BOOKS
Terzian, Philip & Warner, Sam Bass Jr. & Conniff, Richard & McDonnell, Kilicm & Corwin, Phillip & Heidenry, John & Cohen, Arthur A.
Governor was predisposed to leave the disposition of human events to men themselves who acted in accordance with natural law. In fact the real God was man. George Washington thus became not...
...mCHARD CoNNWF, adjunct lecturer in writing at St...
...In fact, he was the most unco-operative witness the Committee had subpoenaed...
...Years earlier she had been a summer guest of the family of a boy named Robin with whom she had had a highschool correspondence...
...Frank Getlein on Washington...
...Protected by the latent period, manufacturers annually put hundreds of new chemicals on the market without ever having tested them for their cancer-producing capabilities...
...At this beginning of fall why not send for a trial subscription...
...and yet it is permeated by a sapphire stillness...
...Then in 1934, largely on the basis of two stories he'd published in the Saturday Evening Post, he landed his first job in the movie industry, as a reader in the story department of Warner's, at $35 per week...
...The Malines Conversations, whose fiftieth anniversary was celebrated last year, also demonstrate how influential small initiatives can be...
...Still, both Agran and Corbett have produced interesting, useful, and at times deliberately enraging books...
...Economic leverage...
...The Cancer Connection a i d What We Can Do About I t LARRY AGRAN Houghton Mi~lin, $8.95 Cancer and Chemicals THOMAS H. CORBETI', M.D...
...Larkin's world is perhaps decidedly grey, if not bleak...
...FATHER KILIAN MCDONNELL, O.S.B., is Executive Director of the Institute for Ecumenical and Cultural Research at Collegeville, Minnesota...
...Any religion worth its salt represents some~ing more than a "social construction of reality," some other that transcends our experience...
...Billy for Faulkner and Bernie for Malamudm only Jews are wholly diminished), he knows that Wolfson was a genius and no mountebank...
...on the Movies...
...There will be little or no progress against some forms of the disease, perhaps slightly better results against other forms...
...His portrait stares out at us and its image refuses to go away...
...six months (13 issues), $4...
...No, Jean Rhys is probably not England's greatest living novelist...
...Hermit of Peking is, then, everything that a work of historical inquiry should be...
...Thomas Powers on the Press...
...They are exciting in the sense that they will alter the sensibility of anyone who reads them...
...Not primarily as a literary figure, nor because he ever really accomplished so very much politically (what, after all, do you prove by going to jail...
...Gracious, one hopes they never mention anything as disgusting as that o n "Soap...
...This is what Trevor-Roper has had to contend with, and he wisely leaves the implications to the reader...
...We can never be sure, and must at last decide that, since we In Prospect Among the features scheduled to appear in Commonweal in coming weeks are thoughtful articles by such contributors as: Arlene Swidler, David Riesman, John Tracy Ellis, Ralph C. Chandler and Joseph Fichter...
...In fact, quite possibly, that is the point and subtlety of this book, that the Messiah is just around the bend in time, always out of sight, but vaguely over there...
...of mankind...
...The fictional prose is energetic, vivid, the imagery selective, the exposition (the little that is shown off) quite intelligent...
...It is difficult to summarize both the literary grace and sure wisdom of the heart that these two books contain...
...Clearly, Cook liked Dalton Trumbo...
...he concocted vast portions of his historical writings out of forged annals and documents...
...We will send you a complete refund upon their receipt...
...support of the United Nations, confrontation O r cooperation with the Third World, new international institutions pursue d by Representative John Brademas, Charles Yost, Philip Jessup, Kenneth W Thompson and other specialists...
...When one considers that a majority of the Continental Congress and 52 of the 56 signers of the Declaration of Independence were Masons, one can agree with Albanese that the Brotherhood "subtly operated as a vehicle for the promulgation of a new religious structure" which emphasized virtue, self-fulfillment and the exaltation of reason...
...Will chemotherapy save me...
...0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 S t e t m f e l s ( C r o f t . ) "Shameful...
...Hannah and her daughters and their families are representatives of the fringes of the westward migration of the American poor--from the forests and farms of northern Michigan to the forests and farms of Washington state...
...George Washington thus became not only the metaphorical father of his country but the collective symbol of the divinity that is in all Americans, a first among equals...
...One can graph these fluctuations over the cemuries...
...They are pictures of the children, the young mothers and fathers, family reunions, vacations, homes, factories and shops, and even some servicemen in the Kaiser's army...
...Our Columnists These include Abigail McCarthy...
...while Larkin, born in 1922 and long-time librarian at the University of Hull, has to his credit only two novels and a handful of volumes of poetry...
...It moves along two levels: as insight into the process of historical inquiry, and as revelation of an elusive and grotesque personality...
...The new religion was above all concerned with human rights and values...
...Quite clearly, because Mirsky only resorts to calling people by their first names when he is in awe of them and needs to cut them down to his size (hence Harry, but aho Mr...
...She had brought in the dust bin from outside the gate where the trashmen left it, and had been trying to weigh it down again with heavy rocks to keep the rat from tipping it over, when she passed it...
...So Commonweal: 629 too does the federal government, which spends the bulk of its anti-cancer funds on the heroic and publicly appealing, if thus far futile, search for a cancer cure...
...And that, I think, is what most of those who joined wanted to do...
...Although the first book is primarily pictures, the second primary text, and although one concerns the German haute bourgeoisie, the other the American working poor, both powerfully evoke a sense of individual integrity and personal heroism...
...It is a large group of separate diseases...
...To these specialists, many of them ecumenical pioneers, it was abundantly evident what had happened in that decade...
...Albanese is quite aware of this, yet there is still a somewhat static quality to the Puritan myth that she sets up in contrast to the new myth that replaced it...
...The traditional answer had been ,an unequivocal "no...
...Although she handles her materials with sophistication and weaves an intricate account of the genesis of this religion, one wonders whether she has sufficiently caught the complexity of the shift of consciousness that produced the communal sense of being American...
...Bates and Laurie Lee, for example, and dozens of children's book writers, have undergone the same rite of passage...
...NO-RISK TRIAL OFFER To order your set of 20 Pacem in Ten'is IV cassette tapes, just fill out the coupon below and send it along with your check for $156.80.* If, after listening to the tapes, you decide they do not stimulate your thinking, return them within seven days...
...Over the years she has inevitably played with the idea of a marriage proposal from Robin...
...lope...
