Critics' Christmas Choices
Fremantle, Anne & Maloff, Saul & Phillips, Robert & Zahn, Gordon & Cox, Harvey & Dillard, Annie & Harrison, Barbara Grizzuti & Kotre, John N. & Perkins, Pheme & O'Brien, David & Groth, Janet
remark to themselves on her ugliness--but by her independence and the force of her personality, she is always the center of attention. In the film, Lizzie seems to have more this sort...
...This was also the year of a delightful poetry transl/ttion: A. Poulin, Jr.'s rendition, from the French, of Rilke's The Roses & The Windows (Graywolf Press, P:O...
...One wonders how many other tales of resistance, equally inspiring in their heroism, have been lost as these almost were...
...But much of the character James gave her has disappeared...
...Released for good behavior after some years, she joins the Sisters, and, in time, visits the prison where she herself served time...
...American poetry, on the other hand, fared better this year...
...Martin's Press...
...of them were brought up in the most appalling poverty, not rancorous...
...But read in sequence, we perceive Rilke inventing variations and fugues upon his two stated subjects, roses and windows...
...A consequence is that the film sympathizes with the American characters in a way that the novel does not...
...For example, in 1945 he writes: "Dear Bunny, I happened to read The Crackup the other night...
...I know that The Habit of Being, the volume of Flannery O'Connor's letters, has already been done splendid justice in these pages by Robert Phillips's review [Commonweal, 4/13/79...
...What is becoming increasingly clear is that Latin American Christians are not talking about some cheap po!iticization of Christianity but about a radically authentic recovering of the very heart of the Gospel, the good news of God's choice of the disinherited and broken-hearted as those in whom the Kingdom is appearing in history...
...as Comblin so devastatingly shows, national security is a doctrine, using ideas such as God, Christian civilization and the rest to legitimate a deformed social order...
...I I Annie Dillard i if I 'VE BEEN reading at random and at whim, as usual...
...The jacket is inspired, the binding sumptuous...
...Here is one who cares about language, and has never written a trivial poem...
...Otherwise, we are left with the impression that James's great heroine is some kind of bewitching nonentity...
...Trying to follow the method pioneered by Coles, I have come to appreciate the difficulty of condensing a life into a book, into thirty pages or ten or one, into a paragraph, a sentence, even a phrase...
...Blythe told it, without being moved to tears...
...She fashions herSleepless Nights into an exquisite piece of embroidery, colors and contours blending in a book whose workmanship is as subtle as it is masterly...
...I am a little annoyed at the way the reviews of this well researched and interestingly written book keep arguing about whether Kris, tol, Moynihan, Bell et al...
...Nonetheless, it does clarify and focus a powerful but diffuse feeling I have had ever since I became a parent, that having children makes us infinitely more vulnerable to the buffeting and bludgeoning of the furies than we would be if we were childless...
...One is Peter Steinfels's very important T~e Nr (Simon and Schuster, $11.95,355 pp...
...Their work contains practical suggestions for ministers wishing to take advantage of new insights into the life cycle and, I hope, foreshadows theological reflections in the eighties...
...Ronald Blythe brings the elderly where they belong--back into the circle of the living...
...This is a perfectly structured work of art, a well-made exemplum of grace...
...With Commonweal: 700this volume, Frederick Morgan takes his place among a handful of contemporary American poets it is impossible to ignore...
...Senescence: The word itself, with its repeated forbidding sibilants, is off-putting...
...Meier wishes to show the interrelation between Matthew's picture of Jesus, his understanding of Christian ethics,and his vision of the Church as the new, eschatological people of God...
...In one of the many fine letters Flannery O'Connor shared with her friend "A" she writes: "I am reading the [Simone] Weil books now...
...This critical biography, which was nominated for a National Book Award, provides an intelligent reading of Woolf's life in the light of the issues raised in her work...
...Both exegetes show an ability to appreciate issues raised by the Freudian revolution while using their Biblical material to, raise issues about its claim to be a universal hermeneutic for all cultural phenomena...
...He was headed for disaster from his youth up...
...I had asked him how he accounted for the poetic cadences of almost all the old people who speak to us in The View In Winter...
...Ever since the Lord told Isaiah (45.7) "I form the light, and create darkness, I make peace and create evil, I the Lord do all these things," human beings have been struggling to fit these words into the context of their own free choice, however limited by determinism, genetics, environment (Darwin, Freud, Marx...
...HISTORY: Johnny Carey, Cort Conley, and Ace Barton, Snake River of Hells Canyon (Backeddy Books, Cambridge, Idaho...
...It is fitting...
...Bemstein applies some simple aspects of Chomsky's transformational grammar to the techniques of Mozart and Schoenberg...
...is a novel about two brothers in today's Ireland, who become involved with opposite sides, and, this too, is a novel about good and evil and free choice...
...Unlike much "poetry" published today, Smith's poems are not disposable...
...Mary Gordon, Final Payments (Random House, $8.95...
...Considering the state of today's publishing, this quality is worthy of mention...
...John Pfeiffer, TOe Emergence of Man (Harper, $8.95 paper...
...As convenient and easy to use as a dictionary, this all-new Analytical Concordance offers greatly expanded access to the meanings underlying the modern Revised Standard text...
...THIRD-EYE THEOLOGY Theology in Formation in Asian Settings CHOAN-SENG SONG "Perhaps only an Asian theologian, postVietnam, could have directed us so forcefully to the blood and earthiness, the pain of childbirth and self-immolation, that challenges the neon-lighted, cellophanewrapped Christianity of the West and its imperialisms...
...in these pages before, a good book is hard to find and can't be praised enough...
...a strongly-argued attack on vogueish tendencies in criticism and literature, "conservatism" at its best, as serious as John Gardner's "moral" criticism of the contemporary novel is fatuous and selfserving...
...Two of our own are subjects of important recent studies...
...Details an exciting moment in the history of scholarship...
...deals also with the problem of evil, but in the form of a novel...
...and it handles the matter of Woolf with a startling and agreeable wit and enjoyment...
...Thus, there has been plenty of interesting reading this year...
...A very witty monograph...
...The books I wish to take note of here are: Letters of Flannery O'Connor: The Habit of Being, Selected and edited by Sally Fitzgerald (Farrar, Straus, $15,617 pp...
...This little volume is also a beautiful example of bookmaking...
...they are part of the nearly 400 poems in French which Rilke wrote following composition of the Elegies and Sonnets...
...Blythe had chosen to write a kind of poetic distillation of their rough speech...
...reminds us again how valuable a literary intellectual he was...
...How could anyone read it and still accept his word or his expertise about anything...
...CRITICISM AND LETTERS: Robert Scholes, Structuralism in Literature (Yale, $13...
...Eugenia, on the other hand, is very beautiful in the movie since she is played by Lee Remick...
...is a splendid celebration, in the form of a novel, of the victory of good over evil...
...A ift forall seasons] .:~ ~i...
...I stiff don't know which, and I notice that many women also find quite opposite meanings in it...
