Critics' Christmas Choices
Marshall, Kathryn & Deen, Rosemary & Gray, Francine du Plessix & Levertov, Denise & Neuhaus, Richard John & Deedy, John & Schroth, Raymond A. & Tracy, David & Cardman, Francine & Drinan, Robert F.
Books: CRITICS' CHRISTMAS CHOICES Richard John Neuhaus OF the books I have found most rewarding to read and argue with in the past year or so, I recommend the little paperback by Wolfhart...
...It is an imaginative concept, which Berrigan serves up as a way for all of us to imagine our plight as dwellers in a nuclear age— and in a country which has opted to live by The Bomb...
...I am persuaded, however, that Schillebeeckx has provided the most substantive defense to date for that position...
...He who has lost the certainties of the spirit, must needs sin against the meaning of life...
...Those who believe that the brain is a computer could be fed small spoonsful of Mrs...
...But after sixty pages or so I accepted Oates's premises of magic realism, and was bewitched...
...It is also Doctorow's first romantic novel, the first of his works in which the archetypal quest for The Ideal Woman is a dominating force of the narrative...
...DENISE LEVERTOV, poet and critic, is the author of numerous books including Life in the Forest and Collected Earlier Poems 1940-1960...
...Rosemary Deen Because I find current novels easier to start than to finish I loved William Maxwell's So Long, See You Tomorrow, (Knopf, $7.95, 128 pp...
...To keep writing—to review it for the Kansas City Star—I read Norman Mailer's The Executioner's Song (Little Brown $16.95, 1056 pp...
...A book no household should be without is Helen Caldicott's Nuclear Madness (Autumn Press, $3.95,122 pp...
...In her energy, her impatience, her sense of her own authority, and her respectful but unawed approach to ecclesiastical authority (she could urge the pope to act like a man and return the papacy to Rome from Avignon as easily as she could denounce the miserable state of the clergy, while also acknowledging the reverence due the sacramental ministry of both), Catherine is an apt saint for our day...
...After Our War by John Balaban (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1974, $3.95 paper, 84 pp...
...Like his other mentor, Walter Benjamin, Metz's compressed and powerful style fuses theology and philosophy, critical social theory and narrative, aphorisms and actions...
...As I myself wrote a preface for the McCann volume, I will not repeat myself here but instead quote from the introduction to the Orbis volume, in which the translators say of Kim Chi Ha, "Through his courageous conduct and stirring poems the young Korean poet lights us from the darkness of our habitual callousness and indifference to human dignity.'' They also quote from Camus's 1958 statement: "History's amphitheater has always contained the martyr and the lion . . . But until now, the artist was always pn the sidelines...
...it seeks no more than to provide a thoughtful person's view on everyday issues that touch our spiritual and secular lives...
...would deserve attention...
...Like the shells on the beach which serve as signposts on the way to this graced wholeness, Gift from the Sea is itself an unexpected gift for our time...
...It does not lay out Utopian or messianic formulas for remaking the world...
...is the book for you if you want to read contemporary poetry but are disheartened by the books you pick off the bookstore shelf and open to a page of straw...
...In my opinion Pannenberg's continues to be the most impressive theological enterprise of our time, and in these essays he provocatively relates a Christian understanding of destiny to our worldhistorical moment...
...The reader's gain is the fiction: the child who isn't there except in reflections, and as he joins the two parts of the novel an odd, imagined connection of unrecognition...
...Massive and important, Clark is a Catholic of evangelical, even fundamentalist, sensibilities, especially in his treatment of Scripture...
...contains some reflections which seem even more timely now than when they first appeared 20 years ago, on the implications of that anthropocentric arrogance which has brought us, as a species, to our present pass...
...The Dialogue is Catherine's narration of her intense mystical experience and conversation with God, the fruit of her search for union with the divine Truth and Love which had led her more deeply into' 'the world's need.'' Noffke's translation gives voice to Catherine's experience and makes it accessible to us in the first English translation since 1895 (the only other dates to the 15th century...
...These are only fleeting associations, for I find Loon Lake to be the most original novel published in this country since The Book of Daniel...
...And Heller recounts an ancient Chinese story about a sage "who once met a simple man, his better in wisdom...
...The classical debates for and against the existence of God understandably did not first treat the question of a prior trust or mistrust in reality itself...
...Edward Ericson's Solzhenitsyn: The Moral Vision (Eerdmans, $12.95, 239 pp...
...But his new book Aberrations of Starlight (Random House, $9.95, 240 pp...
...Two volumes of poetry and prose by the imprisoned South Korean poet Kim' Chi Ha are now available: The Middle Hour, translated by David R. McCann (Human Rights Publishing Group, 1980) and The Gold-Crowned Jesus and Other Writings, translated by Choy Sun Kim and Shelly Killen (Orbis Books, 1978, $5.95, 178 pp...
...If one can stomach the implicit arrogance and manifest blindness in Kissinger's apologia for the handling of Indochina, there is much to be learned here about those tortured years as seen from one center of power...
...This might seem untrue of the last I shall mention, Catherine de Vinck, several of whose collections (all published by Alleluia Press) I've been reading, including the text accompanying her record album, A Commonweal: 698 Book of Eve (House of Poetry, 1980...
...She must become whole...
...She sees more...
...Here are four of the ones I enjoyed the most...
...is replaced in Loon Lake by a rhapsodic, long-metered prose that is faintly reminiscent, in turn, of Walt Whitman, D.H...
...Like both Rahner and Benjamin, Metz gives more in a short intense compass than many others manage in volumes...
...I remain unconvinced by the main argument of Volume I that we should build a contemporary Christology on the results of historical work on the "historical Jesus...