...Perhaps if he had not become one of the Hollywood Ten, and eventuaUy, the man who almost singlehandedly broke the infamous blacklist, his life would have seemed less spectacular...
...It takes for its inspiration nothing more--or less--than domestic strife and conquest, and its progenitors include E.M...
...No one will ever answer, at least on earth, for the Cancers this single "mistake" has produced and may now be producing...
...Instead, the authors arrange source material for the reader's inspection...
...Early in the Catholic efforts at ecumenism there was an awareness of the positive possibilities in the Pietist pica...
...On the refectory walls of my monastery is a picture of a stump of a tree with a small sprouting branch emerging from the side...
...What a fine historical experience these two books offer...
...or again, feeling herself inexplicably attracted to him and wondering how she could ever adjust to a life of complacent ease in the Oxford countryside...
...That her nationality is never quite disclosed is a good example of Larkin's novelistic method of highlighting a problem--not at all laboriously-indirectly by always assuming it to be self-evident to begin with...
...American and Foreign Policy and the Third ,World...
...What happened, I think, is that in a most typically self-effacing way it has alone managed to endure as something worthwhile in English letters and to preserve what is best in English life and ethos...
...In the final statement of the dialogue the weight of the arguments were theological and historical but the abovementioned discernment played-a role in the request of the Catholic participants t o their ecclesiastical authorities that the Roman Church think of the possibility of officially recognizing the ~authe~ticity of Lutheran eucharistic ministry...
...The negative possibilities in this attitude is that one will be satisfied with an ecumenism of feelings...
...Some of the churches drew back at the threat which the consensus posed...
...His poems are those of the bookish skeptic who is mildly perplexed by passionate argument, political or religious, which tends to take on a life of its own and loses sight of the small anxieties and hopes, defeats and triumphs, that give shape to the real truths--and lies - - o f a person's life...
...This process, as Elliott and Sacvan Bercovitch have shown, began long before the Revolution...
...Then at the Council the Catholic Church emerged .as an ecumenical pace-setter and the transformationist motif received its due...
...I don't quite believe .his modesty, although his judgment is in ~his respect quite correct...
...Why does he put on paper such a mishmash of shorthand opinion, quotation, misconstruction, halfreadings of great minds and great texts...
...John Deedy's "News and Views...
...Free copy added for instructor or distributor on request...
...He is more thorough, if less stirring, than Agran, especially in detailing the chemical sources of cancer...
...Lewis and J.R.R...
...Marked by tiny halting steps, progress in the search for a cancer cure is likely to follow a slow and uneven course," he writes...
...To this must be added the critical comment of our distinguished roster of book reviewers to 8rasp what a subscription to Commonweal will bring you in issue after issue...
...the disease does not normally occur spontaneously...
...This performance is in turn edited and reordered by the listener for publication...
...The decade 1964-1974 was the decade of dialogue...
...At 65, he was still a humanist...
...Always poor and lonely, passed about as children as families dissolve and economic necessity demands, the women marry early and choose badly...
...Will surgery...
...And, with some sacrifice, we can control or eliminate many of these causes, such as asbestos, sodium nitrite, vinyl chloride, saccharin, dieldrin and hundreds of less notorious carcinogens...
...interact with each other's ideas...
...It is written at breakneck speed, breathless, enthusiastic, a s though Mirsky believes that if he doesn't keep going, on the move, he'll never catch up with the Messiah just ahead of him...
...One can easily imagine Trevor-Roper settling into his armchair, adjusting his glasses and pipe and beginning to examine the evidence...
...And the reason why he chose to write about him seems a fitting way to close a discussion of Trumbo's life: He has hung in there--survived, prevailed, even triumphed on a couple of occasions...
...For instance, she makes much of the universal consciousness of the Revolutionary generation in contrast to their Englishminded ancestors, which does not seem to do justice to the universalist dimensions within American Puritanism itself as John Winthrop's famous symbol of the city on the hill connotes...
...His novel, Johnny Got His Gun (1939), stands as one of the great anti-war novels of all time...
...If this is not the core of the civil religion we have inherited, it is a pious fraud that deserves to suffer the mass apostasy that some observers have detected since the late sixties...
...But as for "real literature"--what happened to it...
...Indeed, it is a kind of electronic biography, one that makes contact with all the open circuits in Trumbo's life, and at the same time respects the chronology and hard fact that any biography must...
...They will do the same for you...
...10016...
...foreign policy decisions.., decisions that greatly affect the life of every human being in the world today, tomorrow and far into the future...
...nor is A Girl in Winter, as superb a book as it is, truly the equal of those works by twentieth-century English novelists which by consensus belong to the world's masterpieces...
...No more, to be sure, will English writers ever again produce the great romances and adventures that were a part of empire--writers like Kipling, Stevenson, Conrad...
...Corbett, a clinical investigator who helped expose the contamination of human and animal food throughout Michigan with polybrominated biphenyls, concerns himself with more purely scientific matters, most interestingly his struggles to demonstrate the carcinogenicity of certain chemicals to reluctant and profit-oriented bureaucrats and manufacturers...
...City, State, Zip...
...9-30-77 Commonweal: 635 can never know anything, it is probably better to at least know something...
...One would expect that after such major advancesmspelled out by Minus ---at least the experts would see what is to be found in our relevant ecumenical future...
...DEnclosed is my check of $156.80.* *California residents add 6% sales tax...
...seeing herself as the more mature of the two and rejecting him...
...publication...
...She is a gifted writer whose language has a freshness to it that matches the originality of her approach...
...He began to write screen plays in his spare time...
...they were victims of a brand of industrial anarchy--a production ethic that says anything goes until something goes wrong...
...To more or less degree, writers like H.E...
...The enterprise of Mirsky's pursuit of Jewish substance (Jewish identity he has abundantly) has enabled him to make contact with three of the indisputable prodigies of modern Judaism...
...the economic dimensions of foreign policy explored by William E. Simon, Maurice P. S~'ong, Robert O. Anderson, James P. Grant and others.., the questions of U.S...
...The religion had its demonology also...
...Of course, Mirsky does not think he is a moumebank...
...Each participant contributes his or her invaluable knowledge...
...The Camera of My Fam|ll CATHERINE HANF NOREN Knop/, $20 Hannah's Daughters: ~|x Generations of ass American Family: 1876.1976 DOROTHY GA~AG~R Crowell, $10.95 SAM BASS WARNER, JrR...
