BOOKS

...The central and recurring argument is this...

...Can the mission of the gospel," Braaten asks, "be liberated from false dependencies on dated Western forms...

...Fathers do, I suppose, think such somber .thoughts on occasion, but the predictable repetition of the formula (5 poems in all) and the trite e~pression of the melancholy .in somem"The Unhappy Warrior," "Toy Windmill," and "Evelyn in the Apri~ Sun," rob the theme of potential profund.ity...

...For these poems and for his other successes Sa.ndeen should be read wi.th attention and admiration...

...Every system . . . which lives from competition between groups is demonic," and so is "every system which places profits above concern for both people and the earth...

...I certainly cannot answer the question...

...at worst, as ethnocentric meddlers in the lives of peoples they have not begun to understand...

...Hemingwa.y never wrote his own story, as Gertrude Stein had urged in the '20s...

...The faults in the volume should not distract us for too long from its excellances...

...This sequence depicts the ambiguous love-hate relationship between a poet and his poetry...

...I.t becomes all too clear that they campaign for our favor and attention on the coattails of the fated presences of history, whose destinies are fixed and whose interest is guaran.'teed because they are teal and known...

...The strength Dillon would have us see in her comes out as mere doggedness...

...and for "Sun Helmet" which creates a "li~le darkness" to keep the soul alive...

...They have researched the outrage of television and cry out for the inevitable "something" to be done...

...when Fitzgerald got drunk, people phoned the cops...

...They must know the right (real) people, so ,that they can conduct us into history's back rooms where they are eyewitnesses to or--with a ~ttle cheating---participants in events we know have made a difference...

...And the need was deep in both men to find meaning in this same mythic persona for the forging of their public and private personalities, Hemingway seizing upon courage, Fitzgerald on charm or magnetism, a "series of successful gestures...

...But, unlike those glamorous survivors, Molly has no enlivening malice and never says a single really interesting thing...

...I cite all this only to put a measure of control on the enthusiasm I have for what the authors have written...

...As they move into'the company of real revolutionaries gke Michael Collins and Sean McKeon, Peter Morrow and Nicholas deLacy become more compening characters...

...Similarly disappointing is the occasional clich6 (.the mourning friend feeling for the unspent penny in a dead man's pocket) in "A Plaint of Flowers" and the occasional lapse into melodrama (the housewives who haven't learned to forgive love in "May Morning...

...It belongs therefore to the missionary task of the church in this country to question the present economic order of American vested interest in Third World misery, to "debunk the myth that the future has finally come under man's control," to "represent the human quotient in every dialogue about the future," to "keep people sensitive to the lines of suffering in the human face," and to stand on the side of the poor against those who oppress them in the name of American affluence or security...

...Mander is correct in insisting "that television, for the most part, cannot possibly yield to reform...

...In democratic terms, this individual act is meaningless, as it has no effect at all upon the wider society, which continues as before...

...The .good children .are too good...

...His locales are strongly visualized...

...laristic approaches represented on the one hand by the ontological model of a new loges theology and on the other hand by the historical model of a cross and gospel theology...

...If it hasn't been examined, why is much of what they say no more than clich6 thinking, as' in: "During prime time, the message of television is quite clear and consistent: there is no problem, however serious, whether it falls within the domain of a policeman, private detective, a doctor, a lawyer, or any of the other television heroes, which cRnnot be fully resolved in an hour, to the satisfaction of the law, the participants, and the viewers...

...But the outrages are everywhere and the somethings are being called for everyday...

...The diction often has ~he quality of candied fruit ("Unbeknownst .to anybody, Jonathan availed himself of a supply of diverse herbs from the garden, secreting them in his wallet...

...Blood Relations is set in the .time of the Irish Troubles of 1916-1924...

...Hemingway's letters to Fitzgerald are m~tly paraphrase, evidently hecause Bruccoli could not get the estate's permission to publish the letters themselves...

...And who doesn't know that profits are dirty and the public is clean...

...One of the most striking features of Sandeen's work ,is the recurring recollection of his father...