...Seamus Heaney is recommended everywhere and needs no intermediary...
...And wholeness— "Woman must come of age by herself...
...De Vinck is no detached observer...
...And I was so impressed by it that I've set myself the task of reading several of her earlier novels...
...This isn't Abbey Theater Ireland, which is reason all its own for recommending the book—heartily, as they say...
...Bitter, finely wrought poems by a poet who worked in Vietnam as a field representive for the Committee of Responsibility to Save War-Injured Children...
...and the childhood shock of the house sold, gone one sudden day after school, with all its rooms, furniture, and light...
...For three years I lived just down the freeway from the subject of this essay, yet I never saw, as Morris does, the passion for order behind "the flash and the braggadocio...
...Ericson's study does not include the most recent and absorbing work, The Oak and the Calf (Harper & Row, $15.95, 453 pp...
...In her profound sense of the sociality of human existence, of the relation to neighbor as the test and expression of the love of God, and of the reciprocity of prayer and action, Catherine is also a necessary saint for a time of withdrawal and retreat into supposed interiority such as ours...
...He is the author of Honor the Promise (Doubleday...
...A Jesuit friend assigned The Executioner's Song to his class in criminal justice...
...Others treat of a condition that might be called apartheid of the soul, the sort of separateness that even love can't alter...
...the language is non-sexist without being unfaithful to the text (God remains "Father" and "He," Christ is "Son") or calling attention to itself...
...Where the first volume concentrated on historical analysis of the "historical Jesus," this second volume uses a more literary critical approach to interpret the different understandings of salvation in Christ in the New Testament...
...Francine du Plessix Gray Contrary TO many critics' expectations, this has been a vintage year for fine novels...
...Meconis details the opposition philosophy, describes tactics raid by raid, and probes the disintegration of the movement...
...On the lighter side—I'm now into entertainment reading—there is Michael Garvey's State O'Chassis: An Earful of Ireland (Thomas More Press, $8.95,179 pp...
...For animals have mental functions, but only man has a mind, and a mental life...
...Like his mentor, Karl Rahner, Metz often writes as a theologian's theologian, assuming his readers are familiar with the many alternative positions he discusses and debates...
...Nor did I believe the city was informed by anything other than a mad randomness...
...Whether her destination is Manhattan or London, Panama or South5 December 1980: 701 ern Africa, she evokes the spirits of place with polish and wit...
...Poignant, often beautiful, it is a book full of the spirit and intelligence of a true man of peace...
...Didion speaks from the depths of sight where dark and light are often indistinguishable, where reality blurs and the narrative line no.longer holds...
...and die adult story—marriage, adultery, murder, suicide—of his friend's parents...
...Water resources will be inadequate, forests will be depleted, energy will be much more scarce, hunger will claim more babies and "more of those surviving will be mentally and physically handicapped by childhood malnutrition.'' During 1980, Americans learned from a wide variety of sources that the future of up to one-third of humanity depends profoundly on what the 5 percent of humanity who reside in America do in the immediate future...
...This was a good and holy man with utmost concern for his church, his scientific colleagues, for humankind, and for history...
...David TRACY is professor of theology at the University of Chicago Divinity School...
...Her new novel will be published next year...
...Buffalo Bill, who my father, as a young boy, had seen shooting glass balls out of the air, in a parade in Trenton at the turn of the century...
...So there is a short list marking the route: theology, politics, social criticism and, inescapably, back to theology...
...Simplicity—"to ask how little, not how much, can I get along with...
...FATHER ROBERT F. DRINAN, S.J., represents the Fourth Massachusetts District in the House of Representatives...
...To become a more "successful" administrator I read some survival guides: for example, half of Richard H. Buskirk's Modern Management and Machiavelli (Mentor, $2.25...
...Balaban's essay Doing Good (Hudson Review, Winter 1977) is, with these poems, probably the best writing by an American to have emerged from direct encounter with the horror of that war...
...one of the most enjoyable books I've read in years...
...Sorrentino's rigorously unsentimental view of sexual urges, his humorous compassion for our Commonweal: "696 self-deceptions, his tragic vision of unfulfilled dreams make Aberrations of Starlight a masterpiece of current fiction...
...I am more agile and supple than you (when, from time to time, we have been able to spend a few days together we have competed with morning exercises on the floor of a hotel room) but in my slackened behind turned to you in the bathroom as I shower, in the sunburned wattle that webs between my thin jaw and my neck, you see the final softening of the flesh that is coming to you as a man one day, your death as a lover of women...
...we see the contemporary "successful" journalist dogging the rails, warm and in the glow of eminent men, yet still so wounded by having been blacklisted and jobless in his earlier career that his patriotism has turned sentimental and his critical sense has gone dull...
...So I pick up James Thomas Flexner's Washington: The Indispensable Man (Mentor, $2.95, 430 pp...
...Reading it, we finally envision the philosopher's "virtual life": the exuberant patience of the thinker for whom no labor of learning is not enlivening by deeper draughts of the thing itself...
...Land of Spices (another reprint) by Kate O'Brien, (Millington, Dublin, Ireland) which like Frost in May, describes life in a convent school (this one in Ireland) around the turn of the century, and does so with wit and profundity...
...She finds herself thinking, almost inevitably, of cities like Calcutta and of empires that once assumed their own permanence...
...Magazine columns do not always stand up as a book, but Burns's pieces from U.S...
...It had to do with the willful blindness, the illusion of eternity, that's central to life in the capital...
...More importantly in this second volume he has now provided the best analysis available of the socio-political character of Christian salvation...
...Three of the voices I have heard this year stand out particularly clearly...
...ROSEMARY DEEN is a poetry editor of Commonweal...