...On the contrary, these men died because there were no effective government controls reaching into their workplaces...
...Wolfson worked, to use an accessible metaphor, tb rc llvllrc...
...Utility became the chief value and useful knowledge became the summum bonum of education in the new republic...
...A Girl in Winter PHILIP LARKIN Overlook Press, $8.95 Sleep I t Off, Lady JEAN RHYS Harper & Row, '$7.95 JOHN HEIDENRY Jean Rhys and Philip Larkin are widely recognized, though belatedly in the case of the former, as two of England's most important writers...
...Ostensibly, there was never anything in particular about Backhouse to raise suspicion, at least so long as no one looked too close...
...Nor were Trumbo's achievements limited to the screen...
...Backhouse was little known to Trevor-Roper then, as indeed he is little known to us today: a mysterious English baronet, resident in China for most of his adult life, co-author of the classic China under the Empress Dowager (1910), extravagant benefactor of the Chinese collection at the Bodleian...
...Minus rightly gives the Marines Conversations an important place in ecumenical history...
...and outside the falling snow, no easy presage of spring, redeems the grey-world as a symbol of implacable destiny--that what must happen will happen...
...Ultimately, that is why he is worth our attention...
...The exercise is something like excerpting lines from a play whose title and plot was unknown to us...
...Dalton Trumbo BRUCE COOK Scribners, $12.50 PHILLIP CORWIN The story of James Dalton Trumbo is an authentic American story...
...Can a minister not ordained by a bishop celebrate an auther~ic (valid) Eucharist...
...Reprehensible...
...Agran blames perhaps 90 percent of all cancers on environmental carcinogens, while Corbett puts the figure at 80 percent...
...And yet, though Larkin was chosen to be editor of the Oxford Book of English Verse, and much of Rhys's earlier work is now being republished, both writers still live in that half-world, the far side of bestsellerdom, of neglect or at best success d'estime...
...And beyond that, there is an interesting point: how can we gauge our own credulity...
...Tapes that provide timely, provocative and timeless dialogue on such critical issues a s . . . American-Soviet Detente and National Security . . . Senator Edward Kennedy arguing for detente, former U.N...
...tGerald Weales on the Stage...
...Foreign Policy and American Democracy...
...But therein lies the mystery and the tantalizing question...
...la/wa A. c o i ~ is completing a new novel, Acts o~ The/t, and a novella, A Spanish Romance, both of which will appear next year...
...Second, says Agran, though we are ignorant of a cancer cure, we already know much and can, with relative ease, learn more about exactly who and what cause cancer...
...At the moment, however, it would seem that novelists like Iris Murdoch, Muriel Spark, and Anthony Burgess are at best able to write novels that are more like unwitting parodies of themselves than anything else...
...Trevor-Roper has spun aged documents and fading memories into a monster, but a monster that is, at long last, human, and disconcertingly SO...
...Unfortunately her natural style is somewhat marred by an overuse of the turgid jargon of the disciplines she utilizes, creating at times the two-in-one effect that Albanese finds so prevalent in the paradoxical character of Americans...
...But up until Vatican II the official Catholic ecumenical stance was one-sidedly preservationist, when official ecumenism existed at all, which it generally did not...
...When she is found unconscious, sprawled out beside the dust bin, where she had lain all night, the people of the village learn at last that her enfeebled condition was due to a heart condition, not drink...
...At the end of the book Minus calls attention to the ecumenical retreat which coexisted with the ecumenical advance during the decade after Vatican II...
...The suffering and heroism in their lives rests in the conflict between the ways of the old rural society and the skills and disciplines of the new urban and industrial world...
...In thz,~meantime, he puts his foot on everything, on doctrines that look to him like prototypes of some bit of his sacred jargon, on admiration for the followers of Sabbatai Zevi and Jacob Frank, on bits and fragments of his past, on good Israeli writers who were ~moved by his palpable warmth and open-'hearted generosity, on his affectionate nature and on his capacity to be a simple world-wide shlepper...
...The Strausses, the Wallachs, and the Hanfs were German Jews who rose slowly from farming and small merchant lives to success as modern businessmen...
...Standing as a deposit of faith against which all future experience would be judged, the Constitution, Albanese concludes, was simply Liberty Tree reborn in a form to endure through time...
...Appropriately enough, when he finally emerged from behind his several pseudonyms, he did it with a typical flair, as the screen writer of Exodus (1962), and soon followed with other maior credits, including The Fixer and Papillon...
...Undoubtedly under a different form, but certainly somehow it will grow again...
...It is about Sir Edmund Backhouse, but also about the habits and vagaries Student S,_!bseriptions CI.,ASSROOM ORDERS, 10 or more copies for any number of issues (biweekly) to one address, 37r a copy...
...The collapse of the civility which had enabled these apolitical humans to flourish destroyed many family members who could not escape...
...Noren's family are German Jews, victims and escapees of the Nazi holocaust...
...What everybody doesn't know about is the terrifying Armageddon the old lady is living through largely because of a large brown rat that haunts the backyard where Miss Verney must empty the trash...
...It is this new relationship between historian and reader which, I think, accounts for the popularity of this new documents style...
...But significant of what...
...Only recently have scientists come to realize that most major cancers are similarly chemical in origin...
...We have been so rooted in an objectivist traditionmsometimes even raging objectivism~that shared experience usually received the slightest nod of recognition...
...This book is an eloquent testimony to the dogged persistence of its life...
...Everyone,,' announces another advertising man, "has the right to turn the set off...
...Hannah's Daughters is quite the opposite sort of story...
...but rather because he is a man of moral stature...
...Thus vinyl chloride, a potent carcinogen, served as a propellant in household aerosol products until 1974...
...With others they will provide a wide range of insights on questions of the day...
...Whatever does he think inspired such an exercise in vulgarity and titillation as "Soap" in the first place...
...The Declaration of Independence and the Constitution are, in Albanese's exposition, not the sacred scriptures but the chief sacraments of the new religion insofar as they ensure the continual regeneration of the republic...
...He was an acknowledged eccentric, but an eccentric of genius, and how many of them have there been, and are revered today...
...Oral history, the edited records of interviews, are also ambiguous since they are records of an unspecified interaction between the interviewer and the interviewee--a public presentation of self to an audience of one...
...There now exist broad areas of theological agreement which the churches have yet to digest and appropriate...