...The other recommended new collection, interestingly enough, is also published by University of Illinois Press: The book is Goshawk, Antelope ($10, $3.95 paper, 128 pp...
...Commonweal readers will have a special interest in several works of Catholic scholarship...
...Jayne Anne Phillips, Black Tickets (Delacorte Press/Seymour Lawrence, $8.95...
...his book makes me very happy...
...This partisan irony is at work from the very beginning of the novel, where an inn that is "gloomylooking" in one line is "the best hotel in the ancient city of Boston" a few lines further on...
...Styron takes Shopie's choice and shows, with immense subtley, how even in a concentration camp, it was still free...
...BARBARA GRIZZUTI HARRISON is the author of Visions of Glory: A History and a Memory of Jehovah's Witnesses (Simon and Schuster/Touchstone...
...As it is, we are fortunate to have these accounts...
...Death Mother" is a mixture of myth and religion, war and domesticity, life and death...
...80302...
...And because this Analytical Concordance is intended specifically for use with the RSV, there is no extraneous material applying to the other translations...
...The Europeans offers us the worst of both worlds, not a world better than our own...
...It makes someone who is morally ambiguous in the novel into someone who is merely inscrutable...
...7 December ! 979:693Rosellen Brown, Tender Memories (Knopf, $8.95...
...one book I love...
...Ivory's version of The Europeans removes Eugenia's inner conflicts the way furniture might be removed from a room...
...This powerful, dramatic story of courage and incompetence provides important new information about a major turning point in the history of imperialism...
...Marvin Mudrick can be insufferable--strident, gleefully nasty where the work under review isn't worth the bother,hyperkinetic, wrongheaded at times (as on Edmund Wilson), too clever by half (as in the very title of his new collection, Books Are Not Life But Then What Is?, Oxford University Press, $12.95, 348 pp...
...THE ARTS: Leonard Bernstein, The Unanswered Question (Schirmer, $20...
...Ramati details the astonishingly successful work of a Franciscan priest who was given the task by his local bishop of facilitating the escape of Jews...
...SAUL MALO~F, a novelist and critic, is a regular contributor to Commonweal and other magazines...
...Coleman Barks, New Words (Sweetwater Press...
...Besides some Dickents, Fuentes, and Updike, besides Paul Horgan's Richard novels and Anthony Powell'sA Dance to the Music of Time, here are some of the books I've liked recently: NEW FICTION: Kit Reed, The Ballad of T. Rantula (Little, Brown, $8.95) and The Better Part (Farrar, Straus...
...GORDON C. ZAHN...
...He is haunted by the landscape from which he takes his inspiration and sustenance...
...I cannot think of this story, and of the unselfconscious way in which Mr...
...Niccacci himself, thereby avoiding Hallie's tendency to indulge in cloying adulation and pious foreshadowings that occasionally mar, but cannot diminish, the impact of his book...
...I should like, therefore, to recommend two books which deal with what might be called the "other side" of the Holocaust and which have not been given the serious attention they deserve...
...it draws characters with power and lively sympathy...
...Steve Orlen, Permission to Speak (Wesleyan, $7.50...
...Ramati wisely lets the Assisi story be told inthe words ofFr...
...For a true sense of his range and power, this volume should be read in sequence with his earlier collection, Literature & The Sixth Sense...
...Now we finally have an introduction to his thought for the general reader in S. Sandmel, Philo of Alexandria (Oxford, 204"pp...
...Moss's study, fifteen years after original publication, still seems to me the most accessible examination of Proust's difficult classic, as well as the most illuminating...
...a shutter falls across our vision...
...Although embarassed to keep puffing my ~own publisher, they do deserve it with two other books I devoured this year...
...if only Roth had had the daring to leave open the tantalizing possibility that Anne Frank was alive and well in America...
...Gordon Zahn T HERE IS reason to fear we are learning to "live with" genocide...
...raises similar issues in the area of Christology and ethics without relying on the sociological reconstructions that underlie Brown's analysis...
...The movie was a huge commercial success because it happened to satisfy a new desire to excuse the failure of the present by seeing the past as easier, simpler, more limited...
...In Women of Crisis (Delacorte, $10, 320 pp...
...Although Orbis has published a rich variety of things, in the field of Christology in particular I recommend Leonardo Buff's Jesus Christ Liberator ($9.95, 323 pp...
...A longing to inquire Into the mystery of this heart which beats So wild, so deep in us--to know Whence our lives come and where they go...
...Eugenia's character is one of the places where, as I was saying in my previous column, the films adapts the novel by stripping away its Jamesian qualities...
...800 pages 9 Maps 9 Heavy buckram bindings, sewn signatures 9 $39.95 until December 31, 1979, $45 thereafter @ Now at your bookstore, or order direct from the publisher...
...Nabokov writes at the time of the breakup of Wilson's marriage to Ma~y McCarthy: "I do not know what to say to you except that I have been feeling 'very much' upset about the whole matter-especially as I did not hear from you directly and had to sift and combine various rumours...
...D. Harrington surveys all the various methods and issues in New Testament interpretation and illustrates them with excellent examples in his Interpreting the New Testament (Michael Glazier, $4.95, 152 pp...
...A thirst to spend our fire and restless force i In tracking out our true, original course...
...Further letters reflect a constant exchange of ideas and counsel: the more established Wilson serving as the mentor on publishing, Nabokov acting as the (often frustrated) instructor of Wilson in matters of Russian prosody...
...But so far it has gone unpunished, even largely undiscussed...
...Her life is almost a perfect blending of the Comic and the Terrible, which two things may be opposite sides of the same coin...
...There has never been a more elemental poetic landscape since Robinson Jeffers...
...Resum(~ and vision...
...In soliciting Leon Edel's endorsement of their movie, the one claim Ivory and Jhabvala have made for it is the faithfulness to the novel...
...Perhaps Sobrino's main point is that the historical location of the questioner makes a big difference in what questions are put to Jesus Christ...
...raphica[ narratives, dreams and fables, dramatic dialogues and oriental imitations...
...He is not a misanthrope or even a pessimist...
...Gibran's The Prophet...
...In the absence of such irony, the movie offers us the one thing Jan~.es's writing never encourages, nostalgia for the good old days...
...His influential essays in theoretical criticism are to be found elsewhere, primarily in Writing Degree Zero, published in 1953...
...One might assume the author's discerning thoughts on art, literature, religion (he is a profound Christian) and sex might make the chorus sound cheap by contrast, but they do not...
...By trying to be deferential, the film vitiates James, and it vitiates film art as well...
...Both authors happened upon their stories at the end of World War II but did not get around to pursuing their intentions to make them public until twenty years and more had passed...
...Even more relevant is William Shawcross' excellentSideshow: Kissinger, Nixon and the Destruction of Cambodia, (Simon and Schuster, $13.95,467 pp...
...A sober and witty treatment of the problem of memory which seems (I'm still reading it) to take off from Wittgenstein...
...This orientation characterizes much of the new work in New Testament studies...
...I could not, by the way, tell, nor did I trouble to discover, how old he is: One might just as easily have reckoned his age to be 45 or 65...
