Critics' Christmas Choices
CARMODY, JOHN & Kolbenschlag, Madonna & Murphy, Walter F. & MacIntyre, Alasdair & Cuddihy, John Murray & Senior, Donald & Maloff, Saul & Lekachman, Robert & Jacobsen, Josephine & Amidei, Nancy & Toolan, David & Woodward, Kenneth L.
Books: CRITICS' CHRISTMAS CHOICES Alasdair Maclntyre ALASDAIR MacINTYRE is the author of After Virtue (University of Notre Dame Press). He teaches philosophy at Welles-ley College. THE second...
...ALL of the books I have chosen are poetry, thus displaying my personal bias and pleasure, and enabling any unregenerate soul who just doesn't like that form of literature to skip the piece at once...
...More than once she was called home to "nurse" her mother (who suffered from an inability to keep a maid) and then was forced to begin nurse training all over again, as punishment for having responded to familial responsibilities...
...We go out on it/ anyhow...
...till the last chapters a dismantling spoof of master-mind "realist" Sigmund Freud...
...More for the golden agers implies less for young families...
...Mendelson's narrative makes the particular poems new for us by re-focusing our attention to them...
...shows her wit, perception and high lyric ability, together with an exceptional variety of form...
...Andrew M. Greeley's The Cardinal Sins (Warner, $12.95,400 pp...
...provided careful guidance around the rising middle class Irish parishes of Chicago and its chancery...
...women, sex, love, their troubles, life, and hard times...
...By his rediscovery of the voluntary and donary dimensions of microeconomics, and by spelling out their endless consequences, Gilder puts us all in his debt...
...Brittain is exceptionally good at recreating her own state of mind along the way...
...One folded copy per customer sent free on request...
...His prayer seeks the ultimate conversion: "I pray God to rid me of God.'' Fox has mediated the master well...
...661 and 480 pp...
...Nevertheless, I respect his argument's force and make the book required reading for undergraduates and graduate students...
...For Emerson, surprise was the most American thing about America...
...Through their letters-and they were remarkably prolific writers for the circumstances-she had a more immediate sense of the war than some...
...Alienation translates into inefficiency, mass entry of women into labor markets in order to preserve family living standards, transformation of our society from a pro- to an anti-natal attitude, acceptance of gays as semi-legitimate once sex is separated from procreation, and creation of a permanent black underclass which pursues crime on rational grounds as the most lucrative of career opportunities...
...is my surrender to nepotism, but also a lucid treatment of how the archaic mind at one with nature showed itself in prehistoric times, changed with civilization, persevered in the world religions (Buddhism, Christianity, Islam), and is with us yet, perhaps offering some medicines for our ecological ills...
...Joan Meyer Anzia's and Mary G. Durkin's Marital Intimacy: A Catholic Perspective (Andrews and McMeel, $6.95, 81 pp...
...the spectrum is wide: popular culture (rock and its variants, movies...
...Theologians are apt to fail us at this point...
...The phenomena embrace declining growth and product quality, exploding crime rates, worker alienation, feminine rebellion, gay liberation, and resurgence of kooky religion...
...Department of Health, Education and Welfare, is the director of Food Research Action Center in Washington...
...is a remarkable exercise in systematic theology for a number of reasons...
...His last published work, The Two Marxisms: Contradictions and Anomalies in the Development of Theory (Continuum $17.50, 397 pp...
...But the narrative, though compelling, is only by the way...
...Art makes obvious things odd...
...All the fanfare for that first volume may have made the appearance of the Christ volume anti-climactic...
...The Farewells (Elpenor Books, Chicago, $10.00, 76 pp...
...His control and grasp have grown, book by book, and their cumulative power is a joy to the reader...
...and translations in German and French of the Lax poem...
...A higher birth rate and influx of immigrants may actually raise productivity as well as our standard of living...
...She was never entirely removed from it though, because her brother went early, as did others they both loved...
...In the 1930s Auden's voyages are like his loves, beginning splendidly and turning false...
...If so, David Plante's The Country (Atheneum, $9.95,159 pp...
...He explains his journey to Marxism and Reformed Christianity, making a persuasive case that Marx's social analyses are more complementary to biblical faith than antagonistic...
...Jacques Ellul's Perspectives on Our Age (Seabury, $10.95,128 pp...
...Arthur C. Danto's The Transfiguration of the Commonplace: A Philosophy of Art (Harvard University, 212 pp., $17.50...
...SINCE I spent the summer of 1975 in India, that country's polymorphous perversity had stuck in my intestines...
...they come out of the veins and viscera as well as the cerebra...
...Brown combines a novelist's imagination with a scholar's careful concerns for evidence and inference to turn what seems to be an impossible task into a ripe occasion to teach in a fascinating way about the development of Christian doctrine and community...
...The subject of disturbing images, of course, brings to mind two novels in different ways about memory, Milan Kund-era's episodic nightmare mime of Czechoslovakia, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, (Knopf, $12.95, 228 pp...
...Eugene Kennedy's Father's Day (Doubleday, $13.95, 488 pp...
...But it, too, is a monumental book worthy of praise...
...The dark mood of the first clashed with the bright life of Florence and the joyless Christian self-sacrifice of the second with the city's happy pagan sensualism...
...Simon & Schuster...
...Pantheon will publish his new book, Greed Is Not Enough: The Short, Unhappy Life of Reaganomics...
...But maybe that is because Rabbit, Updike and I are all middle-aged and rather liking it...
...In any case, you had better, for she will not be denied...
...Of mixed quality are three books from a ground-breaking field of psychological research, Leslie Feher's The Psychology of Birth (Continuum, $12.95, 224 pp...
...This is philosophic theology as it is meant to be written...
...Individually the characters are treated with what is not always recognized as a literary virtue, truthfulness...
...it paradoxicalizes the ordinary...