...But it is one of the odder aspects of both Corbett's and Agran's books that, after repeatedly demonstrating how little we can rely on government to protect us from can30 September 1977:630 cer, both writers urge, as a first step toward prevention of the disease, the creation of new anti-cancer bureaucracies...
...If we fail to exercise such preventive controls, if, that is, we continue on our present course, one in four Americans now living will develop cancer, and one in five of us will die from the disease...
...It isn't even hagiography for which I would find a noble excuse-genuine love and submission to the authority of better minds...
...But Rhys and Larkin are somewhat more special...
...He left in his wake a trial of artful deception and a perverse imagination that leads the searcher continually astray, purposefully sends him down one plausible avenue when the truth, discovered long after, is quite the other way...
...How well I ren%mber a caucus of the Catholic delegation during which someone said of a Lutheran theologian in the dialogue: "You cannot know Arthur Carl Piepkorn and think that his Eucharist is not valid...
...Trumbe was a participant, a victim, a survivor, and even--though he denied torical happenings that engulfed his it--a hero in a series of bizarre hisgeneration and destroyed many people of lesser fortitude and perseverance...
...But no one knew or felt confident enough to predict what direction the ecumenical movement would take in the years to come...
...First, we cannot expect the development of a cancer cure in this century, or possibly ever...
...he defrauded, he lied, he feuded continually with his few friends...
...And he was a graduate of the rags to riches school, that oversubscribed American academy, a poor boy from a small town in Colorado who had to leave the state college at age 20 to support his two sisters and his mother after his father had died of pernicious anemia...
...2) As a monk I recall that monastic life periodically flourishes and wanes...
...My Seareh f o r t h e Messiah MARK JAY MIRSKY Macmillan, $10~95 ARTHUR A. Mark Jay Mirsky's My Search /or the Messiah is one of the most unpersuasive accounts I have read in a long time...
...Mark Mirsky is a novelist...
...The tale begins with the death of Hannah's mother, and her being sent to board as a small neglected child in her grandmother's loveless Michigan home...
...Pacem in Terrls IV was originally convened by the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions and the Fund for Peace to bring together 51 of our country's most important decision makers...
...The times, having produced cures for polio and other once-epidehlic diseases, encourage such thinking...
...Neither is i n any danger of being prolific...
...And so Dalton Trumbo went to jail for Contempt of Congress...
...In addition, there were o t h e r novels, original stage plays (The Biggest Thief In Town had the best run, a year in London), short stories, pamphlets ("The Time of the Toad"), and theatre criticism...
...I t is hard to imagine what this innocent man of the cloth perceives as controlling what's on the air now, other than economic leverage...
...Because of cancer's long latent period---often as much as 20 or 40 years between exposure to a carcinogen and the first signs of cancermit has always been difficult to trace the disease back to its source...
...war hardly touches them, and when it does it comes as prosperity...
...What made him thus...
...At least it was the hope that this was Mirsky's convention which kept me trudging through the sludge of Mirsky's prose...
...oWe are talking about your joining leaders of Congress and experts of varying political, economic and scholarly viewpoints in an informal, non-partisan discussion and debate of crucial, life-anddeath U.S...
...In the face of such an extraordinary man we thirst for answers that, after the passage of time and with our own inadequate resources, can never be answered...
...And then at the age of 42, along came J. Parnell Thomas and his House Committee on Un-American Activities, and Dalton Trumbo refused to co-operate...
...INDIVIDUAL STUDENT Subscriptions: one year, $8...
...When the proposal does come, in the heart of the winter of her discontent, she has already worked out an independent existence for herself: they must at last go their separate ways...
...At ~he Rome meeting there were clarion calls for bold action but neither the consensus nor the experts could indicate where to put the next foot...
...10016 Please send the next 11 issues of Commonweal to: Nan~e . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Address...
...Some boxes of papers, fleeting references in correspondence, yellowing newspaper columns, corporate records and archives...
...And when it wanes, as it does now, it is not necessarily because monastics have been unfaithful to their calling...
...His girl in winter is a German girl named Katherine who works in a library, no less, in a city very much like Hull during wartime...
...But his spirit was never broken...
...For that matter, given the ambiguity inherent in the word "established" as used by Lucie-Smith, I am not so sure that England's greatest postwar poet was not an American, Sylvia Plath, who had settled in England before her suicide...
...In the best of the anthologies of modern British poetry, British Poetry Since 1945, its editor Edward Lucie-Smith concedes Larkin to be, in addition, "probably the most important poet to establish himself in England since the war...
...The real celebration of the book, the real center, the real Messiah 'whom Mirsky will one day find is himself, Mirsky the Messiah--"and all the time I was looking for myself" he may one day write...
...CI~RCULATION DEPARTMENT, Commonweal, 232 Madison Ave., New York, N.Y...
...Finally, a few words of praise for Cook's biography...
...Jean Rhys by contrast, as is only to be expected of a Trinidadian, is a touch more exotic...
...F~II of the conventional wisdom of alienage, too young to be a member of the beat generation and apparently too old to begin any serious study, Mirsky's book is a litany of intellectual press releasesm accounts of lectures given by the Rav, Joseph Soloveitchik, chats with the late Harry Austryn Wolfson, an afternoon in Jerusalem with Gershom Scholem (Mirsky's trinity of gurus), interspersed with the most wanton name-dropping, ,travel itineraries through Israel and America, visits with the exotic Bedouin, and exuberant evocations of how marvelous and difficult it is to be a Jew...
...A. Alvarez has even gone so far as to declare Jean Rhys "the greatest living English novelist...
...Some hard facts about the extent of our involuntary exposure to carcinogens nationwide, in our air, our drinking water, and our food, might have tied together the somewhat episodic material of both books, and would have made more forceful what are already persuasive arguments...
...One wonders too whether that man-centered myth established itself as dominantly as she suggests...
...All we have to go by are papers and more papers, which Backhouse himself demonstrated tell only half the story, if that much...
...As with Backhouse, there are always dark corners and inexplicable gaps--everything does not add up--but we can imagine much, thanks to Trevor-Roper, and draw our own conclusions...
...This short book consists of a series of interviews of a 99-year-old woman, Hannah, and her daughters and granddaughters aged 81 to 22...
...Focusing on personalities (Fernand Portal, Father Paul of Graymoor, Yves Congar, Joseph Metzger) and on developments within Roman Catholicism since the 19th century, Paul Minus has sketched a Catholic rediscovery of Protestantism within the framework of preservationist and transformationist motifs...