...But while this is an act that may be very satisfying and beneficial, in making this act we must never forget that, like choosing not to drive a car, it is no expression of democratic freedom...

...This is why theology so often appears to be a matter of "solving riddles of the past" or "developing scientific ideas about religion in an academic setting," when it should be providing Christians with "a challenging and critical theory of world mission" or "reaching out to the world with an impact on its future...

...T,hey just might lead some readers back to the genuine history they dilute...

...We can throw our sets in the garbage pail where they belong...

...In the second part of the poem, a poignant sonnet of two six1,ine stanzas and a couplet, the poet mourns his father's death, noticing in sorrow and anger that the trees ou.tsicle sleep quietly while "the fact of snows" settle cold upon Chem: Anger as thick as blood was my consolation for the storm of silence bleaching breath and space since nothing strong and taU out there had grace enough to toss defiance or even to bend before this beginning of memory and its end...

...Througlmut his Collected Poems Sa, ndeen sees in the ordinary and the famil.iaT occasions for question, speculation, ,and discovery...

...What precisely is the mystery that was hidden and is now revealed through Christ and his church...

...There is a warning too against "a hidden triumphalism" undergirding liberation theology's assumptions about the church's use of power through "a new Constantinianism of the socialist left...

...That existential background is "the deepest and most enduring datum" of his own selfunderstanding as a Christian person...

...Mander obviously believes that no television is best for everyone, but he cops out by not arguing forcefully that citizens unplug the sets and give life a try without them...

...He worries that the transcendent elements of Christianity may be ,obscured and the biblical sense of sin may be blurred...

...A casual news item, a church service, the memory of his father, the sight of his child, the sound of a passing truck or airplane, .the chirp of a cricket, the ohange of the seasons--all suggest to the poet ri.tua01s of life, ,the universal rituals of birth, love, and death which transcend the presem and .the particular...

...Morrow participates in the famous escape of Eamon DeValera from the Lincoln jail...

...Through the funny-sad story we get an occasional glhnpse of Zelda, very unkeen on Ernest, and the saintly Maxwell Perkins, forever paternally trying to patch it up between .the boys...

...When such questions are answered positively, it will be seen that a realistic theology of the Christian world mission is an urgently needed bridge between the gospel and the modern pluralistic world...

...But the author's own approach to humankind's salvation is eschatologically elusive and hardly accessible therefore to missionaries in the field who are trying to reshape their practical attitudes toward non-Christian religions...

...And ,though he seemed ever willing to invent new variations of the game, by the ,time he could offer them to Hemingway, the latter had discovered a new partner--the great blue and glittering world itself, just as Henry Luce had created it...

...That, at least according to moral values I was taught from my parents, is the ethical basis that answers all the questions: if everyone did what I do would our collective life on this planet be improved or worsened...

...But why go to the trouble, as does Mander, of making the arguments for eliminating television but then going limp at the moment when we aH want to know how...

...Fitzgerald never made an effort to conceal what he was about, openly _9 identifying himself with his heroes and frankly confessing his despair when the Perpetual Bones show fell apart...

...Bruccoli retells all the old anecdotes--the long count CallaghanHemingway fight with Scott the time-keeper, the "Poor Scott" crack in The Snows of Kilimanjaro--and gives us a healthy sampling of Scott's 50-odd letters to Ernest...

...Two .boys, an English noble's son and a Jew, two Flemish sisters, a young monk, and some others are caught up first in the crusade preached a.t St...

...The fctional plot depends upon an ancient contrivance: a pregnancy arising from a virgin's one ni.glR of indiscrete'on...

...It often seems tha~ their busy search for a subject in ,the past is a compensation for the missing wit and flair of the firstrate stylist...

...llhere is in the Bible "more backing for a .gospel of universal hope _9 . . than evangelical pietism has been wil, ling to adopt in its system of salvation...

...Generally the poet sings of these rituals in a restrained but melodic voice which is capable of humor as well as seriousness...