...In a season when we are summoned to integrate the story of our lives into the biblical story, too many find their own lives disintegrating into despair...
...His The Zero-Sum Society (Basic Books $12.95, 230 pp...
...Indeed, due to Brown's challenging presentation, Gustavo's melody lingers on days after one has closed the book...
...Another fine book is Contemporary Christologies: A Jewish Response (Paulist, paper, $7.95, 203 pp...
...In many ways an infuriating tome, it is nonetheless useful in presenting in respectable intellectual terms an old view of the relationships among individual autonomy, private property, and governmental power that most liberal academics-and judges-have ignored since the 1930s...
...If taken seriously, its radical argument would shake down the thunder from the sky of the institutional church and rekindle the faggots in the old Holy Office...
...Denise Lardner Carmody's The Oldest God: Archaic Religion Yesterday and Today (Abingdon, $6.95, 192 pp...
...These are volumes of widely differing quality...
...Now, barring an impossible discovery of attics stuffed with heretofore unknown primary sources establishing the precise identity of the quadroon lover and other Whitmanesque inventions, concoctions, evasions and mystifications, this Life will stand handsomely for the rest of the century and beyond...
...David V. Hicks's Norms & Nobility (Praeger, $21.95, 176 pp...
...It defamiliarizes...
...Robert L. Cohn's The Shape of Sacred Space: Four Biblical Studies (Scholars Press, $9.95, 86 pp...
...It's possible that Julia Randall is the least widely known of the truly fine American poets writing today...
...and Leni Schwartz's "how to" book, The World of the Unborn (Marek, $12.95, 309 pp...
...Walter F. Murphy WALTER F. MURPHY, McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence, at Princeton, is the author of The Vicar of Christ and The Roman Enigma (Macmillan...
...Capitalism is the economic in-stitutionalization of surprise...
...Bernard H. Siegan's Economic Liberties and the Constitution (University of Chicago Press, $19.50, 384 pp...
...That was the year in which Auden availed himself of a longstanding European alternative to despair by going to America...
...Galilea is a Chilean priest, a very popular author in his own country but, until now, unknown here...
...Josephine Jacobsen JOSEPHINE JACOBSON has just published her sixth volume of verse, The Chinese Insomniacs (University of Pennsylvania Press...
...If feminist philosophers have convinced us that women as well as men are capable of more than the sum of their biological endowments and socialization patterns, Julian Simon's The Ultimate Resource proposes that earth itself is something more than the sum of its material and quantitative resources...
...is a solid contribution to John Knox's "Makers of Contemporary Theology" series...
...Farrar, Straus, Giroux, $11.95, 209pp...
...There runs through The Farewells a strong concern with the destructive, with unaf-fordable losses, not merely of whale and Our dreams have turned the lions, have made pathways in the jangle, peaceful lakes...
...Not quite our Oscar Wilde, not yet nor ever to be our Dr...
...In-house criticism gave me great familiarity with it but has yet to breed the least bit of contempt...
...The new commentary is as much Meister Fox as it is Meister Eckhart, but this adds to the richness of the encounter...
...It offers, not only an experienced therapist's view of what femaleness has become and of the nuances of sexual micropolitics, but also an analysis of the macropolitics of a masculinized dominant culture...
...WHEN I first came to Princeton for an interview in 1957, a senior colleague told me that a serious scholar had two options: to read or to write...
...And beneath his primary paradigm, when he turns to the East, and analyzes the Asiatic mode of production, there is also, Gouldner writes, a chauvinism in Marx, "an ethnocentrism exalting the West as embodying a unique promise for the world's future development...
...a compelling, though uneven, novel about the Citadel, my home town of Charleston, S.C., and the clannish violence of young males...
...As with good friends, these books invite dialogue...
...Second, she was a woman carving out a new way of life for herself and women like her, often by sheer force of personality...
...When the sunbelt prospers, the snowbelt declines, and so on...
...Martin E. Marty writes so many good and important books that it would be easy to overlook his short and irenic addition to the Journeys of Faith series, By Way of Response, (Abingdon...
...However, Galilea does not offer mere sweetness and light...
...A final book...
...they have built new Edens ever-sweet and ever-changing...
...linked my interests in social science, textual analysis, and theology...
...Their education, like that of theoretical physicists or economists, too often makes them think of truth as embodied primarily in generalizing propositions...
...Order from Helsinki Watch, 205 E. 42nd St., N.Y., N.Y...
...Early next year...
...He has distilled their message into the happy news that if only the poverty of the poor is allowed to spur them into activity, and further enrichment of the opulent is permitted to swell saving, investment, and prodigies of entrepreneurship, America will be great again...
...Men gain at women's expense...
...various social issues and themes clustering around feminist (and not only feminist) preoccupations (abortion, pornography, sexual power politics, marriage and the family and alternatives to both...
...is a landmark...
...The fundamental paradigm for all of our relations is found in the bond between man and woman...
...242 pp...
...Eckhart's theology of "letting go'' assumed that notions of God, as well as the self, could become idolatrous...
...Kenneth Woodward KENNETH L. woodward is an editor at Newsweek and co-author with Arthur Kornhaber, M.D...
...Have you lost a parent this year...
...By Brian Moore...
...A strong, agile polemicist who is never anything but deeply serious, she can and very well may infuriate readers of opposite views-on abortion, on marriage, on sex, on being fruitful and multiplying-on any of these urgent questions...
...A stunning reminder of just how much nineteenth-century religious preoccupations are with us yet...
...Edited by Robert J. Stanton and Gore Vidal...
...This was not the aspect of Edward Mendelson's Early Auden (Viking, $20., 407 pp...
...Brown is thoroughly an advocate for Gutierrez's positions, especially the key ones of solidarity with the poor and the priority of praxis...
...Kaplan's biography of our presiding national poet and good grey fox, as admirers of his previous ones on Mark Twain and Lincoln Steffens will not be surprised to hear, is judicious, subtle, full-bodied and, on top of that, a rich, dense tale well-told...