...So when he was not working, he was writing...
...This popular new type of history eschews the didactic ways of our historical narrative tradition, and avoids as well the ordered arguments of academic social science history...
...however if one can judge from the extracts from his novels which he includes for some reason in this nonfiction essay-travelogue, it does raise certain questions about the differentiation of the fictional style and the essay of self-exegesis...
...however his account of their life, thought, and charisma is cheap, even vulgar...
...By the time he was 40 he was making a lot of money as a screen writer and seemed for the first time in his ,life to be financially secure...
...JOHN HEmENRY is a free-lance writer and critic living in St...
...for that was not only his liking, it was also his escape route, his hope, his exorcism for the devils of his daily existence...
...Tolkien, and has most recently been exported abroad in an enormous bedtime tale like Watership Down, which is but the tip of an iceberg of a peculiarly whimsical English subgenre that is mostly written by goodhumored, pipe-smoking chaps and clever retired schoolmistresses who also are not above keeping up with the cost of living...
...Oallagher's family consists of six generations of American women who are fodder for our nation's urbanization...
...The change was breathtaking...
...Let this relationship of simple human friendship be carried from the center you have created here to the boundaries of Christendom and we have at least the beginnings of ecumenism...
...Forster, Ford Madox Ford, Henry James, who themselves have their roots in Trol30 September 1977:632 We are looking for a few concemed Americans willing to spend $156.80 to join 51 of the great leaders of the decade in a debate that directly affects the lives of every human being...
...Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley, Seymour Melman, Vemon Jordan, William Wirtz explore the effect on the domestic economy and plights of our major cities.., key 1976 campaign issues and Congressional-executive relationships discussed by Senator Howard Baker, former Senators Mike Mansfield and Eugene McCarthy and others...
...Perhaps implicit in the use of the term is surviving, in which case there is no contesting...
...The pursuit of historical truth is both detective work and informed speculation, and Trevor-Roper has done both, taking us along in his inquiry, showing us how things add up to fill in the spaces, and how we can not always be certain the spaces are adequately filled...
...T h e Cancer Connection mental" carcinogens include one's own cigarette smoke or the sun, which causes almost all of the many skin cancers reported annually...
...He suggests we get control of cancer and thus of our own lives by requiring manufacturers to demonstrate beforehand that their new products are not carcinogenic, and by licensing and carefully regulating manufacturers of dangerous products...
...I f her prose is bare-bones, there is a ring on the skeleton's hand...
...What is historical truth...
...In the meantime, Hermit o/Peking remains a masterpiece of historical writing...
...Shared experience and the union of hearts should not be dismissed--and Minus does not do so---as Pietist fluff...
...That is also the craft of history: it is well to engage in research, but everything must be tied together and speak to us as a whole, and speak well...
...Considering these two writers is also occasion to reflect briefly on whatever happened to English letters in the twilight of her second golden age...
...Especially those of us who 'are professionally involved in ecumenism yearn for those years when we rode the crest of the wave with such grace and poise...
...This suggestion will hardly satisfy those most concerned about cancerm the 675,000 Americans who last year learned for the first time that the disease existed in their bodies...
...Liberty became interchangeable as a value with property, which now became a man-made transcendent, having the sacred character previously associated with divine beings...
...In the light of what we know today, what would it have been like to see him, to know and to talk to him...
...But his are no testimonials to great human beings nor to great teachings, since the "three gurus" he has chosen occupy the center of his stage for about a third of his book...
...Now you have the opportunity to join this select group--to agree or disagree, to challenge, to argue, to change your mind or solidify your opinion--all without risk...
...Why then does Mirsky ,#rite My Search...
...Minus's recounting of the Marines Conversations brought to my mind an incident in the late '60s when the members of the National Lutheran-Catholic dialogue were studying ministry...
...how can we ever be sure of what we are reading and knowing...
...Noren's family are German...
...Minus notes that it was out of the experience as an observer at Vatican II Commonweal: 631 that Douglas Horton spoke, not only for the other Protestant observers but also for the Fathers of the Council in relation to their acquaintances among the Protestants present, when he said: "Because you have made us your friends, nothing important to you can be unimportant to us: we shall never again be indifferent (however we may disagree) to anything in your theology, your polity, your liturgy...
...So it need not be retold here, except to say that Cook has added a few new facts and has generally fitted the whole sordid business into its historical context with admirable objectivity...
...The documents of the Nazi attack on the family--the forms and applications, the letters to relatives, and, most chilling of all, the Auschwitz diary of a man who survived by being a clerk in the camp---are unnerving...
...I don't recall ever having read a more convincing account of the human costs which that enormous social transformation exacted...
...Most of the photographs date from 1890 to 1930...
...I might read a novel one day by Mirsky, but I will never again pick up his (what is it called, that genre)--nonfiction...
...Most written texts give more abundant evidence about why the document was created and what the author thought his work signified...
...stimulate each other's thinking...
...PHILLIP CORW1N is a poet, novelist sad critic who works for the United Nations...
...Theirs is the culture of poor American farmers--independent, hard-working, isolated...
...For Backhouse there are half-remembered and sometimes totally forgotten documents squirreled away around the world that, pasted together with industry and inductive speculation, somehow manage to take the form of a portrait--or, more properly, a charcoal sketch...
...Cynthia Ozick has called it a "dervish book" which I take to mean the self-mutilating and ecstatic dervishes of North Africa and not the grave and stately mystics of Turkish Islam, There is nothing grave and stately about Mirsky's book...
...There was considerable ecumenical activity on the part of Roman Catholics during the last century and during the first half of this century...
...Peter's College in Jersey City, writes for various newspapers and magazines on health science and other subjects...
...Minus reminds us that "ecumenical pilgrims have repeatedly encountered impasses, delays, and detours...
...Piepkorn, now deceased, had been part of the dialogue from the beginning and deep ~bonds of friendship .had been formed...
...And his tenacity was legendary...
...PmLn, ~ is Assistant Production Manager of The New Republic...
...Marjorie Tuite, OP October 28 - 30, 1977 New Contexts for Christian Thought with Thomas Berry November 25 - 27, 1977 For information on these or other programs and residence opportunities write: Greilville Loveland, Ohio 45140 call: (513) 683-2340 on the theory of the palimpsest, the historical overlays can be filled by reading the writings abandoned or obscured beneath...