...This is valuable history, but probably not for your aunt in Orange County...
...It is the kind of house that has a refreshment center...
...Shifting ground a bit, there is Charles A. Meconis's With Clumsy Grace: The American Catholic Left, 1965-1975 (Seabury, $9.95, 204 pp...
...That it is still in print at a time when books disappear from print almost as rapidly as they materialized, makes its longevity as surprising as it is welldeserved...
...The sage, seeing how the man watered his field in a very primitive manner, asked him: 'Don't you know that there is a contraption called a draw-well, a kind of machine that would enable you to water a hundred such little fields in one day?' And he received this reply: 'I have heard my teacher say: He who uses machines, conducts his business like a machine...
...will be both confirmed and surprised by the contents of the second volume, entitled Christ: The Experience of Jesus as Lord (Seabury, 1980, $29.50, 925 pp...
...is a useful handbook for those familiar with the prophet's work and a good introduction for those who are not...
...Gordimer, always at her best when writing short, is better than ever in this collection...
...Selected Later Poems of Marie Luise Kaschnitz, translated by Lisel Mueller (Princeton University Press, 1980, $9.95, $4.95 paper, 111 pp...
...If the Reagan administration desires to adopt a new dimension to our foreign policy which would help America's farmers, stabilize Volatile regions of the world, and help to win friends in Asia and Africa, the report of the President's Commission on Hunger contains the blueprint...
...As often happens, the crest of her intellectual power is reached long after the waves of her first popularity...
...In her piece on Washington she accounts for the anxiety that dogged me every moment of my year there...
...and "everything that sets our minds free without giving us mastery over ourselves is pernicious...
...The women's movement in particular seems in for a hard time...
...But as mirrors of this lost person, the narrator tells two stories: his own, beginning when he was eight with the death of his mother...
...But his historical study, combined with a thorough examination of relevant material from the social sciences, makes this a book that will be hard to ignore in ongoing debates among Christians about feminism, homosexuality, the meaning of the family, women's ordination, and a cluster of other questions relating to male-female relations...
...which I'm inclined to think may be his masterpiece...
...The third major book in theology published in this past year is Hans Kiing's Does God Exist...
...the argument is emphatically pro-life, but with a refreshing knowledge of and civility toward opposing views...
...But now the artist is in the amphitheater...
...I have seldom seen a house so evocative of the unspeakable.'' It is exactly Didion's own evocations of the unspeakable, her piercing revelations of the ridiculous and the horrifying beneath the surface of things, that make the essays collected in The White Album so compelling and, often, so uncomfortable...
...I've just finished Trollope's Can You Forgive Her...
...De Repente/All of a Sudden by Teresa de Jesus, translated by Arlene and James Scully and Marie A. Proser (Curbstone Press, 1979...
...Kathryn Marshall Destinations, Jan Morris, (Oxford/Rolling Stone, $12.95, 242 pp...
...I liked most of the poems...
...The Brandt Report is buttressed by the conclusions of Overcoming World Hunger: The Challenge Ahead, a report of the Presidential Commission on World Hunger (Government Printing Office, 151 pp., $6...
...A sobering book, with haunting illustrations by Robert F. McGovern...
...P. Putnam's Sons, '73, 320 pp...
...is the first book of Anne Tyler's I've read...
...The language is shrewd and economical and the vision unrelenting...
...When the bomb exploded —Hiroshima, Birmingham Jerusalem, Vietnam— when...
...Samuel Johnson once wrote that the best art "approximates the remote, and familiarizes the wonderful...
...the voice asks: woman-voice beating great wings of words against the walls...
...Bellefleur (E.P...
...Can we ultimately trust any reality...
...Hie focus is on the future of freedom and the kinds of social and political agencies that may be divinely ' 'elected'' to advance that future...
...Cottage Street, 1953" (about Sylvia Plath) is a dazzler...
...John Deedy MY reading during 1980 has been restricted pretty much to research in conjunction with writing projects of my own, but in those areas are three recent books for strong recommendation...
...Tyler's ear for dialogue is formidable...
...e.g., the charge in Natural History making him an accomplice in the Piltdown "man" fraud...
...An invaluable guide to the issues involved is A Private Choice (Free Press, $11.95, 288 pp...
...It is a sympathetic report, and one which also raises some disturbing questions...
...The idiom is contemporary without being jarring...
...Commonweal: 702 nature and origin of the veritable gulf that divides human from animal mentality, in a perfectly continuous course of development of life on earth...
...The findings are startling...
...The dialect of the Depression years, the rancor and prejudices of working-class Catholics on the eve of World War II, are rendered with Flaubertian precision...
...The continuity between the two volumes is Schillebeeckx's masterly use of scriptural scholarship and his original and often daring theological reflections...
...Ragtime, a more fashionable but less important work, documented the gilded innocence of turn-ofthe-century America...
...If only I had Garvey's good sense to equip myself then with a pen as well as a stout corkscrew, said I to me as I paged through Garvey...
...It is more important than ever, now that we're to try and survive four years of Reagan and Bush, that the people should learn the facts...
...Gift from the Sea speaks to many of the underlying concerns of feminism in a remarkably contemporary voice that may well be better heard than others today precisely because it lacks the feminist vocabulary that is, unfortunately, a verbal red flag for so many people...
...Last week, prompted by Cox's 1977 review, a friend gave me Daniel Martin as a birthday gift...
...It is also her thirtieth or so book, being equally preceded by ten collections of short stories, three volumes of criticism, a few plays, and four books of verse...
...Dutton $12.95) is Oates's twelfth novel...
...is a most ambitious effort to do theology according to the ancient axiom, lex orandi lex credendi, giving full rein to the interaction between Christian cerebration and celebration...