...During these idyllic days, when Hemingway got drunk, it was somehow a literary event...

...Eaton's voice in this volume is clearly his own creation...

...What then is the meaning of "the world's own natural structures...

...He envisions instead, in a rather sketchy fashion, a new order of Christian socialism emerging gradually in the future~ Not surprisingly, after all that, Braaten is enthusiastic about liberation theology which, far from being a passing fad, exemplifies very well what it means for people to do their own theelegy out of their own historico-cultural situation...

...Some of these seem to arise from his qualified optimism (already noted in connection with his view of non-Christian religions) regarding things natural, secular, thisworldly, present, somatic, cultural and historical...

...Theology and missionary praxis are indispensable to each other...

...The union of thought, feeling, music, and image which characterizes Sandean's poetic remembrances of his father is not always evident in the poems inspired by his chi.ldren...

...Does saving grace touch humans more efficaciously when they are praying than when they are gathering food, or cooking it, for the family...

...A beteer, sF/urter novel would have had him at' Rs center...

...And generally he shows himself to be a sleilled craftsman, comfortab...

...The divorce between mission and theology may also explain why so many missionaries seem to function, at best, as a kind of pious peace corps...

...For the rest of us, the question is what can be learned from two more books about television that other authors haven't already tried to drive home in some 6,000 previou" works...

...This observation has been around so long that maybe even the Martians have heard it...

...I came to understand a television set as no more than a salesman after my money...

...In general, these are good reads, of a sort, for the summer...

...I don't mean to be sour about it all--I happen to be feeling fine at the moment, because I have just come in from an hour of running, have showered, had a glass of pineapple juice and the sun is shining...

...Perkins suggests r Scott that in Snows Ernest really meant kinctlyn he was only trying to give him a bit of a "jolt...

...At times the action seems arranged to display these locales to advantage, as .though Rhodes were already setting op shots for the movie version...

...Most disappointing of all, ,however, are a number of poems, including "Lore of the Real," "Kite Umbilicus," and "Poem Made Out of Questions," in which ideas and images have been forci-" bly stitched up rather than woven together in a seamless garment...

...Like Huxley's 'savage,' or like today's young people whodrop out to rural farms, we find ourselves even further removed from participation in the central processes that direct our society, our culture, our polities, and our economic organization...

...What we need are ideas by which citizens can eliminate television and television's power to demean their lives...

...It is a powerful, disturbing, brutal~y candid voice which demands respect and which sings of the primitive darkness deep within us...

...In The Man in the Green Chair Oharles Eaton presents to us a circus of unusual, often erotic characters...

...Braaten is a universalist in his hope for the salvation of everyone, even outside of an explicitly historical encounter with the gospel of Jesus Christ scho, as the Lord of ,history, is also the Lord of the world's beligions...

...They sustain interest even if they do not lodge themselves in the memory...

...But I have come to think that, having overcome the television addiction, I am freed for the processes of being more available to my family, the pleasures of the neighborhond (the library, the running paths) and pondering the question of what would things be like if everyone made the same choice about television as I did...

...And to Ernest, Max contides that he has finally discovered the root of Sco~t's personal problems: nicotinized cigarettes...

...Fitzgerald's spirited defense of TITN charitabty omits mention of the fact that this is precisely the method Herningway used in The Sun Also Rises, and in most of his other work, except that the case histories are not always marvelously faked, just faked...

...The riots and battles and prison scenes are quite vivid...

...The burden of this same Cowley letter is Hemingway's old compiaint about Scott's "mixing" of personalities in his fiction, a repeat of the "damned marvelously faked case histories" letter he sent to Scott abo~ Tender Is the Night...

...Although salvation includes the social, political and economic dimensions of life, there still remains the fact that the individual qua individual stands as a naked sinner before God...

...Only a combination of discipline, experience, and rich talent could produce this volume-one which will exci,te and delight even the casual reader...

...Though we may not be able to do anything whatever about genetic engineering or neutron bombs, individually we can say 'no' to television...

...They write: "The men and women who control the Age of Television are animated by little more than a simple search for profits...