...It may be that Backhouse is a minor figure, and that his exposure will not cause great ripples to pass through the intellectual community, but that is beside the point...
...They have children because women have children, and they have children because they are unhappy...
...Hermit of Peking HUGH TREVOR-ROPER Knopf, $10.00 PHIHP TERZIAN In August, 1973 Sir Hugh TrevorRoper, Regius Professor of Modern History at Oxford, was presented with the manuscript memoirs of Sir Edmund Backhouse (1873-1944), the "hermit of Peking," for deposit in the Bodleian Library...
...He was the embodiment of the work ethic, as prolific as opinionated, a whirlwind of energy and competitive drive...
...Nelson-Hall, $8.95 IlI~IIAJID CONNIF'F" The average American tends to think of cancer not at all until he or someone he knows gets it and even then, not unnaturally, only i n terms of a cure...
...The power and effect of the new style lies in its very ambiguity...
...They challenge each other's viewpoints and convictions...
...John Garvey on Religious Books...
...Are there Backhouses lingering in the library more adept at covering their traces...
...In this context the questions the Catholic theologians in the eonsuRation had to answer reduced themselves quickly to two: Can one be an authentic (read valid) minister of the Gospel if one has not been ordained by a bishop...
...Agran combines scientific detail and generally weU-thought-out preventive recommendations with the sorry stories of individuals whose lives cancer has cut short...
...They move from a cabin in the woods to a modern house with all the appliances, but only ~the youngest ever finishes high school, and no one enjoys the luxury o f a career...
...1) The public ,attention span can only be stretched so far and then it tires and falters...
...Rhys, born in Trinidad in I894, has published only six books...
...Harry Austryn Wolfson (whom Mirsky calls "Harry") was perhaps the most learned historian of philosophy produced in this century, an imaginative rationalist who did for the history of Jewish thought from Philo and the Patristics to Spinoza what Etienne Gilson (with a different methodology) did for medieval Catholic thought, that is, define its schema and problematics, its historical resonation, its plenitude and lacunae...
...nor the people in the village in the title story who are determined to dismiss old Miss Verney as nothing more than a recluse trying t o keep up a respectable front when everybody knows she is in her cups...
...Even the most fervent monasteries can suffer decline...
...Under the stump is the inscription succissa virescit...
...Inevitably, one is drawn to think about the spectacle he presents, but TrevorRoper has been content to introduce us and allow acquaintance to evolve...
...the impact of the "Cold War foreign policy" on the American system debated by Senator Frank Church and William Colby, focusing on the CIA and secret operations, followed by comments by Senator Claiborne Pell, Morton Halperin, Charles Morgan, Ray S. Cline and Andrew Young...
...To think that "special-interest groups" are "trying to use economic leverage to control what's on the air...
...To write as Mirsky does that "when half the argument is missing, Wolfson jumps in and makes it up" and to persevere in this vulgarization by asserting that "when there is no argument, Wolfson creates one" is to suggest that Wolfson was a kind of clever mountebank...
...Militarism became the form of a new conversion experience that transported Americans into a religious universe that centered on American society and demanded the ultimate sacrifice as a proof of loyalty to the national sovereignty...
...Meanwhile, during those prolific years in exile, Trumbo managed to win an academy award for The Brave One (1957), under the name of Robert Rich...
...The iportrait of Trumbo that emerges from Cook's presentation, meanwhile, is that of a man of principle whose liberalism opposed the assault on civil liberties that HUAC represented...
...One of the lessons of the Catholic rediscovery of Protestantism is the human dimensions of ecumenism...
...Now, back in England, she tries to re-establish contact, worries whether she has done the right thing, and finally is able to come to terms with herself--to grow out of that central experience of her adolescence--in her confrontation with a much changed and disappointing Robin, who is a boyishly drunken soldier now and not at all the charming idealist of his youth...
...With a new preface by the author...
...But the reader must supply his own context, he must decide what the facts are the truth about...
...The sixteen stories in Sleep It O~J, Lady are mostly concerned with young girls, women between affairs, older women...
...cries Aryeh Neier, pastor of the First Church of the First Amendment...
...Ecumenical affairs were at an impasse...
...During the next decade, especially through bilateral conversations, the preservationist and transformalionist tensions produced a theological consensus which was greater than that which emerged from all the ecumenical discussions since the Reformation...
...A life devoted to deception that would someday be revealed, as TrevorRoper has so artfully done...
...This has never been a domil~ant Catholic temptation...
...SAM BASS WARNER, JR., teaches in the history department at Boston University...
...Both writers leave the reader wondering whether "environI t wasn't too much government that killed Pete Gettelfinger or Joe Firman...
...Louis...
...What has Trevor-Roper found7 Backhouse journeyed to China for no discernible reason after failure at Oxford...
...This factor has enabled many manufacturers dealing with suspected or proved carcinogens to practice what Agran calls an "expose now/regrets later" policy with workers, neighbors, and customers...
...He acknowledges that to call himself a student of Wolfson or of Soloveitchik or of Scholem "is to defame them...
...Those who were the greatest threats to American liberty and property, the British as well as American traitors like Benedict Arnold, filled the satanic roles...
...In six generations they prosper, as the American economy does...
...His employ was in a bakery in Los Angeles, and he stayed there for eight years, working the night shift and despising every second of it, going off to work each night, in Cook's words, "as a condemned man, with a sense of almost physical loathing...
...This declaration could be understood as a kind of hippie theology: "He is a real good guy...
...Dorothy Gallagher's Hannah's Daughters, is an edited series of interviews with a few family pictures...
...But Agran, a lawyer and writer on health, makes two persuasive arguments for this change in cancer policy...
...In the fall of 1974 there was an invitational meeting of ecumenists in Rome, delegates chosen by a committee of Protestants and Catholics, which discussed the ten years of dialogue since the publication of the Decree on Ecumenism...
...On the other hand, it might have been even more glamorous, since at the time of his being blacklisted (1947), he was already one of the highest paid screen writers in Hollywood, and famous, with movies such as Kitty Foyle and Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo to his credit...
...And this irrespective of the inherent merits of a movement or of the goals yet to be achieved...
...Without attempting to suggest an adequate critique for the present malaise one can at least say two things...
...Frequently it is the ancillary characters who, illuminated, cast the best light on men and events...
...Cancer, it seems, is not really a single disease susceptible to a single cure...
...And that is about where we still are...
...These are two highly readable and moving books in the modern genre of do-it-yourself history...