...George Gilder's Wealth and Poverty (Basic Books $16.95, 306 pp...
...In spite of his immense productivity, instead of labeling him as prolific, we have instead the sense of Ammons's immense fecundity...
...To do this invites another mistake: the identification of capitalist culture and motivation with utilitarian ideology...
...Fundamentally, say the authors, the mind's business is poetic-and (my gloss) the most revolutionary things around, as the Kremlin knows, are new metaphors and the people who make them...
...If he does not entirely succeed, at least he restores our confidence that at its best theology need not fail those whose vision of the world has the integrity of the best novelists and the best critics...
...Walt Whitman: A Life...
...shows how claims about the truth of certain narratives provide the context for the central claims of moral theology...
...The first book takes us through her early career as a writer, and up to her marriage in 1925...
...Shiva's power to destroy lies in the hands of a first rank artist here...
...is a brief collection of mostly brief but never slight poems, and it is this very brevity which makes the book so remarkable...
...Two scholarly works impressed me deeply: Edward Schillebeeckx's The Christ: The Experience of Jesus as Lord(Seabury, $29.50, 925 pages) and James Dunn's, Christology in the Making (Westminster, paper $24.50, 443 pp...
...In challenging the contemporary myths of "overpopulation" and scarcity," Simon emphasizes the infinite capabilities of the ultimate resource: the human imagination...
...She quickens, brings to immediate squawling life, almost every subject her intensities compel her to...
...is exciting, mind-expanding...
...Lyle Stuart...
...Marx, among others, recognized this relation as an index of authentic human development and a gauge of appropriate relations to everything else...
...10.95, 143 pp...
...by Eugene Borowitz, a Reform Jewish scholar who faces head-on the "scandal" (literally, "the stumbling block") of Jesus Christ for the Jewish-Christian dialogue...
...10.95...
...Gilder is the rich man's Jerry Falwell...
...crane and greenness, or even of people, but of quality, of ". . . all those/ who keep an undegraded eye/ and tongue to tell a master by...
...My third choice is Matthew Fox's new collection and interpretation of Meister Eckhart's Sermons, Breakthrough: Meister Eckhart's Creation Spirituality in New Transition (Doubleday Image, $7.95, 579 pp...
...Madonna Kolbenschlag MADONNA KOLBENSCHLAG is the author of Kiss Sleeping Beauty Goodbye (Doubleday...
...rolled copies for hanging, $5 per poster...
...A companion volume to his previous grievous bodily assault on modern art (painting, mostly, mainly abstract expressionism and its variants and offshoots), The Painted Word...
...Even Schoenberg and European influences in music, Freud and . . . but once the fever takes hold, all are consigned to hell...
...The analytic technique of anamnesis is no match for a lady whose hysterical symptoms and sexual fantasies are prophetic, over-determined not by the past so much as by the future...
...He argues that world history is making the faiths more aware of their mutual interpenetration, and is calling for a theology of their whole...
...I love you, I love this fool's walk./ The thing we have to learn is how to walk light...
...MY CHOICES for "gift" books this Christmas will include three very divergent works published in the last year which, nevertheless, have some important things in common...
...Even neoconservative intellectuals can give it but two cheers...
...Thurow's remedies combine free market solutions with proposals for full employment and redistribution of income and wealth which in tandem interestingly reveal the troubles of well-trained economists who also embrace social democracy...
...It has the impact of the best work of a poet long since established as a formidable and outstandingly original contributor to the best of American poetry...
...Matthew Fox's Breakthrough is a refreshing interpretation of the Rhineland Dominican mystic-preacher who was posthumously condemned by the Church in the fourteenth century...
...The crucial difference is that on the Christian account that which would warrant despair is always only part of the story, and the essential word is story...
...Within the framework of nature acutely observed, the poems in their characteristic blend of the colloquial and the metaphysical take up, in their unique accent, problems simultaneously ancient and immediate...
...this year I plan to give them as presents (already have, in fact, not being able to wait for Christmas...
...MY LIST is eclectic, joining a few books I have found exciting to a few others I'd like to see get wider exposure...
...No wonder sociologists discover a mysterious "taboo on socialism in America...
...He also demonstrates the widespread effects of contemporary technology, and is refreshingly disgusted with the small impact he has been able to make on the bureaucracies of the French nation and the French Reformed Church...
...Reduced population might, paradoxically, be the most critical obstacle to progress...
...Gilder's farrago of racism, sexism, and social Darwinism, occasionally eloquent though it is, mostly...
...For me it was a joy to see the craftman-ship of Schillebeeckx as he constructed a renewed theology of grace from a fresh reading of the biblical data...
...It is a closely reasoned, clearly written book prescribing a limited set of policy-making roles for judges...
...319 pp...
...I found this a remarkable book not only because of its provocative thesis but because it is a mint piece of clarity and responsible scholarship...
...Farrar, Straus, Giroux...
...Moore's novel is a little more than a novella, in size, scope, scale, conception, dramatic projection, but that is an aspect of its virtue, evidence, if any more were needed, of a masterful writer in absolute control of his means...
...shows how the theoretically residual status of "civil society" in Marxism blinded it to the rule of the state and, in a sense, invited Stalinism...
...In his just published America Now: Why Nothing Works (Simon & Schuster, $12.95, 208 pp...
...The pastoral relevance of any christology is a litmus test for its validity, it seems to me...
...The cause, sufficient for Harris, is the transformation of work, the shift celebrated by Daniel Bell and deplored by Harris from blue- to white- and pink-collar jobs...
...Not so much radical as defiantly post-radical, she is a militant feminist, a self-professed bohemian, a clear-eyed left libertarian (which is to say she is no sectarian or dogmatist) more passionately concerned with cultural and sexual politics than with quotidian reformist politics...