...Here the occasional echo of Frost measures the differences between the poets rather than the similarities...

...Commonweal: 537 In his earlier book, The Future o~ God, Braaten observed that a true and convincing definition of the church is "one of the most underdeveloped areas of Christian thought...

...In it the poem accuses, victimizes, and observes the poet while arranging, editing, and recording his experiences...

...The careful control of form here, as in another early poem, "Chair with Rockers," expresses eloquently the uncontro$ 1able tumult of emotion...

...His leisurely despoiling of the younger Flemiz,h girl, although it is not terribly explicit by contemporary standaxds, has a drooling quality that seems to say more about Rhodes's fantasies and those he would caU forth in us than they do about Frizio's character...

...Commonweal: 543...

...What exactly is the good news the church has to proclaim among the nations...

...Frank Mankiewicz and Joel Swerdlow don't even raise the question of elimination...

...Sandcen displays throughout his poetry a truly civilized w~t, a quality nowhere more appa.renr than in the thirteen remarkable poems whioh begin Like Any Road Anywhere (1976...

...Has anyone yet to be depressed by the violence, mindlessness and hollowness that is so much of ~eleviskm...

...It isn't the fault of the authors that they are coming forward, at this weary moment with their particularly bleak conclusions about television, because they are forceful and persuasive writegk But they come at us when we are all but victimized by outrage overload...

...My disappointment in these books--and to say it again, both are wellwri...

...Often, these poems begin with a joyous description of the child at play only to dwindle into melancholy brooding about inevitable future disappointments...

...Fitzgerald at his death was breaking new ground and in The Last Tycoon had found a prose line not only utterly differenr from his three previous styles but completely new to American letters and superbly fitted to his final and most scary winter dreams...

...The writers of such historical fiction all too of,ten have tin ears...

...Molly has a weak sister, and this makes us ,think of Scarlet O'Haxa and Becky Sharp, who also had softer, weaker women as foils...

...The possibilities of friendship between .two souls so constituted--the one ever seeking an audience, the other always in need of a hero---are good only as long as each partner is willing to play his clear and definite role...

...The first part of "Last Things" recalls in three six-1~ne stanzas the final days when the poet "by a logic that overwhelmed us both" .had to shave his fa~er every day: Revulsive my fingers explored the abyss of love we'd carefully .kept between us, and touched as tender a skin as a baby girl's...

...tten, carefully researched, and at times entertaining--is perhaps because I expected so much from them...

...So the born-again Christian approach to mission, with its individual18 August 1978:J36 ism, exclusivism, and world-negating spirituality, is rejected...

...Hemingway, no confessor, kept up a writing and non-writing offensive until the very end, ceaselessly projecting the only quality in the dream-archetype that spoke to him convincingly until finally the signal failed and even the simulation of courage was too great an effort...

...I'm not sure what Mander means by "the central processes" he sees directing our society...

...If we can deal effectively with only so much outrage in our lives, then those who set out to shock us by overloading our circuits have an obligation at least to direct our fury to some kind of outlet...

...Neither was Fitzgerald in a position in 1934 to set straight, as Bruccoli does, the distortions of A Moveable Feast, where Hemingway promises fact instead of fiction and ends up delivering neither...

...Professor Bruccoli has ably set forth most of the particulars of the friendship beginning in 1925 when Fitzgerald, then the author of five books, began promoting the contender from Oak Park, who had published all of 88 pages of pseudo Sherwood Anderson but with enough broken rhythms in the prose to make important eyes show white on two continents...

...For Hemingway admirers, this may be just as well since the few letters that appear in text put consider18 August 1978:542 able strain on Joh, n O'Hara's contention that the author was the greatest writer since W. Shakespeare...

...Although "the structures of capitalism must go," Braaten is not ready to jump "from the frying pan of capitalism into the fire of socialism" as it is today...

...An Army o/ Children is about the Children's Crusade of 1212...

...The author, although he is not himself a missionary, is a well known Lutheran theologian who was born of missionary parents...