...Where this leaves the Masons I'm not sure...
...The Constitution was the embodiment of the New Covenant that we had made, not with God, but with ourselves (This all seems to make the Constitution church, scripture, and sacrament...
...Thomas H. Corbett, in his book Cancer and Chemicals, with the realization that for every cancer there is a carcinogen...
...Rather it was a kind of theologicalspiritual discernment in the framework of friendship which perceived the authentic reality of eucharist ministry in spite of the absence of bishops...
...experience unites...
...The total number of participants in each of the five sessions never exceeded ten persons, and usually there were less...
...To a large extent the movement had been made miserable by success...
...What the Straussea, Wallachs, and Hanfs know--how to live as a family in a modern urban industrial society--is just what the Lambertson daughters don't know, and their suffering comes from that lack of skill and self-esteem...
...Albanese's study is valuable for showing that American civil religion during this formative period very much had its own content...
...Backhouse's reputation remained, with bits and pieces of dissent, firm until now...
...And that is consolation enough...
...their presence today should occasion no surprise...
...Written as 'it was with the assistance of a tape recorder, and after having visited tens of former Hollywood personalities, the book seems at times to be organized more like a film treatment than like a conventional work of this sort, beginning as it does with the last days of Trumbo's life, and then flashing back to his early childhood, from where it proceeds dexterously through the episodes in Trumbo's life that carry the greatest emotional charge...
...and as compassionate meditations on the less heroic--that is, the ordinary and everyday--aspects of the human lot...
...Former Secretary of Defense James Schlesinger and Representative Les Aspin debating the need for a larger military budget and whether the Russians are ahead of us in military strength.., the significance of Angola, of SALT and other timely issues analyzed by George E Kennan, Hans J. Morgenthau, Richard Bamet, Senator Jacob Javits, Admiral Zumwalt and LaRoque, Herbert York and others...
...Both writers are interesting, particularly after the recent saccharin debacle that unfairly discredited the scientific community, in demonstrating how generally reliable are the methods used by scientists in testing the cancer-producing capabilities of a given chemical...
...This is a relief to know...
...As a history it stands as a fearsome reminder of the vulnerability of all human lives which today depend upon the containment of the violence and savagery of the modern nation state...
...but how insane, and why...
...They belong to that ever fecund race of English writers whom the English have no lack of but who one by one must be discovered by the rest of the world, usually when Penguins or an American publisher grants them mass or U.S...
...Then, to overlook entirely the gothic romance, there is that perennial and eventually rather tiresome manifestation of the English spirit--the fairytale for grownups, which originated ages before Lewis Carroll and George Macdonald, was kept afloat by professorials like C.S...
...Or, ecumenism will be based too exclusively on a shared experience, so that the objectivities of the faith ,are neglected...
...Everything in these books, however, meets the essential test of history writing--they represent actuality, the events recorded really happened, they tell the truth...
...30 September 1977:636 And as a bonus, Dalton Trumbo and nine other outstanding, virtuous men were blacklisted by the movie industry in a rare display of spineless solidarity...
...This is not always evident to victims of the disease...
...an ecumenical women's ~mn'~niW in southern Ohio Beyond COl~ng: Ch~p Str~lim for Women in the Church with St...
...Cancer is, as one prominent physician has put it, "the disease of the century...
...30 September 1977:638...
...America...
...One can also easily imagine the glasses popping off and the pipe falling out in astonishment as he read along, for Backhouse's memoirs turned out to be not only unremittingly obscene, but obscene in connection with many and various literary and 30 September 1977:634 historical figures: homosexual lover of Verlaine and Lord Rosebery, a wellplaced squinter through the keyhole of modern history, braggart, gossip, his eerie self moving in and out of fantasy lingering with fact and speculation...
...To my imagination, The Camera o/ My Family, is a story about the durability and the vulnerability of the modern middle class family...
...Nor will a policy of cancer prevention, requiring them to put health before jobs and profits, win the ready support of many politicians or bureaucrats...
...Albanese offers Freemasonry as the church of the religion of the Revolution...
...His life was the stuff that Hollywood melodramas are made of, a script written by the curators of American mythology...
...oWe are talking about your joining, right in your own home (and without risk), Pacem In Terrls IV, the fourth of a series of convocations addressing the single most important challenge facing mankind: peace on earth...
...As for satire, that watermark of English literature, that is traditionally an erratic genre, written by a black sheep of letters...
...I understand I may return the~tapes within seven days if they do not meet my needs...
...In eight years he wrote six unpublished novels and a horde of stories...
...Thus began Trevor-Roper's quest for Backhouse, much as A. J. A. Symons embarked on his quest for Corvo half a century ago, and the results are as remarkable and rewarding...
...I prefer a full year subscription at $17...
...Colin Westerbeck, Jr...
...None of usm right, left, or center---emerged from that long nightmare without sin...
...When cut down [monastic life] grows again...
...The transcripts are mine to keep in either case...
...There was no governmental presence to shield them from the unnecessary chemical abuses to which they were exposed...
...and presumably everyone also has the right to boycott sponsors, unless the 0 0 0 0 0 0 000 REVIEWERS FATHER R. EMMETr CURRAN, S.J., i8 associate professor of history at Georgetown University...
...He climbed, slowly but steadily...
...At its worst this found i~s expression in the dictum "Dogma divides...
...Now the story of the Hollywood blacklist has been told many times, in great detail, particularly by its participants...
...Trollope, that is, not Dickens, who was not a domestic novelist at all, but the first Englishman to write a detective story and who laid the blueprint for the grand metaphysical extroversions of Hardyand Conrad...
...But Agran passes only briefly over the experience of vinyl chloride manufacturers in meeting strict federal standards, when that experience might have helped us judge how well industry can afford such regulation...
...We were all victims," he said in a spirit of magnanimity, looking back...
...The Catholic Rediseovery of P r o t e s t a n t i s m PAUL M. MINUS, JR...
...The strong ties of family enabled many of them to escape Nazi Germany, and with both personal and family energy to reestablish themselves in the United States, England, the Netherlands, Argentina, and even Germany...
...Even before Mark Mirsky finds the Messiah, I do hope he finds a good editor...
...The secular character of the Constitution underscores for the author the essential humanocentric character of the new religion which the Constitution institutionalized...
...he spent his whole life spinning a complex and inexplicable web of fantasy culminating in the memoirs he wrote shortly before his death...