...But capitalists are no greedier than doctors or writers or professors of sociology or assistant secretaries of energy or commissars of wheat, Gilder has recently written...
...The price is heavy but the ambling footnotes alone are worth the investment...
...IT MAY say something about the condition of the dismal science that the three most interesting economic items I have recently encountered are, in order, artifacts of a social science au-todidact, an enraged anthropologist, and a disaffected, though properly authenticated, economist...
...I never had the sense of getting an after-the-fact, adult version of some youthful passion but a clear, unfiltered original of what she must have thought and felt...
...The second book ends in 1950, by which time she'd had two children and survived a second World War...
...Concerning the two Marxisms: Marxism as science does not, cannot, reflect on itself freely, unstintedly...
...focuses on our relations with each other as men and women...
...Often he is very funny, and when he is, always our intelligence profits...
...So for me the big literary event of the past summer was Salmon Rushdie's Chaplinesque novel of post-independence India, Midnight's Children (Knopf, $15.95, 446 pp...
...Alvin Gouldner died suddenly in Madrid on December 15, 1980...
...After much argument, and threats from her university tutors that she would never be allowed back, Brittain began training as a nurse...
...and D. M. Thomas's The White Hotel (Viking, $12.95, 274 pp...
...Eventually she rejoined a British society that was drastically changed, to finish her university education and become the writer she was still determined to be...
...But with the virtues, as with poetry, counterfeits abound...
...By deftly creative literary and historical scholarship, he reconstructs the sort of community to whom St...
...I do not wish to be misinterpreted...
...Raymond Brown's The Community of the Beloved Disciple (Paulist Press, $4.50, 204 pp...
...So free enterprise is vulgar enterprise...
...The war was largely distant, a romantic adventure for Helsinki Watch A dramatic 24" by 36" poster and 1982 calendar honors the imprisoned Human Rights monitors in Soviet Russia and Czechoslovakia...
...may be the novel-or the meditation-for you...
...To her credit, she wanted to think, to learn, and most of all-to write...
...this time the objects of his anathemas are the towering "glass box" mausoleums which violate the skies of our great cities...
...a meditation on our relations with the transcendent...
...In short, if you've been depressed by the news from the Club of Rome and other environmental sages, Simon provides a fascinating riposte...
...He is killed, Feeley-Harnik shows, for violating commensal-ity, for eating and drinking with publicans and harlots...
...The Men's Club...
...Robert McAfee Brown's Gustavo Gutierrez (John Knox, $3.95,89pp...
...finds Harry Angstrom at middle age and still running-this time, out of gas...
...Her attention falls upon its proper objects, which is to say rises directly out of the ideas, forces, impulses, historical winds which distance her from you and me...
...Alice Thomas Ellis in The Birds of the Air (Viking, $10.95, 156 pp...
...Donald Senior FATHER DONALD SENIOR, C.P., is associate professor of New Testament Studies at the Catholic Theological Union in Chicago...
...The spirituality he suggests is alert to the cause of justice and liberation...
...Nelson De Mille's fast paced Cathedral (Delacorte, $13.95, 483 pp...
...Three things make the books special...
...The book originated from retreat conferences and the pages retain a meditative, non-technical aura...
...Robert Lekachman ROBERT LEKACHMAN teaches economics at the Lehman College campus of the City University of New York...
...the men...
...Thurow's paradigm, out of game theory, of the zero-sum society is unfortunately, intuitively most persuasive of all...
...Or so it seems to me...
...Throughout the war she fought her own private battles as well...
...This is Barth, the cheerful grandfather, talking straight to the heart, to us unborn...
...Not a jot or a tittle of the sequence (seder) is changed by Jesus...
...There is strong emotion in the book, but it permeates rather than assaults...
...I have gobbled up some other good books this year but these are the ones whose flavor lingers and they all happen to be in the general area of christ-ology...
...Birth dates and addresses for sending greetings to the prisoners...
...And then the final scandal: his followers eat his body and drink his blood...
...If even some of this be true, twice-born talk finds a biological basis, and vice versa...
...An economist, Simon challenges the Malthusian models that still dominate public policy by focusing his argument on long-term effects rather than short-term adjustments...
...Christmas had come, as always, at an inconvenient time," and every member and friend of the family who gather together bring their own peculiar defeats and disappointments to the feast...
...rather, of a difficult and waiting acceptance...
...By day from town to town we carry Eden in our tents and bring its wonders to the children who have lost their dreams of home...
...He reviews eleven modern christologies, dialoguing forthrightly with each of them...
...says of one character that "he was American and liked all events and occasions-no matter how unfortunate or bloody-to end in sweetness and reconciliation . . ." The Birds of the Air takes place at Christmas in Britain...
...has sold over 135,000 copies in hardcover, a figure I cite with envy...
...His thesis is that a full-blown doctrine of pre-existence and incarnation is found only in the Johannine literature, although the momentum toward that intuition can be detected in Paul and in the Wisdom speculation of the earliest community...
...But it is a central virtue of his account of how Auden first made himself into a poet and then developed his powers in such a way that he came to write what Mendelson calls "counterfeit poetry...
...Ellen Willis, now a columnist with the Village Voice, embodies the best of her generation, and is by all odds one of our liveliest, most interesting, vivid, fractious, contentious, pellucid essayists...
...7.95, 143 pp...
...For the participants, the Last Supper itself was merely preliminary...
...7.95, Windview Books...
...His study transfigures the commonplace expression "for example...
...GILLIAN FEELEY-HARNIK'S The Lord's Table: Eucharist and Passover in Early Christianity (University of Pennsylvania Press, $19.95, 184 pp...
...My final favorite is quieter, less ambitious than of the others: Segundo Galilea's, Following Jesus (Orbis, paper, $4.95, 122 pp...
...NAL-Mentor, $2.50, 128 pp...