...The story's controlled tone lets Gordimer render, as if in slow motion, certain simple, wordless cruelties: "I am not old and ugly yet but you can see your death in my changing face...
...In this recent book, Metz has articulated his own political theology with the passion and the critical power the subject demands...
...Finally, if only for the essay "Many Mansions," which offers a depressing glimpse into the soul of Ronald Reagan as revealed by the California governor's mansion built during his administration and to his tastes, but never occupied, Joan Didion's The White Album (Pocket Books, $2.75, 221 pp...
...In listening to Joan Didion, Commonweal: 700 one sees with undeniable clarity that the world of her inner eye is our own...
...is a great and absorbing study, the crown of her life's work...
...a book every American should read...
...That's why I'm hesitant to call the,se elegant essays travel writing—let me call them instead the record of a whimsical wanderer...
...Those who have read Edward Schillebeeckx's first volume, Jesus: An Experiment in Christology (Seabury, 1978, $24.50, 767 pp...
...three recent books from the creative minority in theology should interest you...
...The poet (using a pseudonym for obvious and tragic reasons) writes of the violent oppession in her own land, but to how many others do her words equally apply...
...A rather different voice from an even earlier time can also be heard afresh today...
...The poems are tough, spare, and lyrical...
...The Commission documents this proposal with an overwhelming array of information on the feasibility of eliminating hunger by the year 2000...
...Relationship—both the refinding of self once the early intensity is past ("woman can best refind herself by losing herself in some kind of creative activity of her own") and the shedding of shells called for in middle age...
...Arable land, however, will increase by only 4 percent in the next twenty years...
...There are cogent and brilliant essays on behaviorism, evolution, animal behavior, and animal "language...
...Ragtime's cool staccato aestheticism ("Women visited the fleet carrying white parasols...
...Francine Cardman LATELY I HAVE found myself looking for and listening to the voices of women...
...It is the kind of house in which one does not live, but there is no way to say this without getting into touchy and evanescent and finally inadmissible questions of taste, and ultimately of class...
...Nevertheless they reveal a man who would be about as capable of Piltdown as Theresa of Lisieux...
...Try Schillebeeckx, Metz, and Kiing this season: Handel's Messiah will sound even better...
...In the light of November 4, 1980, it is hoped that others will follow his lead...
...The "start" of the novel is in the middle (at its heart) in the unrecognizing glance that one boy, the narrator, gives another in the corridor of a Chicago high school...
...The most notable fact about the second volume is that here at the length and with the exegetical care needed, readers may now find a brilliant refutation of the still common belief that the New Testament's understanding of salvation is both apolitical and individualistic...
...Yet in our own period since at least the time of Pascal the question is both more existentially significant and logically prior to the further questions of either theism or atheism...
...Finally, another reprint, The Artist's Journey into the Interior by Erich Heller, (Harcourt, Brace, Javanovich—Harvest Books, 1978, $4.50 paper, 240 pp...
...Time Did" doesn't demand a South African context...
...The letters cover a seven-year period (194855) long removed from Piltdown...
...Because other circuits only return exhausted to where they began...
...Robert F. Drinan THE appalling poverty, sickness and illiteracy that plague at least one-fourth of humanity have elicited three frightening challenges to humanity's conscience...
...Even Didion's fascination with dams, waterworks, and shopping centers cuts to the center of the technological alienation on which our culture is built...
...The revelation and the recommendations are clear and compelling...
...Lawrence and the picaresque Hallelujah-I'm-a-bum rhythms of Jack Kerouac...
...This is a typical Berrigan book: part prose, part poetry, all challenging...
...Catholic survive admirably within hard covers...
...Morgan's Passing, persistently funny, and affecting, is an engrossing and superbly-crafted book...
...Two stories in this collection that come back to me most vividly are' 'Town and Country Lovers" and "Time Did...
...This commission, chaired by Sol M. Linowitz, states the moral, humanitarian, technical, and economic arguments for eliminating world hunger but also stresses that political security for Americans is intimately linked to global efforts to assure an adequate diet for all of humanity...
...Although marred by his puzzling animus toward Patrick Moynihan, Steinfels's study is one of die few tries from the left to appropriate and digest what is legitimate in the conservative critiques of the several liberalisms that have served us so poorly...
...The mother who ' 'put her five-year-old daughter out to die on the center divider of Interstate 5 some miles south of the Bakersfield exit...
...vibrates with imagination and energy on every one of its 200odd pages...
...Like all great books this one is important both for what it says and as an example of saying...
...Martin Marty comments in the foreword on the sane, civil tone of the book, and he's right...
...for its language as I read and for its beautiful structure when I had finished...
...There is a marvelous tension between the deceptively prosaic facts of Sorrentino's plot and the richly varied pyrotechnics of his narrative style, which includes letters, interior monologues, outlandish fantasies, question-and-answer quizzes...
...I am ashamed to say that Morgan's Passing (Knopf, $9.95, 311 pp...
...This summer, in our own small scale search for history, two Jesuit friends and I drove west from Kansas City up through Nebraska, Wyoming, and Montana to Idaho where I sat on a porch overlooking Hayden Lake with John Burke's Buffalo Bill: the Noblest Whiteskin (G...
...But when she writes, for instance, 'Where are the children...
...In the opening essay, "Faust's Damnation," Heller speaks of Goethe's belief mat evil arises from any knowing and doing of man that is in excess of his "being...
...A Soldier's Embrace, Nadine Gordimer (Viking, $8.95, 144 pp...
...Because of this failure of the heart, the second boy's story cannot be told: his point of view does not exist...
...These works remind us that theological books need not be read only in Lent...
