets and Poetry Against the War (Kansas, $10.50...
...All of us look forward to reading something...
...I am being careless of centuries here but I doubt if even Swift wrote anything better than Evelyn Waugh's A Hand/ul o] Dust (Dell, $1.45...
...A new standard in readability, comprehensiveness, and artistry has been set by Richard Ellmann in his life of James Joyce (Oxford University Press, $4.95...
...She speaks with simplicity, authority, imagination, in the idiom of her time...
...According to Professor Shannon, the role of the citizen, as defined by Catholic tradition, has been largely passive, emphasizing the prior right of authority--sacred or secular...
...Craftsmanship is not (or at least not only,) the result of primitive republican virtue but a matter of technique, materials and tools...
...While he hopes to illumine the passages in the gospels that refer to the pharisees, much else comes to light...
...Best children's ]airy tale...
...What one is looking for is not just information or a pleasing style but in addition a resourcefulness as much in the breadth and depth of the writer's humanity as in learning...
...Freedom is expensive, but the price is not impossible," Don Juan says...
...And thus...
...lieve, a great feat of research and historical imagination that Professor Genovese has performed--and his book has been for me deeply moving...
...On the back roads of Mississippi, Alabama and other parts of the deep South, there are still many thousands of families facing slow starvation...
...And yet, and yet . . . Amaury de Riencourt traces male-female history from the male victory over the early mother-goddess to the synthesis produced by Christianity which "by making allies of women, without giving them any clerical authority, ensured its temporal triumph.'" He rightly emphasizes the tremendous importance of the A.D...
...In comparison Mencken looks like a rube (which he was) and Trilling becomes rather overlong in making his point...
...In an odd way people had been disheartened and disillusioned to the point of political coma...
...My favorite poem, however, is "Engagement at the Salt Fork," written during the San Francisco to Moscow Peace Walk in 1961, which conveys a note of confidence and warning in regard to the American experience at mid-century: "I could not sleep for pride/ in these my people, still square-shooters, still/ready to tote fair with the other man./ I could not sleep for sadness too, to think/how these great hearts are gulled with lies...
...Americans of the 18th and early 19th centuries had something, some feel for life as well as for things, which is gone and will not return...
...Nothing, in other words, of the past year comes to mind as representing the toughness and cogency of vintage Niebuhr and Tillich and Bultmann...
...His autobiography, The Education o[ Henry Adams, is one of those books everyone is supposed to read in college, but I never did...
...He catalogues the trends superbly and his book has already become must reading for participants at world food and population conferences this past year...
...Professional commitments require me to "keep up" with currenl publications in the world of theology and in that of literature and criticism (and the various ancillary disciplines...
...bringing a package from Blackwelrs rather than the clerk at Brentano's...
...5. Best English satire...
...And to end on a less preachy note: Marchette Chute's Rhymes about us (E...
...Their Contacts through the Ages by S. D. Goitein (7th printing...
...Terms: something rather more than a journeyman reviewer and less than an Oxford scholar...
...Ill Our Idea of God Vol...
...It includes general discussions of poetry from World Wars I and II, and from the ongoing Indochina war, as well as informed sensitive readings of poems by Allen Ginsberg, Denise Levertov, Robert Bly, and Robert Duncan...
...Thus to fulfill my duty and serve my conscience I have come up with a different sort of list, to which some readers with cause may object...
...The latter documents Dick Tuck's visual gags in full but Tuck's Mexical laundry truck can't top Rosten when he starts to tell about the nextdooriker who . . . MICHAEL TRUE The five most memorable books of the past year, for me, all appeared somewhat unexpectedly, through people I met or through direct confrontation...
...I thoroughly enjoyed Abigail McCarthy's Private Faces, Public Places (Curtis, $1.50) and Frank Mankiewicz's Per/ectly Clear: Nixon ~tom Whittier to Watergate (Popular Library, $1.75...
...Vividly written, salient for timely reappraisals, it also is balanced in its view of what can be done...
