BOOKS
Wood, William P. & Vellucci, Dennis & Merchant, Norris & O'Connell, David & Feo, Ronald De
inherent in capitalist industrialization. But there is practically no mention of thecontraryexperiencewhichhas played at least as important a role in our culture: the impact of the increasing...
...It would, of course, be foolish even to intimate that there is some easy plan for human salvation whichonly hasto bewilled into existence...
...The City Builder is really more of an essay than a novel, a sort of extendedfictionalmeditation,so it would be unfair to evaluate it by applying traditional standards...
...I prefer a full year subscription at $18...
...10016...
...Letters of not more than 250 or 300 words naturally have a better chance oJ being published...
...For this reason alone, Mr...
...Cast in the first person, it is told from the point of view of a city-planner who has been searching, in vain, for the ideal plan...
...Why can't we prove it definitively an absurd anachronism or at least a painted hoax...
...WoFkWSnl~d COOK/HOUSEKEEPER seeks positic~ with pHesh orbrothers...
...Before that, and before coming under the patronage of the House of Savoy, it was certainly exhibited (the first sure exhibition was in 1357) in France by the family of Geoffrey de Charny, who was French .~tandard bearer at the Battle of Poitiers, in 1356...
...Yves Delage, an agnostic professor of comparative anatomy at the Sorbonne...
...An un-named woman of the parish was his godmother on the occasion, but there was no godfather present...
...For this reason,DukeUniversityPresshas wisely decided to honor Wallace Fowlie in a special way on his retirement bypublishinghisintellectualautobiography.JournalofRehearsals, gleaned from his daily writings over almost fifty years, records for us the pilgrimage through time and space of a leading academic intellectual who is also a Christian...
...Her husband had already been recalled...
...This criticism even has its ironic aspect...
...To the Editors: Ten years ago when the encyclical Humanae Vitae was published,Iwasshockedatthe limited understanding of some theologians concerning the available philosophical defenses of the papal teaching on artificial birth control...
...Amin, as these accounts make clear, has no claim to support in his country based on ideology, because he has none...
...Arendt cuts herself off from this rich concept of the relation be-tween thinking and willing, which is a pity and an irony since many of its analyses border on her own...
...Gerald Weales on the Stage...
...I think so...
...But what is masked by the polite but faint praise that Fowlie's name often provokes from colleagues in the academy is the reaction that any man of staunch moral conviction who is also prolific arouses in an age of confusion and mediocrity...
...But how was the image impressed on the cloth...
...JourNal of Rehearsals WALLACE FOWLIE Duke, $12.75 [219 pp.] DAVID O'CONNELL WallaceFowlie,JamesB.Duke Professor of French at Duke University, is nearing the age of seventy and will soon retire...
...The stories of these educated,intelligent,capablemen closely resembleeach other.Amin once ordered Mr...
...Henry Kyemba engaged in just such an inner emigration, distancing his public role from the feelings he had inside himself about Amin to the point that he made no protest when Amin murdered his brother...
...But must thought be merely poignant and will merely personal...
...Both oftheseprotagonistsareweighed down by guilt because their attempts to deal with the ills of society, with the miseries of existence in general have been so half-hearted and inade-quate...
...George Konr[id hardly possesses a light touch, but his intellectual integrity and his ability to stimulate the reader to think and argue compensates for the general heaviness of his approach...
...But this educated man, often shocked by what Amin ordered him to do, went on serving the dicator for five years...
...With others they will provide a wide range of insights on questions of the day...
...Whereas The Caseworker was specific, illuminating a particular segment of society, an underground world, The City Builder takes an overall view, analyzing society in general...
...But this illusion of joy quickly gave way to horror as Amin's unpredictable murderousness appeared almost at once...
...Brother Julius, O.F.Id...
...tivr~J tJmuz...
...Fowlie has been at Duke since 1965, but during two earlier periods of his life, from 1935 to 1941, and from 1950 to 1962, he taught at Bennington College, and it was during one of theseperiodshedoesnotspecify which one--that he w.as baptized in 1 September 1978:568 thesmalllocalFrench-language church...
...sneered at by Erasmus or the Crown of Thorns (one of many in medieval circulation) for which King St...
...The author tempts him with some details (about the city builder's family, for instance, or his imprisonment during the war) and then frustrates him by slipping back into abstractions and generalities...
...Under the circumstances it is not surprising that much of their work is dark and closed...
...His predecessor, Milton Obote, was widely reviledat the time he was overthrown...
...Amin, admittedly, came to power in a burst of euphoria and celebration...
...Wilson, an Oxford history graduate, might justifiably be called a convert of the shroud...
...on the Movies...
...By comparison, East European fiction seems more concerned with the person, the individual than with "the people...
...But the so-called "Shroud of Turin" is an outstanding exception...