...Robert Nisbet skims and plunges through the centuries and a vast literature in History of the Idea of Progress (Basic, $16.95, 370 pp...
...Take her "Los Angeles: The Know-How City...
...His work is rich in image and music, full of abundant energy and love of life even when describing the brutal and tragic...
...My mind boggles when I think that she has combined this already Gargantuan oeuvre with a fulltime teaching schedule...
...And just this is badly needed in our present context...
...Bellefleur amply fulfills that condition...
...Overall, a moving document...
...But often the most powerful book of the year is the one waiting to be read...
...She, however, reflecting on certain peculiarities of geography, finds our second largest city "a balefully organic phenomenon," a place that, could it be "pried out of its setting . . . wotild be like a dried mat of some bacterial mold, every hump, every corner exactly shaped to its landscape...
...The most readable of these studies, because it is the least technical, is North-South-A Program for Survival (MIT Press, 304 pp., $4.95 paper...
...Books: CRITICS' CHRISTMAS CHOICES Richard John Neuhaus OF the books I have found most rewarding to read and argue with in the past year or so, I recommend the little paperback by Wolfhart Pannenberg, Human Nature, Election, and History (Westminster, $4.95, 116 pp...
...This is the essence of 'coming of age'— to learn to stand alone-----She must find her true center alone...
...Susanne Langer's Mind: An Essay on Human Feeling, the first two volumes available in paperback (John Hopkins University Press, Vol...
...I suspect it will be my book of the year...
...Huey Newton, an enrolled member of the Kaiser Foundation Health Plan...
...It is a delightful, witty book that put me in the shoes of myself at Garvey's age, a wanderer around Ireland while a student at Trinity...
...and received in return a remarkably lucid understanding of one way of viewing U.S.-Soviet relations in the scheme of international disorder...
...I suspect for the same reasons I assigned Tom Wicker's A Time to Die (Ballantine, $1.95, 436 pp...
...and The Tree House Confessions, a meditative semiautobiographical fiction by James McConkey, whose limpid style and complex perceptions make him one of my favorite contemporary writers...
...The letters, carefully set in context, make that plain...
...Because pondering the absolute is, as Pannenberg might say (or Augustine, or Luther, or Rahner, for that matter), our origin and our end...
...Kiing not only knows this but devotes the major and best part of the entire book to the discussion of the question of nihilism before discussing the question of atheism or his own theistic response...
...or to encourage the martyr and make the lion forget its appetite...
...I don't recommend them all...
...Why, for instance, was the church unable to hold as believing members so many in the Catholic Left whose very witness grew out of their Catholicism...
...What is the matter with the house that Reagan built that Jerry Brown won't live in...
...II, $4.95, 400 pp...
...Poor Teilhard, even in death they won't let him rest...
...Raymond A. Schroth As AN EDUCATOR—a dean of a small midwestern college—I have tried, with mixed success, to define the heart and guts of the educational process as a love—indeed, a passion—for books...
...His Hegelian treatment of the nature of God's reality makes him, to American eyes, a kind of ' 'anonymous process theologian.'' All in all, Kiing has written a masterly exposition of the questions that most contemporary Westerners really pose when they ask the ultimate theological questions: does God exist...
...Indeed in Schillebeeckx's capable hands, even the Letter to the Hebrews begins to bear political tonalities...
...Yet, as an academic administrator who is both a teacher and an its-time-to-jump-off-the-shelf-andwrite-again journalist, as a person trying to nourish an intellectual life, my reading has various clearly defined purposes...
...Kung's own "yes" to reality, his affirmation of fundamental trust, is entirely persuasive...
...Didion exposes the heart of the matter deftly, laying bare the heart of Ronald Reagan as well: "One hears every possible reason for not living in the house except for the one that counts: it is the kind of house that has a wet bar in the living room...
...Doubleday, 1980, $17.50, 839 pp...
...Man aspiring to a freedom of the mind fatally beyond the grasp of his "concrete imagination," seeking power over life through actions that overreach the reaches of his soul, acquiring a virtuosity inappropriately superior to his "virtue"—this was Goethe's idea of hubris, his divination of the meaning of black magic...
...I began Bellefleur by resisting its Gothic aura, the ghosts of Mary Shelley lurking in its pages...
...He who has the heart of a machine, has lost all certainties of the spirit...
...to Nisbet, Bell, Podhoretz, Kristol, and a host of others...
...Mueller is that treasure among translators, a marvelous poet herself who is truly bilingual: one can have complete confidence in her...
...Denise Levertov I tend to read several books at one time, leaving them in different rooms—perhaps a bad habit, but an inveterate one...
...Walter Lippmann and the American Century (Atlantic-Little Brown, $19.95, 669 pp...
...In spite of everything kindly in life child losses and adult losses do not coincide though they share the same center...
...Anne Morrow Lindbergh's 5 December 1980: 699 GiftfromtheSea (Vintage Books, $1.95, 140 pp...
...Bellefleur is a generational saga which documents the fate of an eccentric, wealthy family accursed by some tragic flaw which one could interpret as a nefarious combination of greed and passion...
...There is some overlap, but the variant translations and the translators' introduction make the two editions complementary...
...I also like poets who are stubbornly strict, serious, political like Thomas Kinsella, who grows leaner and more civil and humane...
...In her view," the report observed, "shelivesin a world of people moved by strange, conflicted, poorly comprehended, and, above all, devious motivations which commit them inevitably to conflict and failure...
...And yet what dooms these relationships isn't the law so much as the lovers' inabilities to see themselves except as the law sees them...
...It is a 5 December 1980: 697 free translation of the Purgatorio into modern idiom, thirteenth-century kings and princes shading into twentiethcentury colonels, shahs, and juntas...