...brings knowledge of cultural symbols and attention to literary patterns and structure to this intriguing and enigmatic book...
...Above all, the essays provide examples of the solidity and depth of discourse when the literary imagination is enriched and extended by a complex political intelligence and sense of history...
...and Ignacio Ellacuria ' s Freedom Made Flesh ($8.95, 246 pp., $4.95 paper...
...Box 2649, Chicago, 60690...
...I, IaEME PI~.I~NS teaches theology at Boston College and is the author of The Gnostic Dialogue ( P aulist ). ROBERT PllltLlPS is the author of several books including The Confessional Poets and a collection of poems, The Pregnant Man...
...Of all the works in the recent wave of brilliant Latin American theology, this is one of the finest...
...author of War, Conscience and Dissent, teaches sociology at the University of Massachusetts...
...and Wind Mountain (Louisiana, $3.95 each...
...The "voice" is Sinyavsky's, sometimes in the form of portions of his letters to his wife, inte/' spersed in the chorus...
...Scholars are trying to understand the interaction of community structure, history and theological reflection in the development of earliest Christianity...
...This book is the result of fourteen years of listening--truly a labor of love, and one that is informed by the gentle writer's graceful insights and his erudition...
...To show this, without preaching, for over a thousand pages, makes of Mailer's book a great work of art...
...and The Nabokov-Wilson Letters: Correspondence between f/iadimir Nabokov and Edmund Wilson, 19401971, edited, annotated and with an introduction by Simon Kalinsky (Harper & Row, $15...
...A lay staff will assist in matters of psychology and education...
...No, he said (perhaps too modestly): Even the imperfectly educated villagers with whom he spoke grew up hearing or readingThe Book of Comraon Prayer and the Bible, and those noble words colored their speech...
...I recommend his work to those who think today's younger poets (Dave Smith was born in 1942) write only political folk ballads, electronic guitar music, or militant feminist manifestos...
...DAVID O'BRIEH teaches history at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester...
...The joining--the marriage?--has to be, or you can't stay on the vicarious track of the past or whatever 'truth' you think your're tracking...
...Mailer, who spent two years researching and writing Gilmore's life, interviewed, in depth, everyone who touched his life, from Gilmore's mother, sister--various girlfriends-to his victims' relatives...
...Read individually, they may seem slight...
...In it the'relations between the characters do have a certain quaintness to them...
...It's the first (and only) RSV Concordance to list and analyze both the English and the original Greek text--yet it requires no knowledge of Greek to use...
...A theoretical structure does not intrude upon the narratives...
...Anne Fremantle T HE NATURE of evil has been explored thoroughly, at great length, and to me satisfactorily, in two books published this year by two of the greatest U.S...
...There is far more dramatic tension in these stories than in much of Robert Coles's earlier work...
...notes that "What we are today comes from our thoughts of yesterday...
...ANTHROPOLOGY: Mary Douglas, Natural Symbols (Vintage, $1.95) and Purity and Danger (Routledge & Kegan, $5.25...
...Address questions and checks to Madre Mafia del Carmen P~rez, SSCC, Casilla 15001, NUNOA, SANTIAGO 11, CHILE...
...A most affecting example of two masters of language unable to find the fight words to say to each other...
...almost all of it devoted to contemporary writers, most of them American...
...a book that takes the life-markers identified by Levinson and other researchers and correlates them with markers already present in Christian ritual...
...JANET GRorlt is a member of the English Department at the Un~ersity of Oncinnati...
...I had lunch with Ronald Blythe after I reviewed his book...
...Far scarier than any vampire movie is William Shawcross's Sideshow (Simon and Schuster, $13.95,467 pp...
...by Abram Tertz (Andrei Sinyavsky) will undoubtedly remain one of my favorites for a long time...
...point out, from evil only evil can come, and the Dhammapada (500 B.C...
...But there were signs of strain long before.Wilson's unfavorable review of Eugene Oneginthe Pushkin classic which represented years of effort in translation and scholarship on Nabokov's part--brought them into a public quarrel...
...ANNIE DILI.ARD's Pilgrim at Tinker Creek won the 1975 Pulitzer Prize...
...JOHN N. KOTkE is the author of recent biographies of Andrew Greeley (The Best of Times, the Worst of Times, Nelson-Hail) and Pat and Patty Crowley (Simple Gifts, Andrews and McMeel...
...There were fine new collections by John Ashbery, James Dickey, Irving Feldman, Isabella Gardner, William Heyen, John Hollander, Richard Howard, Donald Justice, Stanley Kunitz, and Howard Moss...
...Box 142, Port Townsend, Wash., $10, !02 pp...
...John Irving's raucous epic, which is either the best pro-feminist book yet by a man or else the worst piece of male chauvinist garbage turned out in cons...
...Sobrino makes it clear that the imaginary interlocutor who resides in the heads of most First World theologians--the skeptical, doubt-ridden, mentally homeless "modem man"--is simply not the one who is asking the real Christological questions in most of the world today, and in Latin America in particular...
...19107 7 December 1979:697Saul Maloff M IOST OF WHAT passes nowadays by the name of stmcturalist pocitics, or literary aesthetics, or more simply theoretical criticism will surely soon dissolve into limbo--has already done or is right now doing so-leaving not a trace behind, affecting the way we read and think about literature not at all, a matter of momentary interest to graduate students and their mentors awaiting the advent of the next critical wave...
...Write, by December 15, 1979 to Search Committee, Religious Studies Department, Villanova University, Villanova, Pennsylvania 19085...
...In The Community of the Beloved Disciple (Paulist, $3.95, 204 pp...
...Styron's threnody, despite its tragic ending, is an affirmation that at every moment there is still "our and Adam's choice" (as St...
...If contemporary philosophy sometimes seems a little bare of ideas, it is always possible to turn to anthropological theory--to what Douglas calls "anthropology in a teacup...
...In the meantime, his book stands as a model of investigation that is both conscientious and useful...
...These books play with ideas--new ideas--and excite me about ideas in the way that great literary criticism does...
...Best of all, these directions are being pursued by careful scholars, who are not interested in keeping their pearls locked in safe deposit but who seek to involve a wider audience of interested readers in their investigations...
...William Styron's Sophie's Choice (Random House, $12.95,384 pp...
...When it no longer does, Justice Jackson's dire warning at Nuremberg will have become a prophecy fulfilled: "If we cannot eliminate the causes and prevent the repetition of these barbaric events, it is not an irresponsible prophecy to say that this twentieth century may yet succeed in bringing the doom of civilization...
...a collection of her essays will be published in May...
...It is, however, "the logical starting place for any comparison of the RSV with other modem translations" (Keith Crim...
...but no matter...
...If I were to live long enough and develop as an artist to the proper extent, I would like to write a comic novel about a woman--and what is more comic and terrible than the angular intellectual proud woman approaching God inch by inch with ground teeth...
...The Center will be run under direct responsibility of the sisters of the Sacred Heads...