...At the same time, Braaten has xeservafions and suspicions about the ,implications of such theories as Rahner's "anonymous Christian" or Tillich's "latent church in the world's religions," especially as these theories have been developed with increasing optimism by Roman Catholic theologians in recent years...

...Yet, for awhile, about three years actually, the partnership seemed to hold with Scott talking about his whoring for The Saturday Evening Post and embarking upon unpretty drinking escapades that served to clearly etch him as the failure in the game...

...The originality of the conception, the use of a disinterested stance, and the verve of the execution bring home to the reader al.l of the humor, pain, and joy of artistic ereationmtruly an achievement in a genre which invites the dull and the selfindulgent...

...These workmanlike xespectabiltties and imaginative limRations are found, in just about the usual proportions, in FAlis Dillon's Blood Relations and Evan H. Rhodes's An Army o/ Children...

...and Nicholas deLacy, also a separatist leader and a member 'of an old Norman family (which, incidentally, is historical...

...This theology will also serve as a key to understanding the catholic dimensions of the Christian vocation_9 "Christianity," as Braaten observes, "is already a syncretism of many religious ideas, symbols, rites, and practices which have been . . . baptized into the name of Christ Jesus...

...We are struggling in a classic double bind...

...He kept rising, exasperatingly, at the count of nine in contests just large enough to annoy the self-crowned champ...

...The trick in ticti'on like this is to invent a central group of characters with the right connec, tions...

...After 1940 Hemingway produced little new work and what he did produce was self-imitative and sometimes absurd...

...The central characters are the Goulds, shabby genteel Protestants who live near Galway in a run-down ancestral mansion...

...Both books seem remaxkably oldfashioned, as old-fashioned--as downright cozymas the art on their dust~ackets...

...Blood Relations EILIS DILLON Simon and Schuster, $10.95 [479 pp.] AR AmV of Children EVAN H. RHODF~ Dial, $9.95 [434 pp.] DANIEL M. MURTAUGH It has been years since I have Tead the sort of m~ddle.bruw historical fiction exemplified in these two novels...

...The splash, color, and dating of these poems differ greatly from Eaton's early attempts (one thinks of "Cold Spring," and "Nocturne," for example) whose quiet lyricism and simple diction recall the work of Eaton's teaoher, Robert Frost...

...The .fictional characters may be less interesting than the historical charac,ters and events ,to which they convey us, but, being .the only ch~acters whose minds we 'are privileged to enter, they must still occt~py most of our attention...

...Beginr~ing about 1928 the rifts began to appear...

...of The Sun Also Rises, though we are given only a peek at the actual text...

...Collected Poems, 1953-1977 ERNEST SANDEEN U. o/Notre Dame Press, $10 [191 pp.] The Man in the Green Chair CHARLES EDWARD EATON Barnes, $7.95 [71 pp.] ROBERT MIOLA Apparent in the dust~jacket photograph of Ernest Sandeen, in the high forehead, the square jaw, the dark clear eyes framed by dark glasses, the siblver hair, and the casual wave of professionial pipe, are the qualities of intelligence and reflectiveness which characterize his best poetry...

...What finally emerges from this inevi, table account is that coutrary to Scott's here-tortoise simile (he being the tortoise of course) w~hat seemed true to most critics of the '30s and '40s and much later--that Hemingway was .the great stayer, and Fitzgerald the early leaver--is silly on the record...

...With their hilarious misspellings---apon for upon, allways for always, and anything that came to mind for Hemingway--the Fitzgerald letters are insightful, funny, and friendly...

...That's what I've been doing for Commonweal: 539 years, and I'm waiting for people like Mankiewicz-Swerdlow and Mander to spread the word that the radio word is more than plenty...

...Bruceoli provides a useful synopsis or chronology of ~he friendship and a good but fairly familiar listing of Scott's Notebook entries about Ernest...

...e with the complex stanzas and metrical forms of his early periods as well as v~tih the flexible but disciplined free verse of the l.ater...