...The photograph is the most deceptive of all documents since it is at once loaded with specific detail and at the same time carries few clues about the motives or position of the photographer...
...Prevention begins, according to both Agran and Dr...
...Will, more desperately, Laetrile...
...With friends fike this, does free speech need enemies...
...And they work, work hard, and ceaselessly...
...PACEM IN TERRIS IV ORDER FORM 1443 Please send me the 20-tape set of Pacem in Ten'is IV along with the free 3-volume set of edited transcripts...
...Both artfully lift the details of domestic life to the level of significant history...
...The author prepares and lays out his materials which then allow the reader to have an historical experience...
...Albanese's use of the methodology 30 September 1977:628 and language of the history of religions is illuminating but seems overdrawn at times in applying categories developed from the study of pre-logical societies to an advanced one like the United States...
...The abundance of the collection, the clothing, the furnishings, and the author's comments on family stories and rituals, all testify to the delight of these people in family life, and their pleasure and success in moving out into the possibilities of the modern world...
...Minus cites Charles Butler, an English Catholic layman, who in 1816 objectively examined Catholic, Orthodox and Protestant beliefs and concluded with a Pietist-like plea: "If we cannot reconcile all opinions, let us reconcile all hearts...
...Her world, with its center in the tropics and its colonies in London, provincial England, Paris, and other cities and places, is hardly grey like Larkin's...
...Fernaad Portal, with Viscount Halifax, opened up dialogue with the Anglicans under the patronage of Cardinal Mercier...
...The mood is invariably one of restlessness--of a long tropical boredom in which small events ~ change lives forever and lead up on the Richter scale to the apocalypse...
...Tapes that bring into your home and life almost 18 hours of intensive interchange of ideas from some of the world's most informed conservatives and radicals, pragmatists and idealists...
...As to why Trumbo joined the Communist Party, he is very explicit to Cook, even if he was willing to go to jail rather than tell J. Parnell Thomas: In a time .that began with the Depression and the total collapse of the American economy, with fourteen million unemployed, and soon spread throughout the world...
...Why would anyone---in his life so scrupulous and putatively "scholarly"--condemn himself so finally...
...Significantly, in 1970, when Trumbo was honored by the Writers Guild with its Laurel Award, conferred annually on "that member of the Guild who has advanced the literature of the motion picture through the years and who has made outstanding contributions to the profession of the screenwriter," he made an acceptance speech in which he forgave his enemies...
...Textiles were the dominant line, but family life was their specialty...
...But the serious work goes on even when that perfect wave has spent itself...
...It may not even be too much to nominate him as an exemplar of a certain set of American virtues--toughness, independence, persistence---that are becoming fairly rare today...
...RETURN COUPON OR A FACSIMILE . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11 Issues (5 months) for $4 . . . . . . . . . . . . . FOR NEW SUBSCRIBERS ONLY COMMONWEAL, 232 Madison Ave., New York, N.Y...
...I confess to never having read his novels (I own up here to the fact that he read one Now in Paperback FULTON J. SHEEII Life of Christ "Of the many titles which have poured from Sheen's pen, this may well become the most popular and influential...
...Washington stands as the archetypal American in the new dispensation...
...The use of totemism for instance, to explain the relationship between Washington and his countrymen, fails to convince, particularly in light of the ambiguous evidence she cites regarding his popularity...
...And that may well be true...
...In his book, The Cancer Connection and What We Can Do About It, Larry Agran argues that we might spend our time and money more profitably in preventing cancer rather than in seeking a cure-all for the disease...
...An Image Book, $4.95 dDOUBLEDAY Commonweal: 637 of mine which he didn't like much at all), but I am told that they are ambitious, full of big bites out of the large issues...
...and what they all have in common is a determination to keep a tight hold on their own personality and not let anybody wrest it from them--not the venal Captain in "Goodbye Marcus, Goodbye Rose" who tries to seduce twelve-year-old Phoebe...
...Trumbo was merely a man who had endured the miseries of the Great Depression, who believed in as much free expression as possible, and who instinctively sympathized with the underdog...
...oWe are talking about a series of 20 edited tapes from the proceedings of Pacem In Terrls IV that have been made available directly to the public for the first time...
...Portal saw the role of friendship in ecumenical progress and he published a little known essay on the subject...
...They were not victims of an overbearing government...
...Catherine Noren's The Camera o~ My Family is a book of family pictures with a text of letters and a little connecting nar, rative...
...It is set largely in China, but it could just as easily be anywhere else, and is not in any sense "Chinese" at all...
...in a world that had fascism in Germany, and Spain, and Italy, and an era that culminated in the forties in a war that killed fifty or one hundred million people . . . it was not madness to hoPe for the possibility of making a better sort of world...
...It is chic and unpersuasive and yet Mirsky's hook has a curious and elusive power...
...Sons o/ the Fathers is another reminder of the subtle ways we have of making God in our own image...
...his Eucharist must be o.k...
...Perhaps that statement might be made about many American writers, but it is the virtue of Bruce Cook's eminently readable biography about him that such a characterization has never seemed more appropriate...
...Paulist, $5.95 KIIJAN MeDONNELL Anyone who has engaged in ecumenical activity over a long period will see how clearly that experience involves a tension between preservation of religious identity in faithfulness to Christ and transformation of that identity through openness to what the divine initiative .has done in other communions, also in faithfulness to Christ and to the Gospel...
...But what a joy these books are both as achievements of hard-won, brilliantly subdued style...
...Hannah's daughters are as American as Ms...
...Ambassador Daniel Moynihan expressing some reservations...
...Name . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Address . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . City/State/ZIP . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Return this coupon, along with your check to: The Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions, 1114 State St.,#233, Santa Barbara, CA 93101...
...Set down in the midst of a middle-class home in Brookline, Massachusetts, Mirsky began h i ~ thrashings early...
...It is one of the failings of both books that, while they effectively detail incidents of carcinogenic pollution and consequent human suffering and death, they do not elaborate on these startling figures...
...What she illuminates about the civil religion of the Revolution is that it is largely idolatrous in passing off what is man-made as transcendent...
...Not to be outdone, lames Mortimer has pronounced A Girl in Winter "among the best novels of the twentieth century...
...The loveless home perpetuates its e l f generation after generation...
...and this, after all, is the only true test there is of good and lasting literature...
...and there is never any safe predicting its second coming...
...Insane, yes...
Vol. 104 • September 1977 • No. 20