...edited by Rosemary Reuther and Eleanor McLanghlin, an excellent book to put in the hands of people who still think that the demand of women for an equal opportunity to express their gifts in the church is something that recently emerged from a NOW convention.-Unfortunately we have all been handed a history of Christianity squeezed through the wringer of a distorted patriarchal consciousness...
...The generalist and the specialist will find it accessible...
...Most of it from the smaller publishing houses with religious affiliations, and quite unlike the trendy, sensationalism that has characterized the lists from some of the commercial houses...
...It presents a wide range of ideas with a creative and analytical intelligence...
...One of the discomforts of reading this type of material is the uneasy feeling of voyeurism to which it gives rise...
...One part of the Center will be the permanent home for abandoned girls and those in more desperate general condition...
...Appointments FOUR FULL-TIME, tenure-track appointments, junior or senior, for Fall, 1980...
...Some graduate teaching opportunities, heavy undergraduate teaching and committee work...
...Moss's sympathy with Proust's world, his poetic sensibility, and his admirable determination tO write a non-academic book (there is not a single footnote...
...His sympathies are 9 implied in the novel by that discrete irony which is the pinnacle of his writing style...
...and Lest Innocent Blood be Shed by Philip Hallie (Harper and Row, $12.95,293 pp...
...This year there is no doubt whatever...
...it is neurosis...
...For all their differences, Irving Howe is virtually the only critic around these days who stands in that tradition, starting with his early Politics and the Novel, and continuing with his recent collection, Celebrations and Attacks: Thirty Years of Literary and Cultural Commentary (Horizon, $14.95, 256 pp...
...Song calls us back to the guts of biblical religion~of all religions-to the God of a common, redeemed humanity and to politics and religion as one ,and inseparable:' --GAYRAUD $. WILMORE Colgate Rochester Divinity School "A" provoking and timely presentation of the theological reformation in Asia today:' --MASAO TAKENAKA Doshisa University, Kyoto, Japan Pape~r $9.95 LIBERATING GRACE LEONARDO BOFF "An important book on God's presence to human life that relates the new liberationist perspective to the best of the great theological tradition...
...The point is Steinfels has given us an invaluable summary of a powerful political philosophy and movement that can only be viewed as unwelcome and even dangerous to those of us who are committed to democracy and equality and who have some serious doubts about whether capitalism is compatible with either one...
...I admit with some embarrassment that I also vastly enjoyed reading The World According to Garp (Dutton, $10.95,437 pp...
...They are The Assisi Underground by Alexander Ramati (Stein and Day, $8.95, 181 pp...
...Father Raymond Brown has once again turned to the Johannine materials...
...It is perhaps too safe a way to admit of honorable comfort--but what a privilege...
...And though I've praised Wilfrid Sheed's The Good Word and Other Words (Dutton, $10.95, 300 pp...
...Giancarlo Zizola's The Utopia of Pope John XXHI (Orbis, $9.95,379 pp...
...I am in awe of his achievement...
...Women have been demeaned and discredited throughout the centuries of Christianity, and they have also fought and led and prophesied all the while too...
...Two of the most intelligentand interesting figures in American Catholic history, Orestes Brownson and Isaac Hecker helped each other find the church and in their different geographies of faith shed light on the central issues of Catholic presence in the United States...
...Daniel Levinson's The Seasons of a Man's Life (Knopf, $10.95,384 pp...
...The Dancing Floor, by Michael M. McNamara (Crown, $7.95,212 pp...
...Yet unlike Jeffers, Dave Smith fishes around delight's rock...
...The late Philip Rahv's posthumous collection, Essays on Literature & Politics, 1932-1972 (Houghton Mifflin, $15, 366 pp...
...he eats mulbemes from the bush Milton ate mulberries from...
...A personal favorite this year which should interest liberal Catholics is the excellent collection of The BrownsonHecker Correspondence (University of Notre Dame Press, $20, 352 pp...
...I recall that Morgan's first collection, A Book of Change, was misread by some critics, who seemed to feel his work belonged with the how-to-live books (Hesse's Siddhartha...
...Two very special works which should be high on the Christmas list are Frances Fitzgerald's America Revised (Atlantic/ Little Brown, $9.95,240 pp...
...Her most recent book is Holy the Firm...
...He has chosen a non-Jewish victim of Commonweal: 694Hitler (we are apt to forget there were five million non-Jews killed by Hitler -Poles, Resistance groups in all the occupied countries, Communists, more than 5000 Germans killed after the July 20th Putsch, and many--but not enough!--priests, nuns, and simply concerned Christians...
...Tom Jones was released during the height of the Kennedy era, when we first began to realize that all was not right with bur world...
...He shows that the turn to political involvement does not produce a detachment from the religious roots:' --GREGORY BAUM, University of Toronto Paper $8.95 At your bookstore, or write (l~[l~'~ THE CHURCH AND THE NATIONAL SECURITY STATE JOSi~ COMBLIN In this profound analysis of the political system prevailing in most of Latin America today, Comblin presents a provocative agenda for the churches...
...although their first (predictable) reaction was that a book about senescence was bound to be dreary...
...At story's end, Lucette is killed by Vivi, thinking to kill Lise...
...There are historical and autobiog...
...In order to give Eugenia some power equivalent to that she has in the novel, Ivory simply lets his camera gaze into Lee Remick's startling eyes at certain points...
...And since that f'LrSt collection, his work has increasingly embraced the body as well as the soul-as the highly memorable and original rifle-poem of this, his fourth collection, demonstrates...
...Against the background of Christian failure that contributed to the tragedy of the Nazi years, the determined resistance of two men and two communities might not seem like much...
...Roland Barthes eludes definitions and categories...
...His treatment of the Biblical metaphors for God as Father/Mother bring out a richness in the symbol that quite belies the negative press it has been getting from some radical feminists...
...Philip Booth, Available Light (Viking, $5.95...
...Sinyavsky especially loved the Christian sectarians in his prison, the Pentecostals and Old Believers...
...his poems most often examine the insinuations of joy in the dream-contending world...
...Unfortunately, HammertonKelly's appeal to Ricoeur in this regard is almost as obscure as its source...
...For his counterpart, look to Raymond Williams in England...
...a reliable, scholarly, morally correct reminder of our responsibility for the present disaster...
...No wonder Kissinger is wildly angry about this book...
...Sobrino is rooted in the struggle of the Latin American people, and at the same time he is so well trained in current European theology that his masterful arguments simply cannot be ignored as merely the exotic outbursts of some regional enthusiasm...
...The author unfolds the meaning of Christian grace in the light of the Latin American experience of dependency and exploitation...
...If he wants to call himself a sociologist and lexicologist, that's all right with me...
...Doctorate required...
...Reflecting all the latest advances in Biblical scholarship and translation, the Analytical Concordance is uniquely useful among all other Concordances ...a New Testament study aid second to none...
...Mailer doesn't editorialize, or moralize: this is how it was, how-these people were...
...Fred Chappell, River...
...Movies that have this patronizing, curiously smug attitude toward classic fiction seem to have come into being with the movie of Tom Jones...
...Well Simone Weil's life is the most comical life I have ever read about and the most truly tragic and terrible...