...Duns Scotus College Washington, D.C...
...His account leads us from the Palestine of Jesus to Edessa, where one of "the seyenty," early followers of Christ, Thaddeus, allegedly brought an enigmatic "portrait" with curative properties...
...The "Mandylion," then, which suddenly disappeared from history after the Venetian sacking of Constantinople in 1204, was perhaps in fact ~he "Shroud of Turin" known to us today---but rolled up, with only the holy face exposed in those days for public viewing.And what of the years just after its disappearancefromConstantinople, and before it entered the light in the late 14th century...
...he resists the temptation of suggesting that the sixties ended with Attica, or with Kent State, or with McGovern's defeat, or with Watergate...
...Given his mystical sensitivity to grace and to the divine presence of daily life, he shows no interest in an atheist like C61ine, or in existentialists like Sartre, Camus or Simone de Beauvoir...
...For to avoid censorship they cloak their fiction in symbols and metaphors...
...and he trivializes important events (Most of the article entitled "We Are All Part of Attica" I September1978:374 has to do with his inability to get a press pass to screenings at the New York Film Festival...
...Classified -RATES: 70c a woyd, one time...
...BorninBrooldine,Massachusetts and educated at BrooHine High School and at Harvard, where he took his B.A., M.A...
...REV...
...Both of these areas have produced writers of striking originality, energy and sophistication who are not only superior stylists but also gifted fantasists and surrealists, able to gracefully transform the ordinary into the extraordinary...
...On this count, both the Marxists andthephenomenologists, like Arendt,derive from Hegel's understanding that "essence" and "appearance" interpenetrate one another, that they do not form two separate realms...
...Kyemba, does this to block attacks from black groups...
...The essays become increasingly introspective, more personal thanpolitical,morepoignantthan critical...
...We miss the details that made The Caseworker so vivid, and above all, we miss the people...
...Though the two books are very similar, Konrid's cuts deeper, is more detailed and possesses a stylistic and thematicdensitythatWest'snovel lacks...
...All important carbon-14 testing to determine the relative date of the shroud's origin has been postponed chiefly because destruction of a considerable portion of its material would be involved to provide testing samples...
...Yetitsgrimnessis oftenrelieved (mercifully) by humor, not the wry or hearty brand we find in many of the Latin Americans, but a more perverse, off-center variety, a Kafka-like laughter in the dark...
...DEWmS V~LLUCCl OOOOOOOOO CORRESPONDENCE (Continued from page 547) intern informing the Chief of Surgeons how to operate on the head and the heart of the Mystical Body...
...DOYLE, O.F.M...
...More to the point, they make me think, they provoke the life of my mind...
...As society becomes increasingly complex and social problems multiply, the bureausestablished to handlethose problems and impose some order become impossibly complex and unmanageable themselves...
...RONaLDDE Vr.Owrites for...
...Kyemba calls it, of luxury goods from Britain shores up Amin's power more than any other single thing...
...Kyemba, with a greater intimacy of detail than either of the other Amin accounts, has filled om the contours of atrocities only vaguely chronicledinthe Western press...
...he commitment and activism that flourished not too long ago seems to have been replaced by a conformity and a complacency that is, perhaps, a sign of contemment, but that is more likely a result of the displacement of issues that demanded a largely emotional reaction---issueslikeVietnam,Civil Rights, and even, in its way, the race to the moon--by issues like energy and conservation and ~he economy, issues whicti are certainly important but which require more of an intellectual commitment than an emotional one...
...The style, I ~hink, is pretentiously "hip," as if the author considers himself another pseudo-Tom Wolfe-Hot-Shot-Journalist.Heplays loose with the English language, using nounsforverbs(forexample,"I second-acted the set," when he apparernly means that he missed the first part of the Stokowski concert he is writing about...
...The shroud as cynosure of veneration to the Templars (accused of worshipping "Baphomet," and worse) would in fact constitute grim paradox, and even the suggestion of it already partakes of a species of Calvary-like sublimity...
...So far of course their studies are inconclusive, but it is just that factor which challenges further probing of the relics elusive reality...
...We find here a decidedly inward turn...
...For fifteen years, from Uganda's independence to his flight from the country in the spring of 1977, Henry Kyemha worked at the highest echelons of government...
...And yet ~ereare sentences, paragraphs, insights and quotations which are so exciting that if I am unsatisfied with the whole, if I disagree on some rather basic issues, I nonetheless leave these books with the sense of having encountered a challenging intellect...
...And if fakery was to be assumed, by what process could the shroud have been prepared, that would ultimately require negative photography to disclose its---so far unimitable-luxury of eerie detail...
...and Ph.D...
...Given that perspective, it isnoaccidentthatshetalksof Schopenhauer and Nietzsche but not Marx...