...and as husband and father...
...There are many historical indications in these pages as to why Jews and Arabs are so similar in some areas, so dissimilar in others...
...For anyone interested in furniture or in woodworking, Country Furniture is more than just useful...
...The barons of the Congressional committees were beginning to refer to the President as if he were a "lame-duck," when he was only 100 days in office...
...My edition is out of print but probably contained in The Happy Prince & Other Stories (Dutton, $4.50...
...The need, Tugwell says, is to begin anew...
...Now I am a man, I will not submit to it . . . . I will not sit in a meeting where women are allowed to speak and vote...
...In addition, the President, a conservative, probably hopes that such an announcement will accomplish two other purposes: 1 )--bolster the sagging support for Nelson Rockefeller, his beleaguered Vice Presidential nominee, whom Republican conservatives don't like...
...I I GERARD S. SLOYAN "One man's Mede is another man's Persian," George S. Kaufman is supposed to have said...
...8. Best unread recent novel...
...Best book about Dublin after "Ulysses...
...Tales o[ Power (Simon & Schuster, $7.95...
...Rexford G. Tugwell's mammoth The Emerging Constitution (Harper's, $20) is the culmination of ten years of research and fifty years of reflection and experience from a zealous believer in reform and reconstitution...
...15...
...Rosengarten's book is nothing other than Nate's story of his own life in his own words--and it is destined, I predict, to be one of the great testaments of American literature ("Oh, there's so much I remember till I just can't breathe it...
...He offers a trenchant and persuasively bitter stries of trend analyses that will leave just about every reader depressed and perhaps annoyed as well...
...The power unleashed there, almost absently, and certainly indifferently, was one of those things, Stone feels, which you can't take back...
...At this rate, the President will next restore Calvin Coolidge's after-lunch nap to the White House schedule...
...Edmund Wilson and nearly everyone else thought him a leftover from the Nineties...
...Rosengarten had begun to record his account of how, through nearly nine decades, he managed to survive and to prevail---as a tenant farmer, as yeoman, as an organizer of the Alabama Sharecroppers Union in the early 'thirties...
...Pasternak's Dr...
...God help the liars when my people wake...
...2)--make it more difficult for Ronald Reagan to establish a staging area for his efforts to become the 1976 Republican Presidential nominee...
...Order Now, Remit i n January m m m l l CHRISTMAS ORDER FORM n P l e a s e send t h e s e f r i e n d s II a g i f t subseription a t t h e Name s p e e i a i Christmas Rates: II 1 Subseription, $ 1 5 ; eaeh Street mm nmw l I I n n I I additional, $12 (Add 82 for postage outside U.S...
...Apart from the fact that I have never read a short story I have liked completely, Conrad's two long short stories "Prince Roman" and "The Duel" seem to me the best...
...Still, his work is provocative in the best sense...
...V Evolution and Guilt "This is a work of solid worth'~ The Cord Complete set of 5 volumes Hardbou mt $39.75 ($34.75 before I975) Paperback $24.75 ($19.75 before 1975) A Theology of Liberation by Gustavo Gutierrez "This is one of the most acute and most readable theological essays of today on the meaning and mission of the Church...
...Even Woodward and Bernstein seem to have proceeded only one step at a time, tracing the flow of Nixon campaign money, for example, without allowing themselves to think, for longer than you would suspect, that the trail would lead where it did...
...Like Detroit cars the recent ones are too big and have too many optional extras...
...and Canada) I Name l Street City, State, Zip MY NAME IS New [] 1 Renewal [] | I II l Street 1 City, Stale, Zip I] New [] Renewal [] City, Stale, Zip 12-6-74 1 | COMMONWEAL | l 232 Madison Ave., New York, N. Y. 10016 I mm l mm mm m n mm mm mn m mn n mm mm un mm l mm n 6 December 1974:246 mann generally accepts Galway Kinnell's suggestion that "all poetry is rightly political just as all poetry is religious because it attempts to break through, rend, or transcend the barriers and veils that separate people from one another and from the divine...