...comes close...
...The View In Winter is an eloquent-and frequently amusing--social history...
...When he's good, he's splendid, walking through the occasions and artifacts of contemporary life making startling connections between fire and water, slime and ozone, and more often than not making them stick in this collection (l'he Eiffel Tower and other Mythologies, Hill and Wang, $9.95, 152 pp...
...David O'Brien ~ MONG GENERAL works of history nothing this year can top Barbara Tuchman-'s A Distant Mirror, last year's gem, but Thomas Pakenham' s The Boer War (Random House, $20, 768 pp...
...Kristin Gdffith, long-faced and freckled, is by nineteenth-century standards unattractive, but in the film she has been endowed with a sensible mind that compensates for her physical appearance...
...This is not the spirit of Ivory's film...
...The book is not dreary, however, it is gorgeous...
...But it also alters the person in the novel...
...On a movie screen, this does indeed make Eugenia a rivetting presence...
...Acmarly, as this book demonstrates, the history was both better and worse than we have been told...
...He makes fis admit to the existence of feeling in an age which prides itself on decorum and concealment...
...No pattern or set of stages is elicited from their portraits of five poor women struggling to stand upright...
...Treatments of individual New Testament writings have taken new and exciting forms...
...THEOLOGY: Frederick Buechner, The 9 Alphabet of Grace (Seabury, $3.95...
...yet I cannot forego the pleasure of quoting from them once more...
...Not at all the testimony of an embittered Commonweal: 692ex-prisoner, Sinyavsky avoids the cynicism of Solzhenitsyn and writes with a wild kind of humor...
...Freudian psychology reappears in R. Hammerton-Kelly's treatment of Biblical images of God as Father (Mother), God the Father: TheolOgy and Patriarchy in the Teaching of Jesus (Fortress, $5.95, 128 pp...
...Robert and Jane Coles approach lives in a different way...
...Decent-miMed people all over the world may continue to condemn the pracrice, but even their most fervent condemnations carry unmistakable overtones of fatalistic resignation...
...Pheme Perkins F OR THOSE interested in ~e New Testament, its cultural milieu and its contemporary applications the past year has seen publication of some exciting new work...
...He speaks of a friend's "deathday" as you and I might speak of a friend's birthday, an implicit recognition that in eternity time does not exist...
...Philadelphia...
...Robert Phillips I T HERE WAS not a single novel or fiction collection in 1979 that enthralled me the way The Stories of John Cheever did in 1978...
...In my own experience, everything funny I have written is more terrible than it is funny, or only funny because it is terrible, or only terrible because it is funny...
...G. Lohfink's The Bible Now I Get It~ (Doubleday, $5.95, 174 pp...
...Kissinger's just published memoir over the holidays...
...HARVEY COX, Commonweal Paper $8.95 THEOLOGIES IN CONFLICT The Challenge of Juan Luis Segundo ALFRED T HENNELLY "...an excellent introduction to Juan Segundo's thought and a helpful guide to the voluminous literature, presenting the theology not as'systematic' but as 'open': methodological principles allowifig for growth and development take precedence over systematic organization of concepts:' .PAUL DEATS Boston University Paper $8.95 ORBIS BOOKS Maryknoll, New York 10545 / 7 December 1979:701Classified Mm-ried Priests CORPUS-National Association ReSigned/Married Priests...
...Youth Center In a densely populated Santiago slum the sisters of the Sacred Hearts are now building a Youth Center where food and health care will be administered...
...Each of these volumes is a long poem and part of the longer poem which comprises the whole...
...If the Chinese mind is a riddle wrapped in an enigma, then what is the mind of a Chinese American girl-becoming-woman, mashed between two cultures, her head swimming with mama's stories, her fantasies erupting, her rage barely under control...
...As the Upanishads (1500 B.C...
...I have practically bludgeoned all my friends into agreeing to buy Ronald Blythe's The View In Winter: Reflections On OldAge (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, $12.95 288 pp...
...The latter especially fell short...
...a novel, but it seems more an exploration of some of her own multiple contacts with a variety of people, who impinge on her life, but whose reality for her is their relationship--as Rabindranath Tagore said all reality is...
...In prison, visited by one of the French Dominican Sisters of Bethanie, she finds she has a vocation...
...Working by simplification itself, the film seems to favor the moral simplicity of the New Englanders...
...Like those, these poem# are celebrations and affu'mations of human life...
...And Maiamud himself, who refers to Dubin in the first, second, and third persons, keeps the boundary between himself andhis subject obscured in fog...
...Of course...
...Mary Ann Tolbert describes various literary approaches to analyzing a parable, Perspectives on the Parables: An Approach to Multiple Interpretations (Fortress, $8.95, 141 pp...
...of all of them, this one remains the most interesting...
...But the discussions about translation and literary matters that preoccupy both correspondents throughout the book were less interesting to me than the poignant record of broken friendship it also provides...
...Yet a common thread of persistence and hope binds these profiles of a black migrant worker, a displaced mountaineer, a frightened Chicana, a "masculine" Eskimo girl, and a maid in the home of a well-to-do Cambridge family...
...The fast letters soon warm to a fwstname basis (Dear Bunny--Dear Volodya) accompanied by shared family holidays and jokes...
...it would make an excellent gift for men and women uncertain about feminism...
...Lise, the English-born heroine, becomes the madam of a chic Parisian brothel, but at thirty-one, is condemned to life-imprisonment for killing her ex-lover, Patrice, a pimp...
...A final book: One of America's finest lyric poets, Howard Moss, has written a luminous book of criticism about that gigantic poem, Proust' sRemembrance of Things Past...
...Its portrait of national pride, personal ambition, racism, deceit and self-deception, and sheer brutality lends perspective and insight to our reflections on more recent episodes of empire...
...Also, there is Women of Spirit (Simon and Schuster, $5.95,400 pp...
...Let us sit upon the ground and tell sad tales of the death of kings...
...uniqueness reigns...
...Donald IHall, Kicking the Leaves (Harper, $4.95...
...Poulin published in 197"I a well-received translation ofRilke's two fundamentally-linked masterworks, The Duino Elegies and The Sonnets to Orpheus...
...subtitled "Kissinger, Nixon and the Destruction of Cambodia...
...Malamud's Dubin's Lives, Styron's Sophie's Choice, and Roth's The Ghost Writer, to name three, delivered less than promised...
...The frui t of three years of careful research, this scrupulously documented record makes me wonder why Nixon and Kissinger are not standing trial at this very moment for their blatant violation of the Constitution...
...Nor can we overlook the myth of a national security resting upon the readiness and the willingness to commit nuclear genocide on a scale that would put all former experiments of that nature to shame...
...Resurr~ to John Tracy, 90414th St., Boulder, Colo...
...and the poet is David Smith, one of our most vigorous and accomplished younger poets...
...The Nabokov-Wilson letters, like O'Connor's, are concerned in large part, naturally, with the profession of writing, the business as well as the art of it...
...Here again, the film gets James backwards...