...But it is precisely his concentrationonpersonalistvaluesthat leads this highly gifted thinker to a strong complete agreement with the Catholic teaching on artificialbirth control.UntilFr.Curranhonestly faces his opposition, his integrity as a scholar is to be highly questioned...
...Instead, the change is reflected by the content of Bernard's essays: the number of cultural articles increases each year from 1969 to 1977 while the number of political articles declines, so that by the time Watergate erupts, it is mentioned only in the context of some remarks made by Heinrich B6ll at a press conference, and there is no comment about Jimmy Carter at all...
...In February 1977, for example, while he carried om the murder of two Cabinet ministersand the Anglican Archbishop of Uganda, Amin's personal jet was being serviced in America...
...Conference of Research on the Shroud, held in A|buquerque, New Mexico, in March, 1977...
...Kyemba confesses...
...Like Oryema and Oboth-Ofumbi," the two officialskilled in February 1977, "I knew too much...
...Reply Box Number 32...
...With these goods he can keep his police and security forces paid extravagantly...
...It seems to me that civilized conversation could also be a function of the teaching office of the church...
...I do not want to end on such a negative note...
...They seen to exist not so much in a world as in a series of rooms, and the reader is made to share their claustrophobia...
...The social worker,whoseintensemonologue comprises the book, eventually becomes overwhelmed by the human suffering and wreckage he must confront day after day, just as Miss Lonelyhearts, an advice-to-the-lovelorn columnist, becomes overwhelmed by all of the pathetic and tragic mail he receives daily...
...He works with discipline and his labor is guided by the light of faith...
...An antic bloodlust rampages unchecked in Uganda and Idi Am_in, at the very least,should have been universally condemned a long time ago...
...From 1971 to 1977 he served in the Cabinet of Icti Amin and from that perspective has written his account of the savagery in today's Uganda...
...But before this...
...The bookseems to have no center...
...He was hanged, obviously, for the deeds of his "official soul," whatever in~ernal qualms he may have habored notwithstanding...
...IAN WILSON Doubleday, $10 [272 pp.] NORRIS MERCHANT The age of relics often seems to have passed...
...From the published writings of van Hildebrand it is pellucid that his entire treatment of Ethics in general and marriage in particular is all in terms of values...
...It pleases many nations, for money, religious reasons, even perversity, to buttress up Amin.Mr.Kyembaestimatesthat Uganda has an inflation rate of 400 percent today...
...But there is practically no mention of thecontraryexperiencewhichhas played at least as important a role in our culture: the impact of the increasing human control of external nature, an ambiguous but unmistakable part of our lives...
...Kyemba elected to remain in Uganda and government...
...The Meladys and Gywn have written different books...
...63c, six times...
...They seemed to think that this teaching is necessarily bound up with the "physicalCemmeaweal Papers #l: NEW FRONTIFAI8 IN TELEOLOGY Orders for additional copies will be rifled while the supply lasts . 1 to 9 copies, $1.50 each 10 or more copies, $1 each Postpaid Payment should accompany order Circulation Dept...
...9-1-7~ Commonweal: 573 also to record the vain efforts made by the modern state to alleviate that hell...
...The flights continue...
...He has described his own involvement, and Amin's, in the murder of Dora Bloch, who was left behind in a Ugandan hospital following the successful Israeli raid on the Entebbe airport...
...He clarifies thought, connects us with the experience and life of the Christian community and opens the way to future thought and action...
...As he puts it himself, his life has been devoted to "daily progress in thought, writing and spirituality," and we should be grateful to him for sharing with us the major landmarks and experiences of his pilgrimage...
...And even in his books on Gide, Baudelaire and Rimbaud, the sense of spiritual quest is a dominant motif...
...Over the years, teaching at Harvard, Bennington, Chicago, Yale and Duke, he has made many friends and trained what must be a rather larger number of Ph.D...
...MUL.OLL~,~ Ann Arbor, Mich...
...Thomas Melady, the last American ambassador to Uganda, could only look in from the outside, and see dimly the workings of Amin's furious anarchy...
...IenjoyedC...
...A superb lecturer and a legendary teacher, if one is to believe those who have studied with him, Fowiie through his many books has done with taste and zest what every scholar should ideally do: teach those, students and colleagues alike, who are beyond the reach of his own classroom...
...For box numbers add 60c per insertion...
...ROY E]FFLER, O.F.M...
...lan Wilson's The Holy Shroud o/ Turin helps us to understand these as yet not fully explainable anomalies...
...In fact, if there were any sustained laughter at all we suspect that it would be hysterical in nature, a howl at the steady stream of misery, horror and chaos that is recorded, the kind of cry released by Tod Hackett at the end of Nathanael West's The Day o/the Locust...