...The bad guy, a slave trader of mixed blood and religion named Fr is too melodramatically bad...

...Henry, Molly's father, who turns informer for money and escapes to America, is a craven, meanCommonweal: 541 spirited good:for=nOthing who gets better and better as ~ the story goes along...

...Is eschatology the only way of reconciling the universalistic and particu...

...Six years ago, following a mammoth exertion of willpower, I eliminated television from my life...

...And the language...

...Several problems suggest themselves...

...This darkness provides the theme for "The Masse~," ~ho leads us down the "murky staircase" of our bones...

...The problem was, in this ease, that one of the partners, Fitzgerald, was too double-minded about his own needs to play any 'role consistently...

...Indeed," says Braaten, "we would not need theology at all if it were not for the mission of the gospel to the world_9 This is why theology "without the reflex action of missionary praxis easily degenerates into sterile systems of 'true doctrine' on which endless theological controversies may take place...

...Scott and Ernest MATTHEW J. BRUCCOLI Random House, $8.95 [192 pp.] THOMAS S. KLISE In their representative works, Fitzgerald and Hemingway both dealt with the disenchantment of the Genteel Romantic Hero, never mind the differences in se~ting, style, incident, material...

...Peter Morrow, a Galway businessman of humble origins and a separatist leader...

...But they didn't deliver...

...Mander, a Californian who in 1972 founded the nation's first nonprofit ad agency, is at least laps ahead of MankiewiczSwerdlow...

...But I feel put upon, first, by Jerry Mander...

...But I knew that even by not owning a set', the salesman still dips into my wallet, because the costs of the commercials that I'm not watching are still added into many of the products and services that I buy...

...It unites in a new solidarity of faith, on behalf of the poor, theologians of the evangelical right (Orlando Costas), the Protestant and middle (Jest Miguez-Bunino), and the Catholic left (Gustavo Gutierrez), while the rest of us, hardly noticing their confessional or denominational differences, are moved by what they have to say about the gospel and the world...

...18 August 1978:538 Mander realizes that a few citizens like me exist, and he acknowledges that: "at the moment our only choices are personal ones...

...Her story never rises above the level established by that dustjacket blurb...

...It is a serious effort to bring together again these long divorced partners who need each other much more than they realize...

...Squashes," for example, whi0h contains a paraphrased line from Frost's 18 August 1978:540 "At Wondward's Gardens" ('~It's knowing what to do with things that counts"), is typieal~ly bold, original, and distinctive: Like beheaded geese plucked to their yellow skin they lie in the shade Of an obscene but stalwart little forest of thick leaves Lost in all that heat, in a world they never made...

...The mentality of these people, exemplified by Herman Kahn, is shaped by science, not by con-science...

...Will contemporary theologians come to see that missionary situations are "the original matrix of Christian theology...

...Rhodes seems to think thal a story of long ago must comi~ ,to us in an elevated, "poetic" style which in fact sounds like a bad Victorian translation...

...for "The Crow," to whom we belong "for keeps...

...Adjectives function as adverbs, and prepositions sometimes surprise us ( " . . . he could scarce bear to think of it...

...DeLacy's participation in McKeon's ambush of the Black and Tans in Balinalee suggests thar Dillon has read Tolstoy and learned from him...

...The profound corruption of human sinfulness, of course, weighs more heavily upon Lutherans than it does upon those with a more optimistic perception of the Incarnation and its implications...

...Such w~iting is worthy of respect, the sort of respect we owe to industrious research, a good sense of locale, and plot construction that keeps us turning ,the pages...

...The mixture of revulsion and tenderness is perfectly conveyed by the skillful variation of sounds and the alternation of rhymes wit.h half-rhymes and unrhymed lines...

...Ernest begins a letter .to Malcolm Cowley: "As you know Scott was one of the worst writers who ever wrote prose . . ." and then proceeds to write a letter that sounds like a ten-yearold talking to an immigrant wi.th a four-day grasp of the tongue...

...Rhodes has done his homework...

...There is a call here to denounce prophetically the demonic in all areas of life...