...In spite of this tragedy, Rumer Godden has written a glorious affirmation of good triumphant...
...POETRY: John Engels, Blood Mountain (Pittsburgh...
...writers living...
...But Dubin's approach is more than strategy...
...The "chorus" in his title are the snatches of conversation, epithets, curses and ellipI tical outbursts that came from his fellow prisoners during the years he lived with them in the crowded barracks of a forced labor camp in the USSR...
...Areas...
...This beautifully written history of the Snake River, its exploration and settlement, provides a thorough and scholarly addition to American frontier history...
...As is not infrequently the case ~vith Howe, allowances must be made for some stumbling, possibly merely hasty, infelicitous writing, and it is true, as it is of all these collections-- indeed of collections as a species of book--that some pieces might have been permitted to molder...
...In pinion, already, eyes lift and are too late, the heart chills and flakes...
...The goshawk and the antelope of the title are but two images for love and death which Swoop and lope throughout his thoughtful book...
...This book provides one of those rare reading experiences from which one emerges knowing one is better off for having encountered this person...
...Editor EDITOR who wants to use journalistic talents to develop and edit a weekly which will serve as an informative, formative, prophetic voice to the local church...
...James never finds his characters quaint...
...here is revealed a woman of wit, wisdom, courage and beauty, of "strength and self-possession" to use Miss Kolbenschlag's term for the ideal woman...
...he sketches a fascinating picture of the sociological and theological development of the Johannine church from its origins into the second century...
...Paul Zimmer, The Zimmer Poems (Dryad Press, $8.95...
...In addition, it provides analysis not only of English words and their underlying Greek words, but of context as well...
...For a severe treatment of Barthes as a literary theoretician (and other matters) see Gerald Graff's Literature Against Itself (University of Chicago, $15,260 pp...
...Wilson refuses to avail himself of Nabokov's invitation to react to Stanley Edgar Hyman's attack when he certainly could have benefited from a chance to let off steam...
...I John N. Kotre But often, in the din of strife, There rises an unspeakable desire After the knowledge of our buried life...
...There's a Catch-22 in his esteem for the film, for it presupposes familiarity with the literature the film would transmit...
...The trick is to find an incident or moment from which far vistas of a life can be seen and to stand there as you tell its story...
...They are prose poems that celebrate dailiness and the perfectly remembered isolated moment...
...The Nabokovs, however, became very fond of Wilson's next wife, Eiena (his last), and for a time all seemed well...
...In some ways the Cambodia sideshow, for which the people of Cambodia are now paying such a gruesome price, was a crime much worse in scale and destructiveness than the Watergate break-in...
...For those who take the development of the church's social thought inspired by Pope John with real seriousness, Jesuit David Hollenbach has provided the most important American contribution since Father Murray with Claims in Conflict...
...I particulariy enjoyed the last, a tale told to strangers on a train of a man whose violent passions build until they are released by the playing of a duet for piano and violin...
...For his part, Pastor Andre Trocmt, Hallie's Protestant hero, avoided deception and subterfuge as a matter of principle but still managed to convert his parish of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon in Vichy France into an open and non-violent center of resistance and refuge for Jews...
...And unlike Eliot's French poems, Rilke's seem inventive and powerful...
...She also includes an informed discussion of attempts to apply Freudian psycho-dynamics to the parable of the prodigal son...
...Morgan does deal with the cosmic awareness of the essential oneness of existence...
...But it is on precisely those grounds that the movie falls...
...J. P. Meier's study of Matthew, The Vision of Matthew: Christ, Church and Morality in the First Gospel (Paulist, $5.95,270 pp...
...Now that we have learned this awful capacity for genocide is universal and not a moral malignancy limited to one demented regime or one country or one race, it is our advantage todevote some attention to those few who somehow managed to avoid complicity in the evil to which most of their fellow countrymen succumbed...
...Nabokov, for his part, is reluctant to show how hurt he is that Wilson seemed not to have read or cared about the two of his novels of most iml~ortance to him--The Gift and Lolita...
...Finally, the publishing event of 1979 for Commonweal readers, providing the gift book for this year, was the appearante of Sally Fitzgerald's marvelous collection of the letters of Flannery O'Connor The Habit of Being (Farrar, Straus, Giroux, $15, 617 pp...
...ANNE PRF3dAICR~'s latest book is Woman's Way to God (St...
...E. H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion (Princeton, $22, $8.95 paper...
...Graywolf promises two more volumes...
...Dora Vallier, Abstract Art (Viking, $12.95), and Dore Ashton, The Unknown Shore (Viking...
...They keep turning out title after title in theology focusing especially on the contribution of the non-Western world...
...Walter Jackson Bate, Samuel Johnson (Harcourt, $19.95) and John Keats (Harvard, $22.50), Phyllis Rose, Woman of Letters: A Life of Virginia Woolf (Oxford, $12.95...
...Paired in this fashion they offer striking testimony to the potential that lies in individual Christian witness, Catholic or Protestant...
...I should love to have a copy of the book, as a Christmas present, say, with your autograph...
...Poulin has preserved the delicate qualities of Rilke's French, as he did earlier in translating from the German: "A single rose is every rose / and this one: irreplaceable, / perfect, a supple vocable/by the text of things enclosed...
...Ronald Blythe takes it as a matter of course that the past and the present mesh and mingle...
...Finally, two quite different books ad7 December 1979:699dress themselves to concerns of contemporary culture in treating the New Testament...
...Worse still, large numbers have come to accept, even jusNew light on church/world tensions...
...As the f'wst publication in English translation of these fragile, glass-like poems, the book deserves our attention...
...Praise the Lord for Orbis...
...PHILOSOPHY: Norman Malcolm, Memory and Mind (Comell, $12.50...
...The letter ends curtly: "I must be off on my two aluminum legs...
...There is a touching gesture toward reconciliation by Nabokov in 1971, to which Wilson responds (in the last letter that was ever to pass between them) with the news that he has returned to the subject of their old quarrels in his book, Upstate, adding: "I hope it will not again impair our personal relations (it shouldn't...
...If only we too could spend all our time, the film seems to say, worrying about such fine moral points and subtle shades of emotion...
...Graywolf Press accomplishes what many larger presses no longer attempt...
...His latest book is Another Part of the W~ The Camp Simon Story (University of Massachusetts...
...It replaces complexity with a kind of vacuity...
...Janet Groth I ! R EFLECWING ~N my reading over the past year, I discover the voices that have stayed with me with a haunting clarity are not, to my surprise, the voices of Cacciato and Garp (I am still catching up with last year's fiction) but real people speaking or writing in their own voices--which only means I have been reminded again that one of the most fascinating fields of literature is occupied by letters, journals and memoirs...
...His running war against Stalinism seems a bit tired by now, but that may be because the terms of his polemics have been generally absorbed as our received ideas...
...Rosanne Coggeshall, Hymn for Drum (Louisiana, $9.95...
...In the process he found it necessary to organize a full-scale counterfeiting operation to provide his "wards" (and others, as word of their availability and quality spread) with false identity documents, passports, and the like...