...BoxIS ZAmbesl, 7Jmble,Central Africa, appeals for "little packages of everyday things,religiousartlcles,soap, pencils, cheap )ewulry and any IRfle thing ,~0u mlght consider helpful in our poor missions.' Commonweal: 575...
...It was arranged to look as if Mrs...
...Address...
...There are a number of mystical experiences alluded to in the book, although Fowlie discreetly avoids revealing too much of himself...
...I have reservations about Bernard's style and his book...
...One incident of particular interest,however, took place while Fowlie and T. S. Eliot were serving Mass together one morning in the thirties at the Anglo-Catholic chapel in Cambridge...
...I knew the first and third men and their work very well, over a period of some 30 years...
...Kyemba believes, as he told the press during the Commonwealth Conference, that these private visits were made for the purpose of performing ritual blood worship wRh the dead, but he set them up anyway...
...But a little of the kind of wit employed by West in Miss Lonelyhearts would have been very welcome...
...It was not until June 1977 that any international body publicly condemned Idi Amin as the Commonwealth Conference did...
...He admits he knew a great deal about the deaths in Uganda...
...What Melady knew, and relates with direct horror, is the murder of close friends, people of intelligence and talent who would have helped build Uganda...
...10016ism" that Fr...
...For Fowlie, raised a Baptist, but converted to Catholicism, the road to Rome seems in retrospect, to this reader at least, to have been clearly marked out for him through the people he met...
...He was a perfect technocrat who had entered government service as a protocol officer adept at staging and arranging and he continued to act in the same way even when ~he things he was called on to arrange were part of a depraved carnival...
...But the Marxists then go on to analyze that interpenetration historically, in terms of human activity, and they suggest that the world can be transformed by an activism which understands and an understanding which is active...
...Thomas Church, Sesthamkatie, P.O., KERALA, India asks for used cioe'bing and such religious e~icies as rosaries, scepv* lets, statues and religious Easter and Christmas cards...
...That detailed negative showed with a disturbing clarity only partially suggested before then the image of an impressively shaped human body bearing in precise detail the stigmata recorded as Christ's in the Gospels...
...In The City Builder, Konrid's latest novel, the author is again concerned, at least in part, with the state's attempt to order society...
...Wilson, having become convinced of the shroud's authenticity,enteredtheCatholic Church...
...His book attempts to follow the shroud's long itinerary over an Commonweal:571 often dark continent of Christian history...
...The National Review, The Nation and other journals...
...Mlssima Paekages Father Paul Cruz, St...
...Yet it is in his historical imagination, in reconstructing the shroud's obscure background, that Mr...
...Curran's piece [July 7] in spite of myself, especially the reference to D. Maguire and his insistence that "magisterium" has a plural...
...He has avoided fads---like the "existentialist" fad that ran through modern language and Englishdepartmentsin the fifties and sixties, and the "structuralist" fad that we are enduring todaymin order to explicate authors whom he takes to be significant and whose work will have enduring value...
...Like Eichmann on a tour of a killing ground near Lemberg, there is a real danger of being rendered speechless by the fout~ain of blood gushing from the earth...
...The characters are more introspective, waU-bound and oppressed...
...Up to 200,000 people have been murdered in Uganda...
...Recent serious developments of Marx's ideas--Karel Kosik's, for instance--make a united front with the phenomenologists in rejecting the "two world" theory of essence and accidents...
...Yet despite a strong similarity in method and spirit, their works seem to differ quite a bit in focus and direction, and above all in the atmosphere, the worlds that they create...
...It ishard to imagine the multiple relics of the True Cross (enough to build a battleship...
...On the contrary, from the day, while he was still in high school, when he heard PaulClaudellectureinBoston, through his associations with the family of Ernest Psichari, and his friendship with Maritain, the Catholic connection has been constant...
...Kyemba's account and not superimpose HRler's brilliant technocrat Albert Speer...
...Thus, later on, he asked Maritain if he would accept the responsibility, and when the latter agreed, his name was entered retrospectively on the baptismal papers in Bennington's Sacr6Coeur church...
...10016 Please send the next 11 issues of Commonweal to: Name...
...A State o! Blood is neither comCommonweal: 569 pletely history nor personal memoir, but an amalgam of the two like the Meladys' book...
...And while they detail the Amin years, the murders, the betrayals, the suffering and insanity,thecommentators onAmin have raised him to a moral example, fearsome, enormous, and vexing...
...What this outpouring of interest in Amin has done is to elevate him to grand heights...
...The constant shifting from the concrete to the abstract becomes irritating, for just when the reader is settling on firm ground he is yanked away...
...Amin, says Mr...
...While in Paris in the early thirties to begin writing his doctoral dissertation on an arcane subject, he made the acquaintance by chance of a Mine Faure, the widow of the little-known novelist, Ernest Psichari, who had been converted to Catholicism shortly before World War I and who died on the battlefield during the first weeks of the war...