...struck no chords of remembrance, only fear of the real possibility of organized terrorism-and the perhaps equally destructive counterterrorism-cutting into the heart of an American city...
...During the course of the war she lost many whom she loved, and lost as well the romantic idealism she'd felt towards war...
...what this Western Catholic's experience of the world feels like right now...
...And if in a philosophic vein you want to understand why figures such as Rushdie's matter so much, how they constitute, contain, and expand the worlds we dwell in-and as Paul Riceour says, "give rise to thought" -then I recommend George Lakoff and Mark Johnson's Metaphors We Live By (University of Chicago, $13.95...
...Hauerwas has set himself tasks of immense difficulty: to integrate themes from recent analytical moral philosophy, from biblical studies, and from contemporary moral debate...
...It self-exemplifies...
...That cheer is steadfast, but it is also toughly perceptive...
...Lester Thurow, of MIT and Newsweek, is the straight economist...
...In a haunting way, it brought back memories of innocent, caring love that for me overrode its story of the seamier sides of clerical life...
...At its start, Vera had her first wish in the making: she was a student at Somer-ville College, Oxford...
...The Temptation of Eileen Hughes...
...In my academic field of constitutional jurisprudence, John Hart Ely's Democracy and Distrust (Harvard University Press $6.95, 268 pp) came out in paperback this year and demanded re-reading...
...John Murray Cuddihy JOHN MURRAY CUDDIHY is a professor of sociology at Hunter College in Manhattan...
...Farrar, Straus, Giroux...
...You can be convinced by them, soar with them, plunge with them, argue and spar with them...
...Those who work in academic comparative religion will appreciate his courage, as well as his wisdom, and those who know only Christian faith will profit greatly from his breadth...
...Weber, once more, has won a decisive victory over Marx...
...Especially if you share his prejudices (as I do-I who would like to level midtown and downtown Manhattan and replace both with the Palladian style of Georgian Bath's great crescents and see a perfect imitation of Chartres or St...
...Wolfe's passion is borderline paranoiac, unembarrassed nativist, rampant xenophobic...
...Still the best short introduction to the sense and sensibility of Catholic philosophy...
...The book costs $10...
...Father Tracy knows the ins and outs of contemporary hermeneutics like the backyards of Yonkers, N.Y...
...The rise of the Moral Majority makes this must reading...
...Jesus is Isaac come of age, freely immolating himself...
...A. R. Ammons's A Coast of Trees, (Norton, $12.95, paper $4.95, 52 pp...
...The choice becomes no less painful over the years, as both eyes and creativity fade...
...This is a subtext in Marx...
...A new edition of Robert Lax's "Circus of the Sun" has been published under the title Circus by Pendo-Verlag in Zurich...
...There has been for some time an increasing note of sadness in the work, but never that of despair...
...They are Vera Brittain's autobiographical Testament of Youth, and Testament of Experience...
...No Christian educator, Catholic or Protestant, should neglect this book by a gifted young Rhodes scholar and tough-minded headmaster who knows what direction education can and must take...
...dealing, with originality and in depth, with Penn's relations with the Indians, and William Jay Smith's rewarding and distinguished The Traveler's Tree & Other Poems (Persea Books, $13.95, 167 pp...
...It all seems surreal sport, the error of no consequence, until the future, at Babi Yar, comes down...
...My horizon was also stretched by a collection of studies from the Woodstock Center, edited by Thomas E. Clarke under the title, Above Every Name: The Lordship of Christ and Social Systems (Paulist, paper, $7.95, 308 pp...
...on international financial intrigue better fits the Florentine obsession for the tactile pleasures of money caressing the palm...
...The English appear collectively as a singularly unpleasant tribe whose totems and taboos-the Queen, Winnie the Pooh, small animals some of which are to be petted but not hunted, and others hunted, but not petted, all with equal sentimentality-circumscribe their vestigial Christianity...
...Labour well the minute particulars," says Blake, and stripped down to the bare tendons of a family's bonds to each other, Plante does-and what emerges between the lines, the awkward silences between Mere and Pere and seven sons of this French-Canadian family in Providence, Rhode Island, is-is metaphysical country, death's country where the narrating son Daniel cannot pray in English, but seeks to decipher the tongue of his grandparents, a French fur trader and Blackfoot Indian...
...In their attempts to root Christ's Last Supper in the Jewish passover meal, scholars have always bumped their heads against one crucial fact: critical ingredients of the Jewish passover are conspicuous by their absence: the passover lamb, for instance, is not even mentioned...
...13.95, 467 pp...
...Because of this ability, we are able to experience with her the intellectual shift from wartime romantic, to fully committed pacifist...
...By Justin Kaplan...
...Buy it and read...
...offers literary and comparative approaches to interesting aspects of biblical space (wilderness, mountains, centers), and so balances the usual emphasis on biblical time...
...Bauhaus, Gropius, Moholy-Nagy, Mies van de Rohe, their cohorts and co-conspirators-and before these desecrators our abject, craven Europeanizers bent their knees...
...The feminine predicaments she so clearly and poignantly sees never emerge as less than fine and skillful poems...
...provides a jurisprudential justification for Ronald Reagan's revival of Social Darwinism...
...is a good self-introduction to a provocative social critic...
...It is a varied, resourceful, wise, and impressive book...
...never received the notice it deserves as a brilliant proposal for a Christian paideia for secondary schools...
...Near the end, Gouldner indulges some dangerous "outlaw" speculations ("Nightmare Marxism"): suppose bourgeois private property, instead of being an obstacle to civilization, "really turns out be the basis of civilization...
...Sections of the poem, translated into Spanish by Ernesto Cardenal, are also included...
...James Clavell's focus in Noble House (De-lacorte, $19.95, 1206 pp...
...Suppose that the turning point of history is the rise of the bourgeoisie, not its demise through expropriation...
...His humor, which is a quality basic to the work, is really an uncanny sense of proportion...