...Closely paralleling these two studies is the fascinating report to President Carter pursuant to his request for a "one-year study of the probable changes in the world's population, natural resources, and environment through the end of the century'' (The Global 2000 Report to the President, Government Printing Office, 766 pp., $13...
...My addiction to Gilbert Sorrentino's writing began years ago when I first read excerpts of his work in Ted Solotaroff s much-mourned New American Writing...
...Yet was there ever a more pathetic "great" American—once the imagined epitome of manliness, but sick and drunk in his final years, wobbling through his wild west show to pay off his debts, ridiculed by the drunks on a Kansas City street corner who offered his horse a swig of gin...
...I've read some history and studied the lives of "eminent men," partly to try to write about them, partly to get a sense of the thin line between success and failure, both real and perceived...
...The book is an example of how to negotiate ideas: nothing so learned or fine that is not lifted into the streaming life blood of energetic discourse...
...to my freshman writing class—with the hope that students could learn to discover human dignity where it is most hidden...
...I list them in random order: Immigrants in Our Own Land, by Jimmy Santiago Baca (Louisiana State University Press, $9.95, 72 pp., $3.95 paper, 1979) a first book, written in prison by a young Chicano poet (he is free now...
...The grim revelations in this study are not new in the literature about the Third and Fourth Worlds...
...The oddity of its tone results, I suspect, from the fact that Steel befriended Lippmann during his last years when both were adamantly opposed to the American venture in Vietnam...
...Communion with genii loci is no small ambition, but Morris possesses the gift of conjuring...
...It could still turn their thinking around before it's too late...
...In varying degrees all these poets are indeed in that arena...
...Man and Woman in Christ by Stephen Clark is a massive volume published by Servant Books (Ann Arbor, Mich., $15.95,753 pp...
...This literary approach is not only successful on its own terms but in fact more persuasive than the historical approach in Volume I. And thanks to a new translator it is also far more readable...
...The National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific, "Punchbowl," in which many "ship-in Vietnams'' are buried after being "transmitted" to their families in the States and then returned to Hawaii for burial...
...Catherine of Siena, that astonishing 14th century saint, gadfly, and (since 1970) Doctor of the Church, speaks boldly and directly in the sparkling translation by Suzanne Noffke, O.P., of The Dialogue (Paulist Press, $7.95,398 pp...
...Three years ago, when I was book editor, Harvey Cox phoned in his critic's choice, John Fowles's Daniel Martin (Little Brown, $12.95, Signet, $2.95), for the reader who cared about politics, friendship, cinema, writing, religion and national character...
...Morgan is one of those interesting maternal men (increasingly prevalent in our best fiction) whose life becomes more of a shambles than ever when his children grow up and leave home...
...There were no immigrants...
...In the meantime, the most brilliant political theologian in Europe, Johann Baptist Metz, has produced a relatively small (for a European theologian) but explosive volume on political theology entitled Faith in Society and History (Seabury, 1980, $12.95,237 pp...
...De Vinck, who has 6 children, has spent the last 3 decades at home, caring for a son who was bedridden...
...We tend to take this national prodigy for granted, failing to honor the range of her virtuosity and the unique scholarship and charity which informs her critical prose...
...The executive's guide to the psychology and politics of power," a contemporary commentary on The Prince, which warns that conspirators may succeed in axing a dean but will never be trusted by his successor, and that the key to Machiavellian thought is that "the prince ought to read history and study the actions of eminent men...
...Forceful poems from Chile in the living Hispanic tradition which adapts and combines popular ballad forms with almost surreal images and passionate political engagement...
...first appeared twenty-five years ago...
...the gleaming white of the capitol grey and fretted, the pool blotched with scum, the cherry trees dead in their twos and threes, litter blowing across the grass and slogans scrawled on the statues' plinths...
...Theology, in sum, continues to seem alive and well and really pluralistic—as these three very different books testify...
...In fact, Noffke is so skillful and subtle that it was some time before I realized, with delight, that I hadn't been reading about "God and man" or "mankind" or "men," but rather (and rather naturally) that "God was made human and humanity was made God," or that' 'I want to show you how a person comes to be my friend, and once my friend, becomes my child by attaining filial love...
...I could hardly get enough of the narrator-child's point of view, especially the house of his parents: the look and feel of the furniture that fits a little body...
...Several stories follow conventional form, others seem to borrow from film, and one—' 'A Lion on the Freeway"—calls to mind epigram and dream...
...They are admirably translated by Mary Lukas...
...Currently I'm in the middle of three novels: The Lost Traveller by Antonia White (Virago Modern Classics, Dial Press, first published 1950, reprinted 1979, $5.95) a sequel to Frost in May, an old favorite of mine...
...KATHRYN MARSHALL, the author of My Sister Gone, and Desert Places, novels published by Harper & Row, teaches writing at the University of Pennsylvania...
...It is "against everyone's interest to allow poverty to continue...
...In Theodore H. White's In Search of History (Warner, $5.95, 561 pp...
...by the distinguished professor of jurisprudence John Noonan...
...No other contemporary Americans novelist I can think of combines Doctorow's lyric inventiveness with the breadth of his political vision...
...The Book of Daniel dealt with the paranoia and fraudulent ideologies which prevailed among us during the years of the Cold War...
...The book deserves far more political attention that it has thus far received on these shores...
...Social and political light years seem to have elapsed since 1955, yet given Ae mood of the country, one wonders how many of the gains made in the interval will last...
...There were no blacks...
...The book's success is not confined to its technical virtuosity...
...Doctorow's new novel makes a radical stylistic break with its predecessors...
...and Peppercannister Poems 1972-1978 ($9.95, $5.95 paper, 159 pp., Wake Forest University Press...