...O'Meara was indeed "an authority on Duns Scotus," as Deedy says...
...He never does more than pose the question...
...Their messages come to us in code...
...He reveals how frail even intelligence andcivilization can be whenconfronted by such evil...
...For here, as precisely set down in thesebooks, is a figure entirely devoid of humanity, one bloated with murder and brutality, still ruling, still supported and aided, still playing on the world's stage, served by greedy men and good men, proving each day that there is no evil too great to be tolerated...
...For this reason, the inevitable Festschrift, i.e., the memorial volume of essays dedicated to a great scholar's memory, usually including an analytical bibliography of his life's work, will most likely be appearing before too long...
...Knowing what I did about the nature of Amin's rule, why did I serve?," he muses...
...Wilson disingenilously delivers a bomb at the door of historians of the Knights Templar...
...Bernard wisely avoids the task of defining precisely when this shift in national spirit took place...
...New York, N.Y...
...These officials posited the notion of being "inner emigrants" who despised HRler even as they obeyed him...
...To the Editors: The article by Rev...
...Nevertheless, Bernard's candor about himself, about the people he encounters and the places he visits,makes Witnessing: The Seventies a unique chronicle of individualexperience thathelps to identify the elusive spirit of the decade...
...iOc, twelve times...
...Bloch had just vanished rather than being dragged screaming from her room by two security soldiers...
...The essays in this volume, written between ChristmasDay 1969 and Easter 1977...
...0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 IH BRIL WITNESSING: THE SEVENTIES by Sidney Bernard, Horizon, $12.95 [232 pp.] Sidney Bernard begins one of the essays in his collection, Witnessing: The Seventies, by suggesting that there is a need to define the past, for in so doing, no cultural, social, or political movement can ever appear wholly new and without precedent...
...Suddenly, after Communion, Eliot fell to floor, face down, arms outstretched, in a mystical encounterwithGod.But what is so disarming about Fowlie is that he talks of such experiences, as well as of his own deep convictions about the necessity for spiritual values in art and literature, without the slightest evidence of concern that in the academy these days such a tolerant and open viewpoint toward the spiritual is hardly widespread...
...It was revealed in the fall that Ugandan pilots were being trained in Texas to fly helicopters...
...But such publications tend to be somewhat uneven, and often quite boring, since the contributions usually have only one thing in common-the relationship of the contributors to the remembered teacher and scholar.Theircurrentinterestsare usually quite disparate and thus the Festschrift (American professors seem to have a special fondness for the word, its frequency of use varying inversely with one's knowledge of German) is usually of interest and valueto an individual subscriber solely for the bibliography it contains...
...Still, the book is well worth reading for its intelligence and insights, and The Caseworker, despite its excessive weightiness,shouldnotbemissed...
...It is a problem with even the best of the new journalism that the author's personality can emerge so strongly as to dwarf the significance of the events about which he writes...
...John Garvey on Religious Books...
...NORMS MERCR^~r is a lecturer in the area of philosophy, mysticism and comparative religion at the Cooper Union and Hofstra University...
...Hannah Arendt had a dangerous and daring habit of the most sweeping generalizations...
...Wilson presents such ideas with bits of supportive detail, and just enoughcircumstantialevidence,to make him no doubt among the brightestandmoststimulatingmodern Templars of that redoubtable shroud, stamped as it is with a timelessly significant image, whatever its origin...
...represent Bernard's own attempt to define the past--a very recent past--in a set of impressionistic sketches whose subjects range from American politics to theater and film to the New York social and literary scenes...
...Similardifficultiesconfrontedthe reader of Juan Goytisolo's recent work, Count 7ulian and Juan the Landless, which, like Konr~id's book, were cast as meditations, but here the reader was carried on by the tension created by Goytisolo's fiery spirit and savage wit...
...At a time when standards of scholarly performance have dropped, and with hundredsoffullprofessorshipsat major universities occupied by nonscholars, this is an especially impressive achievement...
...To this must be added the critical comment of our regular columnists to grasp what a subscription to Commonweal will bring you in issue after issue...
...Even so-called common, downto-earth people--the kind we find, say, in Garcia M~rquez's No One Writes 1 September 1978:572 to the Colonel, Rulfo's The Burning Plain and Vargas Llosa's Conversations intheCathedral--becomeaftera while the stuff of legend...
...Melady's wife saw Lake Victoria for the last time in 1973 as her plane circled over it, carrying the rest of the family back to the United States...
...AmmLSON Commonweal welcomes letters on subjects treated in its pages...
...Later, after centuries hidden away from persecutors in Edessa, the portrait was rediscovered, to become the famous "Mandylion" of Byzantine Christianity --an image of Christ's face on cloth, procured in 944 by Constantinople and venerated there, until becoming lost sight of in the Fourth Crusade...