...Finally, irresistibly, though I've always been one of those who found Karl Barth's footnotes the only readable thing in him, the subtext of the man's life, revealed in Karl Barth Letters, 1961-1968 (Eerdmans, $14.95, 382 pp...
...Last spring, however, a month's visit to the European University Institute in Florence, where none of the typewriters spoke English, enabled me to catch up on my reading...
...I reviewed Marie Ponsot's Admit Impediment (Knopf, $12.95, paper, $6.95, 144 pp...
...One, Anne Wilson Schaef's Women's Reality (Winston Press, $6.95, 169 pp...
...The crucifixion is the main part of the meal, the shulhan arukh or 'prepared table.' The cross is the table of the Lord where the bitter herbs and the paschal lamb are consumed...
...Calvin College historian George Marsden demonstrates the complex origins of Protestant fundamentalism and convincingly locates its roots in Scottish Common Sense Realism...
...I could neither fully digest it nor spit it out...
...Thus far the domestic program of the Reagan administration has faithfully pursued Gilder's road to affluence...
...is the best short introduction to this fascinating movement...
...Schillebeeckx's book is a sequel to his acclaimed Jesus: An Experiment in Christology which broke into the English-speaking world (and got a left-handed salute from the Vatican) a couple of years ago...
...a timely reminder that the social planners' dissociated "Aged" are no substitute for the wisdom that goes on between grandchildren and grandparents...
...A splendid exception is Stanley Hauerwas, whose A Community of Character (Notre Dame, $7.95,298 pp...
...And thinking of emigration to America as an alternative to despair is not necessarily a mistake...
...I HOPE I won't sound suspiciously pious, or, worse yet, dull if my favorite books of the past year are all religious ones...
...is a sophisticated exposition of the proposition that once growth stalls, one group's gain inevitably is another's loss...
...Danto proposes art as a metaphor of the commonplace...
...the distinguished Columbia anthropologist Marvin Harris explains numerous, depressing phenomena by a single, economic cause...
...The problem arises, Feeley-Harnik maintains, because we confine the Christian passover to one meal in one room on one day...
...THE second most important fact about Christmas is that it is one of the times of the year when the suicide rate rises...
...Knopf, $12.95, 317 pp...
...is a discussion of the prospect of our relations to the earth and its resources...
...where forgetting makes the laughter ring hollow, the sex equally...
...Smith and Marx must then explain the social benefits of such venality by invoking the magic of Unintended consequences: God (the "unseen hand") in the case of Smith, History (the "cunning" of Hegel's dialectic) in the case of Marx...
...Marxism as critique stemming from Hegel and Protestant humanism, reintroduces reflexiv-ity, voluntarism, and "idealism" into Marxism...
...and it is very very moving...
...Mormonism is another kind of fundamentalism and Klaus J. Hansen's Mormonism and the American Experience (University of Chicago, $15, 257 pp...
...From Bauhaus to Our House...
...In theology, where I claim great interest but small competence, I made my happiest discovery in many years when I found James T. Burtchaell's Philemon's Problem (ACTA, 4848 N. Clark St., Chicago, III...
...The authors weave contributions of a two-year colloquium on this topic into a sketch that is humorous, hopeful, informed by analogues in biblical faith, eminently sane, and very persuasive that sexual love is a wonderful gift from God...
...But the meanings are radically transformed and reversed: on that hill tabooed by temple law, Golgotha, outside the walls of the holy city, Jesus is not "passed over" by the angel of death...
...Paul's where the Seagram now stands...
...From years as a scholar of Islam, Smith is sensitive to the great need for nuance, but his conviction that transcendence has been a constant historical experience, and his Christian faith, make him willing to brave the disdain of academic specialists and risk sketching an interpersonal, "colloquial" theology of the whole...
...The passion narrative is the passover haggadah...
...The American distributor is Falkynor Books, Box 8060, Hollywood, Florida...
...As always, I returned this year to a book which has sustained me in its wisdom and clear writing for over twenty years, Joseph Pieper's Leisure the Basis of Culture, first published by Pantheon in 1952 and now available in a paperback edition...
...Breakthrough explores the roots of Eckhart's theology in Scripture, in Scotus and Aquinas, in Celtic mysticism, and in his association with the Beguines and women mystics of his era...
...allowed me, as an alumnus of Notre Dame, to revel in the nostalgia of a well-told tale that recaptured, if not the institution's reality, at least the image it has in my happier memories...
...Conversations With Gore Vidal...
...If love is the word: he is in fact a failed saint, a priest manque, and his self-abnegating "love" is far closer to the medieval "courtly" variety than the soiled carnal...
...19.95, 306 pp...
...The Analogical Imagination (Crossroad, $24.50, 467 pp...
...What The Birds of the Air brings out is how close a truthful Christian view of the moral world may be to the view taken by someone approaching that despair which leads to suicide...
...It is true that the book addresses a literate reader, but this does not appear as a disadvantage, certainly not to Randall...
...was published in 1980 but this classic is worth recommending for years to come...
...John left his gospel and the various crises those people must have experienced near the turn of the first century...
...and, when he wants, can summon just the right phrase to summarize complex subjects, such as literary deconstruction...
...Not only were they good reading, I think differently for having read them...
...The true Israelite "created" by the early Christian haggadah "was a 'glutton,' a man who ate indiscriminately, like an animal, and was eaten...
...15, 432 pp...
...of Grandparents/ Grandchildren: The Vital Connection (Doubleday...
...The result is a Barthian stress on God's "outside" reality, which gives a basis both for criticizing current culture and maintaining a staunch hope...
...Mal-raux proposes seeing art as a metamorphosis performed by museums and juxtaposition and time (history...
...The content and spirit of this book made me think-about my claims for Christ and my attitude to the living reality of Judaism...
...A debut only in the sense that this is a first collection of pieces that have been appearing in various periodicals since the late sixties...