...Foremost is Pierre Leroy's Letters from My Friend Teilhard de Chardin (Paulist Press, $10.95, 216 pp...
...Who is God...
...Anthologists never do well by Richard Wilbur (some unreconsidered image of him has stuck in their minds), so it is self-defense to buy his books...
...Yes, I do know such machines as you speak of, but I also know why I shall not use them.' " If we could learn something from that—not quite literally, indeed, but in viable modification—we would have more hope of a future on our poor mistreated planet than we can reasonably claim this year...
...One of my least favorite persons is Henry Kissinger, but I finally got around to his White House Years (Little, Brown, $22.50,1521 pp...
...The narrator is a woman watching a man grow away from her, a woman who marks time by her lover's changing affections...
...There was a lot of sexual fainting...
...Our culture is discovering, once again and with difficulty, that that is the circuit, spiraling toward the absolute future, that cannot be avoided...
...rather, I suffered throught it, not in the sense of resisting Mailer's masterpiece, but in the pain of compassion—suffering through the historical fact that there should be a man so doomed, so cruel, so godforsaken yet, in the Christian sense, so God-loved as Gary Gilmore, and that his blowing away should become an entertainment...
...The book is frequently prolix and disjointed, but it is a suggestive model which, one hopes, others will pick up on...
...It is filled with such eerie phenomena as vampires, mountain gnomes, bears turning into men, a half-witted child who turns into a dog, a pond that breathes, a viciouslooking rat-like mammal which metamorphoses overnight into a wondrously beautiful, oversize cat...
...The mere announcement of such a subject from such a scholar, thinker, and writer ought tccause a stampede at the bookstore...
...Fairly or not, all of Lippmann's career is viewed through that prism, and what does not conform to Steel's leftist bias is not treated kindly...
...I was disappointed by his behemoth last novel, Mulligan Stew, which was bogged down by an aggressive, almost didactic commitment to post-Modernist techniques...
...Tyler documents Morgan's obsession with two young puppeteers— 1960's college drop-outs drawn with greater delicacy than any other counter-culture protagonists I can think of—whose baby he once delivered during his transient impersonation of a doctor...
...He who conducts this business like a machine, will soon have the heart of a machine...
...This crucially important volume, almost a best-seller in Europe but little known in America, contains the recommendations of the prestigious eighteenperson international group chaired by Commonweal: 694 Willie Brandt on inequality in the world and the fact that 800 million persons live in total poverty and are afflicted by chronic malnutrition...
...Hospitalized for vertigo and nausea in June 196*8, her situation was described, in a psychiatric report from which she quotes, as that of a "personality in the process of deterioration...
...But the comprehensiveness of the material and the urgency behind its proposals are new—and welcome...
...A number of books of poetry read in recent months seem especially noteworthy...
...Langer's discussion of this question every morning for breakfast, to the great improvement of their information and reasoning powers...
...The thesis is that one cannot begin to understand Solzhenitsyn unless it is clear that the religious and moral concerns have priority over the political...
...This insistence strikes me as exactly right...
...for his own sake...
...JOHN DEEDY, formerly of Commonweal, has completed an "interim biography" of Daniel Berrigan, to be published in 1981 by Fides/Claretian...
...David Tracy IF you are tired of reading about the strange theology of the Moral Majority (who isn't...
...Loon Lake, by Ed Doctorow (Random House, $11.95, 258 pp...
...210 pp...
...South Africa's Nadine Gordimer is no wanderer—these stories are rooted in the soil of apartheid...
...This buoyant, immensely witty novel takes place at a summer boarding house in rural New Jersey in the last years of the Depression...
...However, her eloquent, beautiful sensual poems (many of which are devotional) convey an underlying hopefulness and often an ecstatic celebration of living...
...by Ronald Steel is a marvelously readable tour through American political thought and change of the last seventy years...
...The population will grow from 4 billion in 1975 to 5 December 1980: 695 6.35 billion in 2000...
...Once again, and along with thinkers such as Daniel Bell, Nisbet edges up to the proposition that the only hope is some kind of religiously-based reconstitution of Westera culture...
...Who has borne so many disappointments and betrayals and kept his essential vision so intact...
...It tells of two ill-fated interracial love affairs: one pair is arrested for contravening the Immorality Act and the other is discovered when the black woman has the white man's child...
...Peace March, by the late, much lamented Millen Brand (Countryman Press, Woodstock, Vermont 19$0, $12.95, $6.95 paper, 222 pp...
...Pursuant to this premise, the Commission recommends in the most vigorous manner that the United States make the elimination of hunger the primary focus of its relationships with the developing countries...
...the fire-beast began to slither through the roof the children ran out: coated with flames, they ran down the road, their dying . . . transcribed on photographs, sold to newspapers and magazines,' she voices, out of a private and domestic place, the anguish of all the women in the world who realize their actual or possible children may have no world at all...
...Orchids, mudslides and forest fires in a Los Angeles County canyon...
...FATHER RAYMOND A. SCHROTH, S.J., is Academic Dean ofRockhurst College in Kansas City...
...The Neo-Conservatives (Simon and Schuster, $ 11.95,355 pp...
...Reflecting on the situation of woman in America in 1955 (a reflection as prescient as it was perceptive), Lindbergh identifies some of the forces that work against women experiencing their lives as being "in grace": multiple demands and distractions, an instinct to give that leads women to "spill [themselves] away" purposelessly, "Zerrissenheit— torn-to-pieces-hood.'' Moved by the various shells she encounters as gifts from the sea during several weeks at the beach without her husband and children, she also points out directions on the way of grace...