...These three accounts arrive at essentially the same answer to the question...
...Both of them finally establish an intimate relationship with a suffering soul, Miss Lonelyhearts with the wife of an impotent cripple and the caseworker with a hopelessly retarded child...
...This approach, however, creates problems for the reader...
...Each is a persistent recouuting of the malleability of moral principle and how evil can not only be easily supported, but flourish too...
...C...
...Later on he asks again, "was I not by my very presence sanctioning the terror...
...We sometimes feel that Konrfid is attempting to do too much, to cover too much ground...
...It is, finally, the clearest impression of Amin that an American could have...
...To some extent, I suppose, Konr~d intends to weary us so that we can share the caseworker's perspective and frustration...
...The grotesque figure who rules that nation is supported by various Arab states and Islamic groups...
...I do not raise this point out of the sectarian concern of a democratic Marxist...
...David Willis, was once head of the British Society for the Turin Shroud and it was through him that the then-agnostic Mr...
...As it is, the shroud is known to have been exhibited in its present home, the Turin Cathedral, since 1578...
...It is here that Mr...
...How can this happen...
...She looked down and realized that the mutilated body of an old friend, one who had introduced her to her husband, may have been dumped "like a sack of garbage" into the swampy lake...
...Which was Arendt's ultimate, laudable point...
...I Was not yet ready for the only alternative: flight...
...To my knowledge, O'Meara did not consider himself a "nee-Thornier" or any kind of Thomist, still less (if possible) a Maritain disciple.JAMESF...
...monthly in advance formore than t~ree times...
...For Fowlie the association is not fortuitous, for his autobiography is remarkable not only for the kinds of people he has met, and on whose work he has written or whose friendship he has treasured, but also for those names that are absent...
...A Slat~ ef Bk~l HENRY KYEMBA Ace $2.50 [288 pp.] id| Atoll lkmia: J~lt/er Afrk~ THOMAS & MARGARET MELADY Sheed Andrews & McMeel, $7.95 [184 pp.] ldi Amiat: Deaslr~lb-lM~hr of Atfrkm DAVID GYN Little Brown, $8.95 [240 pp.] WILLIAM P. WOOD Idi Amin Dada, who declared himself "a man of few words" in 1971, has become the subject of a word flood in fact and fiction...
...He is evil without redemption...
...REV...
...DENNISVELLUCClhas taught in the English Department at the University of Southern California at Los Angeles.each year not on literature but on other critics...
...Not only has it maintained itself in an atmosphere of formidable desaoralization of old, purportedly holy objects and emblems, but scientists in several countries have givon it their attention, apparently regarding the unraveling of its secret a worthy ente~rise...
...The revamped Nation of Islam and Roy Innis of the Congress of Racial Equality once proposedsending black Americansto Uganda to take up the economic slackwhenAminexpelledthenation's Asians in 1972...
...Broadly speaking, the Latin Americans elevate their material to the mythic level...
...Experienced in cateringfor large community...
...His language is so studied and "inflated that at times it is simply impenetrable...
...Kyemba has performed a valuable service...
...They may at first appear "small," but eventually they grow larger than life...
...That superficial messianism has no place in any serious discussion...
...He has not been...
...To drive home his themes, Konr~id really does rub our faces in the dirt and disorder, and for all the brilliant writing, the wonderful details and observations, the pyrotechnical feats and the vivid nightmarish scenes, his book eventually wearies the reader by its unrelieved grimness and sameness of tone...
...This analysis is partially correct (his famous A Reading o/ Proust is the best introductory book in any language on Proust and his novel), but it is also based on incomplete data(his books on Psichari, Gide, Rimbaud and Lautr6amont are original and solid by any criterion...
...This realization prompted his flight from Uganda in April...
...RETURN COUPON OR A FACSIMILE .............11 Issues (S months) fer $4...........-= FOR NEW S~IERSONLY COMMONWEAL, 232 Madison Ave., New York, N.Y...
...These are questions which in our time have increasingly engaged the interest of radiologists, blood analysts, chemists, textile specialists,computerscientists,and even criminologists, and which caused two U.S...
...His original mentor, the late Dr...
...Is there at least the possibility~fallible, battered, but better than any other----of changing,as well as understanding,the world...
...Musle NEWCATALOG,$1.00: EarlyMusic Stands, Drawer SI0, P.O...
...And the UnRed States remains the Iargest purchaser of Ugandan coffee, even though we embargoed Cuba for acts far less barbarous than those of Idi Amin...
...That sense of tension, of a steady build-up is noticeably lacking in The City Builder...
...Kyemba, while he was Minister of Health, to falsify the records at Kampala's Mulago Hospital of Dora Bloch...