...Fitzgerald of course never wrote anyone else's...

...I am thinking of the work of writers like Lloyd C. Douglas and Thomas B. Costain...

...Their prose is often muffled at best and positively wrong~headed at worst...

...And the solution is almost always achieved by an act of violence...

...Characters shun contractions in speech...

...I know also that being a non-viewer has its other costs that I must pay personally: the difficulties of commurdcating w~th fottr-hour-a-dey addicts whose range of conversation is limited to last night's "special," or the discouragement in knowing that the books and magazines I value are not being valued by many others, or having to get along under a political system where "leadership" is often a question of one hack politician's buying a better TV consultant than his hack opponent...

...Its problems are inherent in the technology itself to the same extent that violence is inherent in guns...

...Now he has himself made a thoughtful contribution to this area, suggesting that the church may be defined by its missionary function, while demonstrating at the same time how theology ought to be done: out of a well informed and personally involved missionary concern for the whole inhabited earth, Four Arguments for the Ellmtmstiost of Telesds|os JERRY MANDER Morrow, $11.95 [371 pp.] Remote Control: Television uud the Ma#ilmlatio# of Ame~heau Life FRANK MANKIEWICZ & JOEL SWERDLOW Times Books, $15 [308 pp.] COLMAN McCARTHY Amnesiacs and visiting Martians are likely to be the most avid savorers of these two offerings...

...Braaten suggests also that the liberationists may tend to accept "too readily" the Marxist definition of the human condition, with its 19th century European ethnocentrism, intolerance of pluralism, and incompetence in dealing with the reality of death...

...Its effects on body and mind are inseparable from the viewing experience . . . . Imagining a world free of television, I can envision only beneficial effects...

...Will they, following the example of St...

...While calling for more muscle from the FCC, Mankiewicz-Swerdlow are weak in the biceps themselves...

...In fact, thts act disconnects us from the system and leaves us less able to participate in and affect it than before...

...In other words, Mander can gasbag for about 100,000 words but then emit only some weightless helium when he has the chance to be more than another lightweight...

...In their conclusion, they call for "a more muscular Federal Communications Commission," the flexing of which, they dream, will lead to television's being "made more responsive to the public's needs...

...They claim that television is "alone among the fundamental forces acting upon us (that) has been exempt from public examination...

...Since then I have found its services useful only in a few workrelated instances, and never in any other context, such as diversion, entertainment or relaxation...

...This is n~t only a vital theology, but one that is "most truly ectmaenical...

...To help Hemingw~y, as everyone but Pound eventually learned, was an extremely dangerous business, and Ernest never forgave Scott the villainy of the Perkins-Wilson-Mencken intros...

...Their method of critical reflection on historical praxis, with priority always given to what is is happening in the real world, has "a close affinity with the pattern of the primitive Christian community in which theology grew out of the missionary proclamation of the church in concrete encounter with the world...

...The eschatological frame of reference, with apocalyptic rumblings in the background, serves Braaten better in his reflections on the future of Christianity in America...

...After reading 357 pages of his thoughts--and they are sound ones, no question there--he finally asks the clincher I've been waiting for, "how to achieve the elimination of television...

...Is there in fact a purely natural order of human existence...

...The one has forgotten the deceits and the insults that television inflicts on the American consciousness and the other has yet to hear of them...

...Both seem destined to be movies starring Tyrone Power, Gene Tierney, or ,the younger, slimmer Orson Welles, with music by Max Steiner...

...History fares better in the story...

...Denis by Stephen of Cloyes, then in the second crusade preached by Stephen of Cologne...

...for "The Centaur, whose bestiality is a "solid, moving, powerful, inel.uotable beauty...

...Later ,poems on the subject, "The Poem takes a Walk" and "Father Familiar," are less formally structured but equally powerful and haunting...

...Moreover, ,their relative pallor becomes more bothersome and their scope of truly effective action becomes more limited as they approach the vivid, concrete facts of the historical context .they ,inhabit...