...This stark reality cannot be avoided, the Brandt Report concludes, either by domination of the Third World by the industrialized nations or by isolation from the world...
...Travel writing is a broad and often dreary genre, one that takes in everything from the least memorable ravings of D. H. Lawrence to the stuff of airlines glossies...
...For myself, this second volume in Schillebeeckx's developing Christology is even more impressive than his much discussed Volume I. Both deserve serious attention...
...Here Kiing provides one of his most sustained philosophical and theological treatments of a single major issue...
...As such the book itself is thoughtful, and insightful...
...Here are some of the books I have read this year...
...Says Morris: "I could not easily imagine Washington actually deserted, but as I sat there in the hot sun I did not find it hard to imagine the city past its heyday...
...5 December 1980: 703...
...All of Metz's familiar and powerful themes are present in this remarkable little book: the "dangerous memory" of Jesus, the need for narrative to keep alive the memory of the suffering of all of the oppressed, the need for apocalypse to destroy all complacency, the need for Utopian and eschatological visions for political theory, and above all the centrality of praxis over all theories...
...He is the author of Blessed Rage for Order and the forthcoming The Analogical Imagination: Christian Theology and the Culture of Pluralism (Crossroads...
...Loon Lake relates the ironic tensions between the despair of the working class and the extravagance of our privileged castes in the depression era...
...FRANCINE CARDMAN teaches historical theology at Weston School of Theology in Cambridge...
...and Donald E. Walker's The Effective Administrator (Jossey-Bass) which cautions that "administrators indeed should recognize their responsibility to absorb the hostility and misunderstanding of others...
...The British Methodist Geoffrey Wainwright is now at Union Seminary, New York...
...How many men have suffered more defeats to be remembered only for the victories...
...Finally, let me say a word for Robert E. Burns's book The Examined Life (Thomas More Press, $7.95, 141 pp...
...It focuses on the events of one weekend of that summer as they are viewed by each of Sorrentino's four central protagonists...
...The debate is almost certain to be intensified in the months and years ahead as, in one way or another, the 1973-Roe v. Wade decision is modified and perhaps reversed...
...I, $3.95,487 pp., Vol...
...And the obsession of Joe Korzeniowski, Loon Lake's central protagonist, for the "blazingly beautiful, pissed-off" gangster's moll Clara Lukacs provides some of the most ecstatically beautiful prose in current fiction...
...Some examine hate and loyalty in that strange society at the toe of Africa...
...Solitude—"the timeless inner strength of women" which calls them to "be the pioneer in achieving this stillness, not only for her own salvation, but for the salvation of family life, of society, perhaps even of our civilization...
...amoving account (in the mode—somewhere between lyrical and documentary—he developed in Local Lives) of his participation in the Nagasaki-Hiroshima walk of 1977, when he was 71 and one of the first Americans to participate in this annual event...
...Leroy's book has nothing to do with Piltdown...
...FRANdNE du PLESSIX GRAY is the author of Divine Disobedience and Lovers & Other Tyrants...
...The title tells the story: this is the record of Catholic opposition to the Vietnam war...
...Theology also celebrates faith and the Christmas season...
...For single volumes I recommend Richard Wilbur's The Mind Reader (Harvest, $3.50, 227 pp...
...Jan Morris is one of the few writers who can convince me I don't know a place until I've read about it...
...Absolute activity, activity unrestrained by the condition of humanity, he once said, leads to bankruptcy...
...Moving on from the war to specters of the moment, we have Daniel Berrigan's new book The Discipline of the Mountain, subtitled "Dante's Purgatorio in a Nuclear World" (Seabury, $8.95, 120 pp...
...Let us raise a standard to which the wise and honest can repair...
...Kaschnitz (1901-1974) stayed in Germany throughout the Hitler years (she was in Frankfort throughout the fire bombings), and much of her poetry is dedicated to the task of "dealing with guilt and suffering, and recognizing that her silence during the Nazi period meant de facto complicity...
...Langer's mighty subject now is "The CRITICS RICHARD JOHN neuhaus is a Lutheran pastor, author and lecturer living in New York...
...The one question that most directly joins religiously based moral judgment and public policy is abortion...
...Doxology: The Praise of God in Worship, Doctrine and Life (Oxford, $24.95, 624 pp...
...is Peter Steinfels's response (reaction...
...A Geography of Poets, a Bantam paperback edited by Edward Fields ($2.95, 300 pp...
...The most striking feature of the work is Kung's extensive discussion of the reality of fundamental trust as the prior existential issue for asking the question of God...
...There is a curious ambivalence in the United States between our Calvinistic admiration for hard work and voluminous production and the suspicion with which we view an artist whose output is as large as Joyce Carol Oates's...
...It ' 'raises man's power above the substance of his being...
...The first is told with a journalistic precision that at times becomes mockery of South Africa's Fleet Street news style...
...He used to sing...
...Will they raise the consciousness and convince the consciences of the people in the most affluent nation in the history of the world that they must be their brother's keeper because they are their brother's brother...
...A Soldier's Embrace displays a wide range of narrative skills...
...Here are 228 American poets publishing in the last ten years arranged by region...
...Indeed that issue is no less than the major theological issue, the reality of God...
...Caldicott manages to present those facts and figures in a simple, comprehensible way, and at the same time to convey something of the passion and unpretentiousness that make her such a dynamic speaker...
...Thanks to Schillebeeckx it is now available...
...of last year, Seamus Heaney's Fieldwork (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $8.95), and Thomas Kinsella's Poems 1956-1973 ($10.25, $6.25 paper, 192 pp...
...His "revisionist" views of the Renaissance are striking and his rather dour pespective on the future of Western civilization bracing...
Vol. 107 • December 1980 • No. 22