...The C~tV Builder GEORGE KONRAD Harcourt, Brace, $7.95 [184 pp.] RONALDDE FEO I think it is fairly safe to say that some of today's most interesting and stimulating fiction has come to us from Latin America and Eastern Europe...
...Henry Kyemba is the most intriguing figure in the three Amin accounts because he escaped from Uganda to write his story...
...Of course, Konrld has much more on his mind, for he wishes not only to depict the hell of existence but In Prospect Among the features sch~luled to appear in Commonweal in coming weeks are thoughtful articles by such contributors as: Lawrence S. Cunningham, Adrian Hastings, Peter Walshe, Brian Wicker, Peter Kovler and Alan Paton...
...In the context of his discussion Mr...
...Even here in the United Statesa strange tacit support for Amin continues, administration criticism aside...
...COMMONWEAL, 2]| Mad;son Ave., Haw York...
...Photography had just become the first modern investigative technique to lend respectability to the shroud as some kind of marvelous "phenomenon" even if that were not precisely what it had for centuries been purported to be...
...degrees, Fowlie has written over twenty books and scores of articles on French literary subjects, and has published at least a dozenbook-lengthtranslationsof worksrangingfromMoli~reto Claudel, Mauriac and Saint-John Perse...
...Reports of mass murder and monstrous slaughter have cirulated almost since Amin seized power, bmtrade continues with him and there is no clamorous denunciation of his regime...
...DAVID O'COHlqELLisaprofessor of French at the University of Illinois at Chicago Circle Campus...
...Their advocacy has become less than plausible after Vatican H, and perhaps the Middle Ages would be astonished at our speed in disposing of many of them or at the casualness with which innumerable altars once housing precious or sacral remnants of hallowed beingsinperpetualmemorialhave themselves been transformed into lessawesomely problematic tables...
...Kafka haunts this literature (as do the war and the Holocaust...
...Tweiyo words minimum...
...However, there is little of even this sort of laughter in the work of George Konrfid, a Hungarian writer, essayist and sociologist, who in recent years has emerged as a major figure in East European literature...
...Wilson in this new study has shown himself most original, even audacious...
...we calculate this using the macabre measuring device of one boatman at Owens Falls pulling out twenty bodies a day from that watery burial ground since July 1971 and multiplying by ewo other similar mass graves...
...Yet there are questions raised by all of these accounts which are disturbing and transcend both Amin and suffering Uganda...
...Although the Organization of African Unity is embarrassed by Amin, it has never taken ehe step of denouncing him...
...and his rhetoric for outside consumptionplayscynically onracial pride...
...It is impossible, for that reason, to read Mr...
...To the Editors: Reference is made to John Deedy's statement in "The Changing Scene" [News & Views, July 7...
...Debunking clerics like Chevalier might have supposed fraudulent misrepresentation in the concocting of the shroud, but the ever more discerning camera eye revealed a striking "new" negative image that had reposed for centuries in the linen, awaiting the camera's inven'~ion to unveil it...
...He is an educated man, trained at Bugosa College and Makerere University, and he served as head of several ministries under Amin...
...There it is said that the three named deceased "neo-thomists" (Pegis, Pollock and O'Meara) were "intimate disciples of . . . Jacques Maritain...
...And, in that regard, he has been reasonably successful Several black organizationshaveexpressedvarying amounts of support for him, although otherscondemnedhimalong with South Africa...
...Curran has not learned otherwise with the passage of 10 years...
...City, State, Zip...
...Curran decries [July 7], and apparently Ft...
...I have had to explain the humor in this little anecdote every time one of our children came into a maturity sufficient enough to realize that another point of view is sometimes where civil-ized conversation leads us...
...Physicalism" is explicitly rejected...
...At this beginning of fall why not send for a trial subscription...
...For Fowlie is like those artisans of the Ue de France who labored incessantly for over a century to create the great Notre Dame cathedral...
...Charles Curran, "Reflections on Humanae Vitae"[July 7] was excellent...
...Louis IX built the Sainte Chapelle resisting for so long and ever more brilliantly the relentless positivist zeal of a technical civilization to catalog and thus perfectly define and dismiss the mana-powered object...
...Morally, of course, this odd concept is unacceptable, and legally it has no force whatsoever.Athistrial,Gauleiter Arthur Greiser of Poland said only his "official soul" had carried out the executions of 15,000 people while his "private soul" had always been appalled by such actions...
...Wilson disposes of the Veronica legend as ultimately derived from a fabled origin attributed to one of the copies of the Mandylion--the vera icon...
...He also made it possible for the dictator to be alone in the hospitalmortuary with the corpses of prominentvictims.Mr...
...I felt sickened by my actions," Mr...
...That reminded me of the old joke about how most of the blessedin heaven have to celebrate quietly so as not to disturb the Catholics who are also in that state...