...This is a book of ideas, not of gossip: it deals incisively with issues intellectual, social, and artistic, and performs valuable close readings on the texts...
...Norman Mailer's The Executioner's Song (Little Brown, $16.95, 1056 pp...
...Morgan's collection is versatile and varied...
...Which is exactly why most of us, frightened, choose not to look...
...At that lunch, Mr...
...an important analysis of American history textbooks of interest to all who wonder how our images of the nation and the world are formed, and Madonna Kolbenschlag's truly brilliant Kiss Sleeping Beauty Good Bye (Doubleday, $8.95, 244 pp...
...They leave us a graphic record of the sheer drudgery and fret involved in the lives of all, even the most gifted, who attempt to make writing a significant source of their income...
...If Edel imagines that the film is going to increase appreciation of James, he is mistaken...
...THE WESTMINSTER PRESS 925 Chestnut Street...
...Even the footnotes are funny...
...Most treatments of first century A.D...
...is an excellent study of the man and his leadership, a fitting reminder of Pope John's intention to turn Catholics away from pre-occupation with themselves and their church to a commitment to humankind in the midst of global crisis...
...And the cover-up was even more elaborate...
...it is intelligent, balanced, profoundly humane and absolutely convincing...
...Irving surfaces an awful lot of fantasies, some of them pretty grundgy, but what a story-teller...
...Commonweal: 702...
...He doesn't know where he ends and his subjects begin...
...Peter Wyden provides the most detailed account yet of John Kennedy's disaster in Bay of Pigs: The Untold Story (Simon and Schuster, Commonweal: 698$12.95,352 pp...
...they must be contemplated...
...But the reader should not be deterred...
...The juxtaposition gives the whole book a fleshy, meat-and potatoes realism that makes its spiritual quality even more luminescent...
...And it is much more: To look at old people is to look in a mirror, to see our fate in theirs...
...Of this year's individual collections, I am especially impressed by two...
...but these cavils entered, it must be said that taken all in all--as literary critic, as social and political historian, as editor of Dissent, as our only socialist intellectual who is all these--Howe's is a singularly valuable and authoritative voice...
...Rosellen Brown, Cora Fry (Norton, 9 $7.95, $2.95 paper...
...although it appeared in 1978...
...Finally, I should mention James and Evelyn Whitehead's Christian Life Patterns (Doubleday, $8.95, 216 pp...
...Roger Sale is always worth reading: balanced, fh'mly discriminating, a critic of exemplary manners and taste (for examples of which see his collection, On Not Being Good Enough: Writings of a Working Critic, Oxford, $12.95, 218 pp...
...Although she does not analyze many of the parables in detail, students interested in rhetorical criticism will find her examples extremely helpful...
...Each praised the other's writing--Nabokov almost always with more warmth than Wilson...
...Judaism contain copious references to the writings of Philo of Alexandria...
...I thought it possible that Mr...
...New Testament commentaries cite this Jewish philosopher to provide parallels to the Johannine Logos, Pauline ethics, and the symbolic interpretations of Old Testament liturgy in Hebrews...
...Apparently throughout his imprisonment Sinyavsky carried a copy of the Book of Revelation from the New Testament in his boot...
...The fast and older poet is Frederick MOrgan, whose latest, Death Mother and Other Poems, has just been published (University of Illinois Press, $10, $3.95 paper, 112 pp...
...Rumer Godden's twentieth book, Five for Sorrow, Ten for Joy (Viking, $10.95, 262 pp...
...But The View in Winter alters one's moral universe: One can never again, after having read this lovely book, choose not to look, not to see...
...and found it an absorbing, funny, depressing, skillfully written book...
...This book has received nothing but superlatives from reviewers...
...Barbara Grizzuti Harrison I M ANY BOOKS this year have given me pleasure...
...It contains at least two stunning poems which belong in any anthology of post-modern American poetry: "The Turtle" and "February 11, 1977...
...He seems to think they were onto something he Would also have liked to experience...
...AN ANALYTICAL CONCORDANCE '9 "~L REVIS~-D STANDARD VERSION NF_\V TESTAMEN r @ A breakthrough In Biblical scholarehip...the only Analytical Concordance especially Intended for use with the Revised Standard Version...
...Written between 1922 and 1926, CRITICS HARVEY COX, professor of Divinity at Harvard, is the author of The Secular City, The Seduction of the Spirit and Turning East...
...Much money is needed to complete the building...
...provides a humorous look at the literary forms of Biblical material along with some very responsible exegetical discussion of the divorce sayings, infancy stories and passion narratives...
...In contemporary fiction, I was puzzled and then intrigued by Bernard Malamud's experiments in Dubin's Lives (Farrar, Straus, Giroux, $10.00, 362 pp...
...John Chadwick, The Decipherment of Linear B (Cambeidge, $15.95, '$4.95 paper...
...His searching critique is not only for Latin Americans but for all of us "who have ears to hear...
...Blythe, who listens so beautifully that the very idea of using a tape recorder to capture a life seems redundant, if not obscene, gives us "fragments of colourful minutiae"--the voices and partial biographies of old people in England and in rural Wales...
...His writing has the apocalyptic quality of St...
...Titled The Magic Lantern of Marcel Proust (NonPareil Books, 124 pp., $4.95), it has been reissued in a permanent paperback on acid-free paper that will not yellow with age, and the pages of which have been sewn in signatures so they will not fall out...
...We are tacitly expected to find these people and their society and even their problems wonderful, because the problems are so much less vexing than those we have today...
...deals with the life and death of Gary Gilmore, executed for two murders...
...A Voice from the Chorus (Farrar, Straus and Giroux $I0, 352 pp...
...Wilson, Mary McCarthy and Vera Nabokov...
...John's visions on Patmos presented with the.sweat and grime that must have ground its way into the pages before his release...
...This general work inspired me to read dozens of studies in prehistory...
...it is also great fun to read, full of vivid anecdotes and wonderful photographs...
...The latter is the best book on the "woman question" I have read in a decade...
...What sane, real stuff...
...The book is interesting and designed to attract and engage...
...Beyond the blood lust of an Amin or Bogassa or Pol Pot's insane vision of an indigenous socialist paradise emerging from the total destruction of a nation's past, there is the "socially therapeutic" elimination of a million or so unborn children in our country alone, upheld as a matter of "protecting rights...
...tify, the instrumental destruction of human life on a massive scale...
...4.50...
...No one could deny that these accomplishments are not enough to redress the balance or excuse the overall record of silence and complicity...
...Box 16...
...while we are getting to know them, better, even, than they know themselves, they know us not...
...All contributions welcome...
...For a class I am teaching on religion and autobiography I picked up Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior .(Vintage Paperback, $2.45,243 pp...
...Retrieving and Renewing the Catholic Human Rights Tradition (Paulist, $5.95,219 pp...
...But his philosophical and theological poems were always less vital than his love poems to wife and family...
...So their stories are prose poems, really...
...But if there are serious "general" readers who think that literature is too important to be left to the schoolmen and who, despite everything and for whatever curious if not actually perverse reasons, themselves sometimes read books about literature, here is a small scattering of recent books worth their attention...