...and many of the categories themselves are more fanciful than real...
...Of course, I would not defend any of these selections to my last breath...
...The NAACP Emergency Relief Fund is now in its fourth year of collecting money to buy Food Stamps for the neediest of these families...
...Essays (Oxford University Press, $2.25...
...Heilbroner is an economic historian by profession, and his book takes the form of an extended essay...
...And his way of talking about how the modern playwright has undertaken to render and redeem the human reality strikes deeply into the whole spiritual situation of the age...
...Back in June, 1972, at the time of the break-in, no one I knew really believed that the men captured inside the Watergate Hotel had been working on their own, or much doubted who .they must have been working for, and yet there was a general conviction that those actually responsible would get away with it...
...There is no Brentano's near 23rd and Sansom in Philadelphia and I've never felt adult enough for the selection on nearby Market St...
...Ben J. Wattenberg's The Real America (Doubleday, $10) presents a very upbeat progress report of how well America is doing--~ompared to where we have come from...
...Of course, there is more to it than that...
...Best novella ever written: Ronald Firbank's Concerning the Eccentricities o] Cardinal Pirelli is among the Five Novels published by New Directions ($7.50...
...and it is not improbable he may misjudge the value of a third of them...
...Kissinger, wherever he pitches camp...
...Jobs which used to take hours, like cutting dovetails or turning chair legs, can now be done much more quickly, with a lower tolerance for error, and yet furniture made today is heavier, uglier and less carefully put together than it used to be...
...If you have a second bathroom try Eric Bentley's The Importance o] Scrutiny (New York University Press, $2.25...
...The seven years between Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita (Berkley, $1.25) and Pale Fire (Berkley, $1.25) comprise the golden age of American literature...
...The great strength of Watson's book is that it both shows and tells you how early furniture makers went about their work...
...But, unfortunately, his writing is so pervasively marked by the predictable (though in his case surprising) malice of an English don toward American culture that the performance as a whole proves to be only another instance of what (as the title itself suggests) the trans-Atlantic venture has so often been for literary Englishmen--namely, an affair of "love-hate relations...
...Best surprise /or self and children...
...Herblock, the cartoonist, is wearing a NIM button these days--"WIN" upside down and reversed--signifying, he says, "Nothing In Mind...
...One comes away feeling agnostic about the relation of the pharisees of the gospels and the prushim of the rabbinic literature but also with some sense of having identified the movement of the hakamim (wise men) which sought holiness for the common man through the Law...
...they show considerable mastery over form and only Hopkins (still unpublished) had gone farther in technical experimentation...
...even to the foundations of the Hebrew University and Cairo University in 1925...
...This marvelous pilgrimage "from the unreal to the real" (as the Upanishads put it) teaches us that the only way to escape the corruption of power is to abandon it...
...resume by February 1, 1975 t o : Search Comm i t t e e C h a i r p e r s o n , EDGECLIFF COLLEGE, Cincinnati, Ohio sseoe...
...2. Best American literary polemicist...
...and if that is so, it is unlikely anyone but a daily book reviewer will know about them...
...Gabriel Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years o[ Solitude (Avon, $1.50) is also the best novel in the Spanish language since Don Quixote, in case there are any doubts...
...Perhaps their success ought to allow us to hope that the spell of power has been broken...
...He understood that there was too much power loose in the country, too uncontrolled, like a cannon which has broken free of its moorings and is careening about the deck of a ship, smashing wildly everything in its path...
...Nothing in the thought or social life of the 18th century, when the nation was born and its institutions established, could prepare men for the epidemic of power released by the 19th, when every aspect of commercial life seemed to shoot suddenly forward...
...Rupert Brooke had no genius but he was almost as pure a soul as Keats...
...No, it is not The Little Prince, which is a book for people who do not read books...