...Our Reviewers These include Colin Westerbeck, Jr...
...It exemplifies the theologian at his best...
...Wilson's thesis takes on the character of a tantalizing evocation of historical mysteries every bit as uncertain (as of now) as the shroud they are concerned with...
...Southfield, Mich...
...WILLIAM P. WOOD iS a free-lance writer and critic living in California...
...For no matter how much power he andthe other, more power-hungry, dictatorial planners exert, and no matter what form of socialism is imposed, society and its complexities as well as the mysterious workings of chance defeat the best of plans...
...Indeed, it was one of Arendt's greatscholarly limitationsthatshe was systematically unfair to Marx (the discussion of his concept of work in The Human Condition bordered on the scandalous...
...Pegis was a disciple of the Thomist, Etienne Gilson, not of Jacques Maritain...
...MARCIA...
...Though the novel is filled with tirades against technology and allusions to modern Hungarian history, it does go beyond the purely social and political dimension...
...Though not a politically conscious writer like Konrad, West, perhaps more than any other author, comes to mind when we arereading Konrad'searlier novel, The Caseworker...
...He has handed the world a record...
...Classified payable with order...
...The Mandylion-Shroud, he avers, seems to have been the celebrated image so secretly and so exorbitantly venerated by the Templars that, along with other infamies and heresies imputed to them by the jealous and the avaricious, it contributed to the Templars' ruin and extermination...
...Industry has almost been obliterated...
...At least three of these recent books are attempts to express the inexpressible,to sum up the outrage of Amin's actions...
...Amin receives aid from many nations and a regular bi-weekly"whiskeyrun,"asMr...
...Norris Merchant, Gary MacEoin, Margaret Wimsatt, Michael Harrington, George Woodcock, Henry Warner Bowden and Wayne Andrews...
...Yet taken purely on its own terms the book still has problems...
...Fowlie is one of the truly great American scholar/teachers of French in this century, yet his reputation is considered by some to be simply thatof a fellow who writes "easy" books designed primarily for an undergraduate audience...
...After the war, certain German officials claimed to have secretly opposed 1 September 1978:570 Hitler while carrying out his commands...
...One such group organized the first U.S...
...ANNE R. LAURANCE Deubti~ Tkemists Rehoboth Beach, Del...
...Commonweal 232 Madison Ave...
...REv...
...To the Editors: I had thought there couldn't be anything else to read about Humanae Vitae after ten years had passed(he-hum...
...His books include The Other America, Socialism and The Vast Maiority (Simon & Schuster...
...That the spirit of the sixties is not the spirit of the seventies is clear...
...Could be the magisteria have something to learn from the mouths of babes...
...It's said, in this version, that the Catholics think they are the only ones there...
...I;ox 277, Pale Alto, CA 94302...
...Cap.Fatima Idleseen P.O...
...Psichari, whomMaritainlaterdescribedto Fowlie as "a pure example of God's entrance into a human being," became the subject of Fowlie's doctoral thesis at Harvard and through him and his experience of conversion, Fowlie himself was to find his way to Catholicism...
...candidates...
...Uniquely positioned to view the decline of his country under Amin's dictatorship, Mr...
...He is compared to Hitler...
...When she makes them in the area of my own specialization, I am often uneasy ---as areotherspecialists in other fields with whom I have talked...
...Arendt, it seems ~o me, does not...
...At the turn of the century the shroud enjoyed the distinction among relics of having been attacked by priests (Father Harold Thurs~on and Canon Ulysse Chevalier) and defended by scientists (biologist Paul Vignon and Dr...
...The Shroud of Turin: The Burial Cloth of Jesus Christ...
...When we think of his work we recall shadowy little rooms, cells for living, and we see such rooms again in the fiction of "Konr~id and in the (rediscovered) work of Bruno Schulz and to some extent in that of Gombrowicz,KunderaandVacullk.At times we not only sense the oppression of the characters, but of their creators as well...
...Konr~id's rhetoric works against him here...
...In my seminary training back in the early forties, we were introduced to such authors as Herbert Dams and Dietrich van Hildebrand...
...Konr~d uses the city as a metaphor not only for society, but for the individual as well, and we often find his planner trying to put his life and his past in perspective, in much the same way as he has tried to do with the life history of the city...
...More fundamentally, I think it unfortunate that Arendt in Thinking dismisses the concept of praxis--of actiontochangetheworldbased upon theory and valuesmin an inaccurate aside...
...In this he leaves himself vulnerable to the criticism of the academic roods who, having turned their backs on the real world, write more and more books and articles 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 liEVIEWEllm ~ICUAF.L t~atmNGTON is Chairman of the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee...
...Air Force Academy physicists to assemble that first American scientific conference on the shroud...
Vol. 105 • September 1978 • No. 17