...The decisive issues to be faced by the Christian conscience here arise from the Third World's economic domination by, and dependence upon, America where more and more power is falling into the hands of an elite few who are advised only by their own kept scientists and technological forecasters...

...Who can bear to be told still again that television is addictive, that it lies to children, manipulates adults, that it is anti-democratic and replaces human imagery, when most of us are already numb from knowing that the air and water are poisoned, the prisons are overcrowded, the schools are underfunded, the weapons lobby flourishes, the hills are stripmined, the elephants in East Africa are being wiped ore, the teenage suicide rate is soaring, inflation continues, Congress is weak and the President is weaker...

...Girl Three Years Into the World" and "Growing Into Light" are more successful...

...No new age of well-meaning television executives can change what the medium does to people who watch it...

...I'd have felt better if Mankiewicz, the President of National Public Radio, pounded his chest and said we'd all be better off if we gave up television for the delight of radio...

...And the historical context brings one of the Goulds to life quRe arrestingly...

...Best of all, Bruccoli prints Scott's ten-page critique of the first two deleted chapters of the ms...

...I don't think it is unfair to take note of the spineless conclusions that these critics reach before I report that much of the thinking that comes before these conclusions is sound...

...More attention might be given to the salutary (recreating) significance of the Incarnation and the meaning of the Second Adam situation in which the whole of humanity already exists...

...It is through these cultural riches of the nations, and therefore by means of the church's missionary out-reach to all peoples, that Christianity will become an a~thentically catholic and universally intelligible sign of humankind's unity and salvation...

...Molly Gould, ~e heroine,-is "a beautiful young woman whose fianc6 dies in an English jail, leaving her pregnant .and trapped .hetween ,Nicholas deLacy, whom she loves, and Peter Morrow, who has fathered her child, both of them committed to the passions and dangers of the Irish struggle for freedom...

...The Dandy, Midget, Eunuch, Cowboy, Gigolo, Masseur, Sailor, Weight Lifter, and Tattooed Lady, all costumed in extravagant, sensual imagery, demonstrate how tenuous and fluctuating is the line between normality and abnormality...

...But the characters are fiat and formulaic...

...That comment appears early ~n the text, and it forms the link with the call at the end of the book about "the public needs...

...The God who makes us is the one who saves, creating and recreating with a healing grace more powerful than the fragility of human freedom...

...More disturbing is the eccentrioity of "Dog Drinking at Night" in which .the sound of the dog's drinking proyokes reflection upon life's "primal wonder," a reflection which must, to the ordinary reader familiar with Bowser noisily slurping away at his water dish, seems some~rhat far-removed...

...His history is ~bout as sound as it needs to be...

...Braaten is "decidedly on the side of liberation theology," but he has some "constructive criticisms...

...they lag behind in a heavy pant of breathless denunciations at all the wicked effects of television and the baddies of the industry...

...The raids of the Black and Tans are painfully real...

...Theirs is essentially the sad story we can read in any history of the Crusades, of deluded children making their way south, their numbers wasted by defe~ion, disease, kidnapping, and ,the rigors of an Atpine crossing, disappointed in their expectation .that the Mediterranean would par~ before them, and, finally, trioked and sold into slaeeery in North Africa by wily shippets...

...So theological expertise and profound personal interest are reflected throughout these 200 pages of erudite and readable wrestling with the major theological themes related to Christianity's meaning, and the church's purpose, for the whole of humankind...

...My emotional sympathies are with the Mander book, my intellectual ones with Mankiewicz-Swerdlow's...

...Paul, allow their theological reflections to be shaped by the church's missionary encounter wi,th increasing numbers of non-Western peoples...

...If this grace really inundates the whole of everyone's life, superabounding where sin abounds, are nonChristians more apt than Christians to reject it...

...And, ~inally, there is the problem of language...

...Mander says he has no answers and ManldewiczSwerdlow offer the golden oldie of a tougher FCC...

...Poems like these show Eaton at his best: the talons grip in the first few lines and then powerful, .noiseless wings sweep the reader away...