...In the field of criticism, the two books I've been most impressed by in recent months are Stephen Spender's LoveHate Relations (Random House, $8.95) and Richard Gilman's The Making o/ Modern Drama (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $8.95 )--though, whereas the latter is a splendid success, the former (despite its considerable interest) must be adjudged very largely a failure...
...His readers will surely be provoked, stimulated and probably angered...
...Reading de Riencourt, one is inclined to agree with the late W. H. Auden, that woman-power is on the whole less nefarious than the phallic toy swords, spears, guns, nuclear bombs with which men punctuate their power...
...Again through his Press Secretary, the President released what was described as a "notable number of achievements . . . a tone of stability and continuity in foreign policy, openness and candor in domestic affairs, cooperation and reasonableness in (his) dealings with Congress...
...Vermes first examines the contemporary Galilean setting and certain Elijah-like charismatic figures in whose lineage he thinks Jesus is to be placed...
...and, since the English censors couldn't then be expected to approve it, the manuscript was relegated to a desk drawer from which in due course it was removed to the library of the University of Texas, where it remained until he finally undertook a few months ago to arrange for its release...
...His pessimism is dark indeed...
...Moreover, having been a leader of a minority party, his statement was a natural defensive maneuver...
...As troubadour poet of protest and prophecy, he has helped restore poetry to its proper place in the public forum over the past fifty years, proving by word and example, as he says in the prefatory note: "Poetry can save your life...
...Geza Vermes' Jesus the Jew...
...A fellow academic in England, John Bowker of the University of Cambridge, has done something more modest than Vermes and perhaps for that reason more satisfying...
...Thus your $10--an amount that buys "just another Christmas gift" for more fortunate kids--can mean $400 worth of urgently needed nourishment to help a family survive, To contribute to this fund, please send as little or as much as you can to the NAACP Emergency Relief Fund...
...One-time,registration fee $100...
...Each entry is a miniature essay written with great charm and skill...
...A Historian's Reading oJ the Gospels (Macmillan, 1974...
...Abby Foster's struggle for freedom for herself and others is one of the more remarkable stories in American history, waged with the help of her husband, Stephen S. Foster, author of that shocking antislavery best-seller, The Brotherhood of Th&ves...
...Homiletic and Pastoral Review Hardbound $4.95 ($3.95 before 1975) Pilgrimage to Now/Here by Frederick Franck "An open-ended encounter with Zen masters . . . with exquisite ink drawings accompanying the text...
...Henry Adams hoped, although his reason denied, that things might still change...
...Isaac D'Israeli in Curiosities o/ Literature (Dover, $1.75) tells you why...
...Meeting with leaders of countries, the "economic summit" (in fact a piece of window-dressing), and a continuation of Secretary Kissinger's peripatetic foreign-policy missions were identified as specific achievements...
...Weekly tuition $50...
...He is concerned, as few before him have been, with the liturgy of leadership, suggesting that the election of a president is an almost religious task, and that like it or not the human heart ceaselessly yearns for royalty of a kind, especially one that will liberate the best in us...
...This is must reading for anyone who wants to partake of the national debates about curbing presidential autocracy...
...Sybille Bedford, who knew Aldous Huxley for more than forty years, proves how wrong Lord Acton can be...
...No doubt in part by reason of my own ancestral heritage, two other books of recent months have been for me at least deeply affecting...
...Add to this such enlightening reviewers as Margaret Wimsatt, Quincy Howe, Colin Westerbeck, Jr., Sallie TeSelle, J. Anthony Lukas, Gerald Weales, Daniel Aaron, Arthur A. Cohen and Richard McBrien --and you have a combination hard to beat...
...Among several exceptional collections of poetry, John Beecher, Collected Poems, 1924-1974 (Macmillan, $8.95) occuplies a special place...
...Heilbroner predicts that the circle of overpopulation and food shortages can no longer be solved by industrial development, because of the scarcity of material resources and the effects of energy consumption on the environment...
...The rest of the book is .a splendidly suspenseful contest for possession of the heroin...