...The situations and methods may have differed, .but the purposes and results were the s~ne: significantly large numbers of Jewish refugees were saved from extermination...
...Readers still puzzled by the various methods used in analyzing Biblical mate~ rials have two excellent guides...
...Taking their particulars from the natural world, he searches for truths about our most fundamental concerns: Long ago I saw that first wet glimmering of hawk tongue and did not know, as I know now, the tiny scream lingers only to say what has happened...
...COLIN L. WESTERBECK, JR...
...Positions THEOLOGIAN IN RESIDENCE: Bring theological education, reflection to state university...
...Leo Tolstoy did that masterfully, I found on rereading short stories like The Death of lvan llych, Master and Man, and The Kreutzer Sonata...
...Remick's performance...
...Blythe told me that near his house in Suffolk grows a mulberry tree planted by Milton's tutor...
...In some ways this book helped me understand two strange lands--China and the mind of a woman--just a tiny bit better...
...Sherry B. Ortner, Sherpas Through Their Rituals (Cambridge, $19.95, $5.25 paper...
...She is pursued by Lucette, who loves her, and Vivi, who hates her...
...is a welcome addition to the library of psychological literature on the life cycle...
...Buy, and give, this book...
...In recent months I have read John Sobrino's Christology at the Crossroads (Orbis, $12.95,432 pp...
...Myself, I would gladly read Sheed on David Ricardo's Iron Law of Wages or Gray's Anatomy and fully expect in both instances to be amused, interested, edified...
...He is against any abstract or falsely universal theories about a person who was after all a specific concrete human being who even in his own time was viewed in a variety of ways...
...the fact is he was never able to be as free with his feelings about himself as he was about books...
...Dubin is a biographer whose strategy is to lose his life in his subject's...
...He takes their feelings seriously...
...Requires theological expertise, teaching ability, organizational ability, ecumenical concern...
...Ephraim the Syrian put it...
...Though its horrendous toll has already been surpassed, Hitler's carefully planned and systematically conducted effort to exterminate European Jewry, remains the classic example of the practice of genocide in modern times...
...One might have it at hand while reading Mr...
...I found it helpful in a personal sense...
...For criticism as Lit Crit, a science dismal as any other, has more to do with the economics and sociology of the academy and its rites than with poems and novels--with, precisely, what Adam Smith called the "size of the market...
...Thus, this new Concordance makes it easy for pastors, scholars, and laymen alike to locate all passages sharing not just common words, but common meanings...
...Thus, one has a choice of intelligible books on the "cutting edge" of scholarship that are free of superficial generalization, scholarly inaccuracies, and patronizing tone--most are also in paperback...
...These are the best of the many analyses and histories of abstract and Abstract Expressionist art I've read lately...
...Levinson has been criticized for linking his stages to highly specific age ranges, but his insistence is open to correction by later Commonweal: 696research...
...They have made that the sole standard by which they want the movie judged...
...are really "neo-" anything, and so on...
...If we know Eugenia from the novel, Ivory's strategy allows us to impose her on the tabula rasa of 9 Ms...
...But a new element of reciprocal wounds begins to appear...
...I enjoyed it hugely--as well as your poem [Wilson's dedicatory poem to 7 December 1979:695Fitzgerald...
...Liturgy, Sacramental Theology, Christian Ethics, History of Christianity, New Testament, Oriental Religions (primarily Chinese), and Religious Education...
...Emphasis on teaching: demonstrated research...
...Rich stuff, sane real stuff...
...This is unfair...
...In telling this sad story, he has shown, not the 'banality of evil' as Hannah Arendt called it, but the inevitable sequence of causality...
...They once actually shared the same pair of socks--darned, in turn by the then-Mrs...
...McNamara (regrettably killed last September in a motor accident) never lapses into Manichaeanism--that horrid heresy Christianity inherited from Zoroastrianism-but shows how willingly the good can lead to evil through faulty vision and values...
...We are caught up in contemplating the mystery of personalities toward whom we have a strange relationship...
...It is as exciting as a detective story, and none the worse for the two heroes fumbling in a Dantean dark wood...
...Matthew Arnold "The Buried Life" (1852) H ow SHALL a life be shaped, its story told, the course of its coming and going be charted...
...Named Our Lady of Peace, it will become a second home for thousands of children and youngsters in true need...
...but he can also be genuinely illuminating, judicious and generous, lethal where the cause requires it, always strongly intelligent, as good on Pepys, Jane Austen, Dickens, as on some contemporary novelist whose name we have forgotten since the review first appeared in a periodical...
...but here is scope enough: some still interesting essays on American writing and even more on his abiding passion, the great Russian novelists of the 19th century...
...Creative biblical reflection is alive and well, though the good seed and the good ground may be a bit less obvious in the public forum...
...Books: CRITICS' CHRISTMAS CHOICES I I I I I Harvey Cox I II T OWARD the end of some years in the past I might have been hard put to name the single best book I had read all that year...
...have coalesced to form an enchanting essay on that greatest of disenchanters...
...Welcome because it does not flatten individual biographies as it rolls in the heavy machinery of the "scientific method...
...The result is an effective literary portrayal of a man with diffuse identity, hollow inside and unable to parent, a variant of the "new narcissist" of the seventies...
...His very name, Du-Bin (the German equivalent of You-Am) clouds the distinction between I and thou...
...Bloodfire...
...our life is the creation of our mind...
...Old people of varying social classes and temperaments talk about the past, and their recollections are vivid, lucid, poignant, funny . . . not cute (neither Blythe nor they sentimentalize), and, remarkably, inasmuch as many...
...In any case, the letters become much less frequent after the early '50s...
...Even so-~and this is the lesson they leave to our genocide-prone age--they provide encouraging evidence of what can be done by individuals inspired and strengthened by a total commitment to Christ and his teachings...
...lovingly and skillfully edited by Joseph F. Gower and Richard M. Leliaert...
...The memory of Auschwitz haunts us, as well it should, in the various forms of television specials, college courses, national symposia, and all the other recent Holocaust-related developments...
...In the film, Lizzie seems to have more this sort of character...
...against it, most formalist criticism seems meager and desiccated...
...In seeing it this way, James assumes the dissatisfied attitude of his heroine, and he invites us to do likewise...
...In the early letters there is a real sense of the delight each felt at having discovered in the other someone with whom to share literary enthusiasms and projects...
...Perhaps that is why his luminous and lyrical book is suffused with joy-although it in no way skirts the terrible and painful facts of aging and dying...
...Elizabeth Hardwick calls her Sleepless Nights (Random House, $8.95, 176 pp...
...A. Y. Collins's The Apocalypse (Michael Glazier, $4.95, 155 pp...
...The precedent Tom Jones set remains in effect in The Europeans...
...When all the escape routes were finally closed by the Nazis, he arranged to hide himdreds of Jews, including entire families, in religious houses throughout the Assisi area (including the convent of the rigidly cloistered Poor Clares...
Vol. 106 • December 1979 • No. 22