...By Ellen Willis...
...And peculiarly American counterfeits for hope are common...
...A moving book, it is well matched with Arthur Kornhaber's and Kenneth L. Woodward's Grandparents/Grandchildren: The Vital Connection (Doubleday Anchor, $11.95, 279 pp...
...She served throughout the war as a nurse: near the battlefront in France, in Malta, near London...
...10017...
...Danto is fun...
...Hope is a peculiarly American virtue...
...THE following is a brief list of books I would gladly buy for myself or others if, like all paid reviewers, I hadn't received free copies...
...Some annoying stylistic mannerisms and a rather hokey "resolution" are more than offset by impressive inventive power, imaginative energy, narrative velocity...
...Finally, reading her books in their recent reedition, the reader has a sense of continuity about the rule Brittain chose to play and to some degree continues to play: her daughter is Shirley Williams, member of the last Labor government and a leader of England's new Social Democratic party.tinues to play: her daughter is Shirley Williams, member of the last Labor government and a leader of England's new Social Democratic party...
...In this instance, a group of men talking about (what else...
...33024...
...BEGINNING TO SEE THE LIGHT: Pieces of a Decade...
...The reader comes away feeling that s/he knows "Gustavo" quite well, and that Gustavo is a theologian well worth pondering...
...Dunn's book attempts to trace the origin and evolution of the New Testament doctrine of incarnation...
...respectively...
...He is a poet of extreme sophistication, both intellectual and technical...
...She suggests that women as well as men recognize their complicity in the perpetuation of the white male system, and that clarity-not guilt-shows us a way out...
...Auden's journey did not of course end when Mendelson takes leave of his narrative, in 1939...
...Burtchaell would replace canon law with Christian love, the notion of God as the Last, Great and Irascible Double Entry Bookkeeper with that of Loving Father, and the roles of Christ as "saviour," "redeemer," and dread judge with that of herald of God's love for mankind...
...In it, Marty reflects on his own life journey which, in so many ways, is our own...
...In Harris's telling, post-industrial society alienates the office slaves as completely as ever did factory assembly lines...
...Adult workers jostle teenagers...
...This book, the product of twenty-five years in the sensibility of a gifted poet, speaks of and to women here and now, but also of things which concern all human beings...
...The characters are Ulster Catholic...
...Jesus himself intones the Hallel...
...But the haggadah assumed and left to us by the participants in Christ's seder-viz., the Passion narratives-included the crucifixion and resurrection in the meal...
...should be noted as a cultural and political phenomenon...
...There is a marvelous sense of universality in her specifics...
...His latest book is A Commentary on the Letters of Peter (The New Testament Message Series, Michael Glazier, Inc...
...the best of the lot...
...proved even better than the fine print, especially those letters to Pope Paul VI and Hans Kung...
...seems a book peculiarly suited to the Christmas season, since it is in essence a book of hope, thus making it a sport among most current books worth reading...
...The provenance of Danto's title goes back, ultimately, to the transfiguration of Jesus on the Mount...
...All three books represent deeply personal experiences of the authors...
...181 pp...
...Anne Schaef s Women's Reality: An Emerging Female System in the White Male Society provides what I would call a "second stage" feminist perspective...
...The accultu-rated personality of the white male has created a system-institutions, structures, attitudes, methodologies, theologies-that have become counterproductive in the contemporary era...
...A remedy is to read books in which the dramatic power of the tale told derives from the author's acute sense of those human realities which cannot be grasped except through narrative...
...She has as sure a sense of her locality, in the physical world, in the world of poetry, as she has the sense of continuity-myth, to the daily detail- that illuminates and excites...
...is a heartwarming sketch of the course our marriages tend to run: from early romance, through predictable flattenings and even crises, to a mature sense of adventure, of making a love story...
...Brittain grew up in Victorian England, surrounded by people whose notion of her future consisted almost entirely of making a good marriage...
...I am not recommending this gift from the East for consumers of the exotic-but rather as a luminous "discernment of spirits" that offers one figure after another for understanding not simply another culture, but the pluralistic world in front of our noses...
...What' makes its attitude peculiarly effective is the sense one always has of how clearly Meredith understands the causes of an opposite viewpoint...
...One reason is that we have so often lost any capacity for understanding our lives as embodying a narrative structure-let alone narratives in which there is hope of a happy ending...
...60640, $2.95, 178 pp...
...Even more, this is essentially a novella or sequence of stories within a loose frame, the honorable, ancient device of assembling a group of diverse characters with stories to tell and letting them go on until they've hanged themselves...
...Last Christmas I received two books as presents...
...His books include The Ordeal of Civility (Basic Books) and No Offense: Civil Religion and Protestant Taste (Seabury...
...By Leonard Michaels...
...The Christian revolution was a culinary, which is to say, anthropologically, a cultural revolution...
...Also strongly recommended are Daniel Hoffman's Brotherly Love (Random/Vintage, paper, $5.95, 170 pp...
...Here all we have is love, a great undulating/ raft, melting steadily...
...Very California, exceedingly Now...
...George Gilder finds that both Adam Smith and Karl Marx mis-identified the spirit of capitalism with the market mechanism for exchanging its products...
...Each implicitly documents a personal odyssey, a wrestling with some particular aspect of understanding our human condition...
...Evidently we must wait until 1982 for a route map to the New Jerusalem...
...Fundamentalism and American Culture (Oxford...
...David Toolan FATHER DAVID TOOLAN, S.J., is assistant editor of Commonweal...
...Another, Julian Simon's The Ultimate Resource (Princeton University Press, $14.50, 415 pp...
...and he is always good to listen to on his favorite subjects-sex, books, politics, culture, the writer's life, the infamy of critics and lamentable inferiority of all other writers-even when he is dead wrong, which is not nearly as often as you might hope...