...the world he found had none and he sensed a dark potentiality in the wild acceleration of history...
...Moreover, members of the Ford Cabinet seem to be in business for thernselves--Butz, the Scrooge, at Rome...
...One thing leads to another, the unthinkable becomes commonplace, and the only defense against the horror is not to care...
...The former can be found in the Portable Conrad (Vintage, $1.95...
...Though his politics were hateful the author of Joy and Under the Sun o[ Satan was perhaps also the best Catholic novelist ever...
...How right Lord Acton was: "All power corrupts," etc...
...Your gift will also provide the insights of such thoughtful Commonweal contributors as: Eugene McCarthy, Saul Maloff, Frank Getlein, Sisyphus, Abigail McCarthy, Mark Taylor and Michael Novak...
...Anyone interested in belles-lettres will like it...
...After living with it for almost a year, I am more convinced than ever that Levertov's collection of criticism will take its place beside Eliot's The Sacred Wood and Pound's ABC o/Reading as an indispensable guide to modern aesthetics...
...Since what the Gospel says about life, is iust as true about power...
...Mine may prove a dull catalogue, especially since the neighborhood bookseller tends to be the mailman (person-person...
...Dog Soldiers is the best book so far about the spiritually corrupting effect on the United States of the war it fought in Vietnam...
...Did you know Spinoza used to relax by setting spiders to fight each other...
...Through examining Washington and his struggles during the revolution, his inspiration at the Constitutional Convention and his trials as President, the reader is clearly reminded of the long ordeal America experienced before nationhood was truly achieved...
...Their record, or the perception of their legislative record, will help determine which political party holds the White House in 1977...
...NATHAN SCOTT, JR...
...Caro's story of Robert Moses is prefaced by a quote from Sophocles "One must wait until evening to see how splendid the day has been" and indeed it is a classic Greek story of a great idealist, a brilliant, beautiful human being, so changed by power that the man who, at Yale, wished to dedicate his life to improving the condition of the working classes, dispossessed of their homes 250,000 poor to make his highways and close to half a million to build Lincoln Center, the United Nations, and various urban renewal projects...
...Two great novels, both sui generis, not only share honors but take them in another category as well: Best American satire...
...We'll see about that...
...and provides theological background for a doctrine of selective obedience, particularly within the context of American society...
...Novak assesses the role of the American president in the context of civil religious values and treats the "king's" subjects as much as the king...
...Schocken Paperback, 1974...
...Two of this year's more outstanding books are biographies of two men who helped found and share this first new nation...
...6. Best essayist...
...The trouble with such effusions is that they are vague...
...Their diets are so inadequate that hunger and malnutrition have become part of their lives...
...The final strain came with the unpremeditated upsurge of Zionism and Arab nationalism on almost identical schedules early in this century...
...Robert Stone would not agree...
...Bowker seems inclined to read the Marcan trial account straightforwardly, against most biblical critics...
...And, in its account of the cultural inventiveness and human resilience with which they reckoned with "the peculiar institution," it lays to rest conventional portrayals of slave life in terms of mere deprivation and "dehumanization": it is, indeed, I beLEARN SPANISH...
...Then he methodically examines the gospel titles for Jesus: prophet, lord, messiah, son of man, and son of God...
...Caro has shown the inexorable hubris that changed Robert Moses from the reformer who wrote the Reconstruction Commission report of 1919 into the man who refused his only brother a photo of their dead mother and who tried to wreck the Tunnel Authority because he couldn't take it over...
...12, Best book 1 have read in 1974...
...Here too the reader is taken back to the nation's early trials, and to a figure whose numerous contributions to our political heritage are impossible to measure...
...Schlesinger has been a prize-winning celebrator of presidential power as exercised by Jackson, F. D. Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy and thus it is only with some candid soulsearching that he comes to a sober semi-revisionist view of the promise of the American presidency...
Vol. 101 • December 1974 • No. 9