...They have that all-important "ruminative" factor that makes passages in them reverberate long after you've read the last page...
...David Stockman has proclaimed it "promethean in its vision" and President Reagan has plugged the book like any other product on national television...
...I had not recalled this creative work's receiving the attention it deserves...
...Rushdie's bodies are broken for us...
...I think Ely is fundamentally mistaken in characterizing the American political system as one of representative democracy rather than constitutional (or liberal) democracy...
...In these times and this political climate, I'm grateful to any thoughtful Christians who are willing to share their ideas on how our acclamation of Christ as Lord relates to the other"Lords" who rule our life, such as the National State, or the National Defense, or the Gross National Product...
...Nancy Amidei NANCY AMIDEI, formerly deputy assistant secretary of the U.S...
...The event that shaped her life and the lives of everyone she knew was war: that "war to end all wars" which claimed an entire generation of young men from every corner of Europe...
...For me it is a matter of some emotion that Gouldner, in his final work, has taken leave of economics and is talking the language of civilizations...
...Harris's polemic proceeds too often by flat statement to be utterly convincing, but the argument is powerful enough all the same to be disquieting...
...It avoids the technicalities of redaction-historians and philologists, giving the reader interested in the received text a stimulating view of the Hebrew Bible's sense of place (and also some deep background for the contemporary question of Zionism...
...Eckhart's spirituality of creativity and wholeness, of compassion and blessing, is timely, and Fox acutely observes the "sin behind all sin" that Eckhart sought to exorcise: the dualistic consciousness...
...for Commonweal, so my notice here will be brief...
...Similarly, but less pleasantly, nostalgic was Pat Conroy's The Lords of Discipline (Houghton Mifflin, $12.95,499 pp...
...The book is a long meditation on Brillo boxes putting themselves forward as-works-of art, or, "gerrymandered" (Danto raids every where for his brilliant figurations) by interpretation into expressiveness, into metaphoricality...
...One consolation for one's own Christmas through the years will be to reread this splendid comedy of tragic moments and realize that one's own Christmas is not as bad as this one...
...And before long she became restless to play a part herself...
...David Tracy argues convincingly for the necessity of traditions and defines the roles that the arts play as disclosures of religious truth...
...Saul Maloff SAUL MALOFF, a novelist and critic, contributes regularly to Commonweal...
...Images from the books have haunted me all year...
...Thomas Verny with John Kelly, The Secret Life of the Unborn Child (Summit, $12.95, 253 pp...
...The good Jerry delivers the good news of potential enrichment in no-nonsense terms: "Put Jesus first in your stewardship and allow Him to bless you financially.'' A certified Harvard intellectual, Gilder has masticated heavy texts by supply side economists, Jensen-ite partisans of genetic predestination, and neoconservative political scientists, sociobiologists, and sociologists...
...The easy antichrematism of intellectuals has had a field day with "capitalism" so defined...
...It also finds John Updike at the top of his form, sure-handed as always and more at home with his subject than in any of his novels since Rabbit, Run...
...The theme here is that our first experience of death comes with birth, and that most of adult life consists perversely in replaying what namelessly, organically, we did or did not learn in utero and during birth until we get rebirth right...
...Even when he intends to outrage and inflame (to shock and scandalize the bourgeoisie) his delight is audible, and infectious...
...a rich middle-aged businessman, his sluttish wife, an innocent girl who is the object of the man's obsessional-indeed demented, lunatic-love...
...Schaef taps into the richness of the alternative "female" system, distinguishing it from "femininity," illuminating its redemptive power for the future...
...That's why I appreciated this book...
...This contradiction is not accidental to, but constitutive of, Marxism...
...Share it with a soul-friend...
...In remythologizing disenchanted Bombay-and so much else- without domesticating the energy there one whit, Rushdie somehow worked the same metamorphosis on my New York, and indeed on any Western city...
...with some stunning woodcuts by Jacques Hnizdovsky...
...which most reviewers praised...
...By Tom Wolfe...
...and that is all the more reason for giving her the fullest hearing...
...14.95...
...In fact, the creative energies Rushdie has harnessed in this homage to his native soul-soil are enough to make any Western author weep with envy for not having such riotous material as he does to feed on-and believe me, this is a full meal...
...William Meredith's The Cheer (Knopf, $8.95, 62 pp...
...turned myth of "eternal return" into tragi-comic historical odyssey-and most surprising bonus of all, more than any American book I've read lately, Rushdie's India figured (or was it nosed...
...If you can still take pleasure in fiction beautifully executed, shaped and finished by the hand of a master potter, gaze, then, upon this comely, harmonious object...
...And yet, and yet, and yet: the man has a point, an important one, and his little book, even if it overstates its case, sometimes wildly, is lively in the familiar vulpine spirit and eminently worth reading...
...It sent me somersaulting with delight, gave all that teeming energy faces I could rage and weep and laugh with...
...John Carmody JOHN CARMODY is adjunct professor of religion at Wichita State University and co-author of Ways to the Center (Wadsworth) and Contemporary Catholic Theology (Harper & Row...
...I finally read James Agee's A Death in the Family and Graham Greene's The Power and the Glory...
...Think of this as supplementing rather than replacing Gay Wilson Allen's biography The Solitary Singer (1967...
...Wilfred Cantwell Smith's Towards a World Theology (Westminster, $18.95, 206 pp...
...Natural resources may be infinite...
...Johnson, Gore Vidal is one of the last of the really good talkers, a rare breed of cat if not a virtually extinct species-witty, clever, smart, churlish, bitchy, stylish...
...In his discourse on the origins of Wealth and Poverty (Basic Books, $16.95,295 pp...
...The book includes photos by Bernhard Moosbrugger...
...Rabbit Is Rich (Knopf...
...Stylish in both senses: theatrical, stagy, classy and fastidiously concerned with the shapes and sound of utterance...
Vol. 108 • December 1981 • No. 22
