Critics' Christmas choices:
Kuttner, Bob & Stuttaford, Genevieve & Tipton, Steven & Bly, Carol & Turner, Edith & Dolan, Jay P & Levertov, Denise & Lodge, David & Haughton, Rosemary & O'Brien, Dennis & Perkins, Pheme & Janeway, Eliot
COLIN L. WESTERBECK, JR. Books: CRITICS' CHRISTMAS CHOICES David Lodge David lodge is a novelist, critic, and professor of modern English literature at the University of Birmingham in England....
...Ravitch's history of the actual past of most of us in education will only prove that mere memory is no substitute for historical scholarship...
...Carol Bly carol bly is the author of Letters from the Country (Harper & Row...
...Personally I find most asceticism repulsive -my sympathies are strongly with Emma Goldman when she said, "If I can't dance at your revolution I don't want to come...
...Podro attempts to find the point of past painting by examining a tradition of art historical writing from Hegel to Panofsky...
...The same message comes through Morris West's novel The Clowns of God (Morrow, $14.95, $3.95 paper, 372pp...
...which analyze the cultural problems of moral integrity and justice in the modern social world...
...The allegedly mad Miss Hare, Ruth Godbold, a battered wife, Dubbo the Aborigine, an artist, and the despised Jew, Mordecai Himmelfarb, are joined together after many sufferings in one great scene of love...
...Two first-class case-histories, indispensable together for an understanding of the interplay between the politics of social forces and the economics of political realism, were published in the past year...
...This is not "theology" as classified by publishers and bookstores, but more and more it is the theology that makes sense to me, the theology of John, and the mystics-the theology of Jesus, too...
...Each had come to experience the vehicle of bliss...
...Sir William Petty, the seventeenth century father of economics, originally defined it as "political arithmetick...
...In this book the history of the working people comes alive as they themselves recount "the conditions they experienced at work and in their communities...
...sets out a social psychology of emotion and its All-American alienation with the sort of stinging insight C. Wright Mills would relish...
...Sbile's poems reinforce her polemic, which even without them transcends the merely topical...
...This year's best -political - economy - book - by - a -sociologist award goes to Paul Starr, for The Social Transformation of American Medicine...
...Starr delves into the history of organized medicine, its sociology, its political power, the rise of the sovereign doctor, and his impending fall to corporate medicine...
...3. The guidelines for research and the moral assumptions of one area of expertise must never be exercised in another area of expertise...
...This is the definitive exposition, by a fully creden-tialed economist, of why orthodox economics is mostly tautology...
...This book explores the fascinating period of early twentieth century American Catholicism and shows how authoritarian churchmen like Mundelein, the "Dutch Master," were in those days...
...The Justice was so righteous that he let the record show that the petty cash went by check for history to see...
...Finally, Paul Davies, well-known for his writings on modern physics of space-time and cosmology, provides a challenge to those who live by the mythologies of science and religion (God and the New Physics, Simon & Schuster, $16.95, 255 pp...
...His Getting Saved From the Sixties will appear in paperback this spring from University of California Press...
...But the family preachments of piety and duty that spurred one member of each generation to distinction made others of their siblings alcoholics and suicides...
...We learn both the futility and the inevitability of violence under these circumstances, when the great old library of the abbey is burnt down in the last scene...
...A second favorite among 1983 volumes is Lester Thurow's Dangerous Currents: The State of Economics...
...He paints the tremendous sight: the picture is stolen, and Dubbo dies of fever...
...The history of American Catholicism continues to inspire noteworthy studies...
...He called it "historical sociology...
...Conventional counsel to "Just be yourself," even when intended as reassurance instead of criticism, takes the imperative mood, and finding ourselves turns out to be a socially patterned process continuous with the history of caring for our souls...
...the other the first volume of the definitive biography of Felix Frankfurter...
...A funny, sad, wise, marvelous book...
...There is a vision to be had in the New Testament of a community of co-equal disciples that may serve as a prototype guiding our progress into the future...
...is the wait it enforces until its sequel covering the Court years is published...
...of Notre Dame Press, $15.95, 320 pp...
...They offer specific examples...
...But scholars also challenge the presuppositions with which we read the past...
...WE MUST imagine the world before we can master it...
...In the past year, an academic intent on doubling in brass as a muckraker made headlines with an expose of the stipend Justice Brandeis paid Professor Frankfurter...
...But perhaps not...
...James H. Charlesworth's edition of The Old Testament Pseudepigrapha embodies translations and commentaries by the best scholars working in the area (Vol...
...Farren prepared a flyer inviting people to give brief personal responses to that question, and circulated it not only within the peace community but by handing it out on street corners, by publication in periodicals, and by mailing it to' 'selected individuals across the political spectrum...
...Because, says Arlie Hochschild, we moderns live in an institutionally divided society...
...Michael True does all three...
...Wolfe explains superbly how full-blooded Keynesianism was emasculated into its opposite, and how the mania for military-led growth hobbled the civilian economy...
...But the moment existed...
...Hannaford is a staunch Reagan loyalist of Sacramento vintage...
...and Michael Walzer's Spheres of Justice (Basic Books, $19.95, 344 pp...
...Here bloody work and the establishment of truth walk hand in hand...
...They are afraid to publicize their achievement because all males, represented here by Shackleton, would suffer a terrible blow to their self-esteem...
...But that has not always been the case, and even today such cultural freedom does not extend to the matter of having a self...
...Since it is outrageously priced, this important study will most likely receive less circulation than it deserves...
...might be called a detective novel set against a vast back canvas of the medieval world in the age of the Inquisition...
...Market capitalism recognizes only the equal opportunity to become unequal...
...Fogarty has arrived at some important conclusions in this study which touch on the very meaning of the American Catholic experience...
...Control, or shared life...
...How sternly, even bloodily, ought truth to be upheld...
...Joanna Rogers Macy, whose important pamphlet essay Despairwork: Awakening to the Peril and Promise of Our Time (New Society Publishers, 4772 Baltimore Av., Philadelphia, Pa...
...Her therapist learns that the world has a moral shape, when a supposedly "attachment free" affair with a married colleague proves that it is not possible for her to claim, "that I was making your life better without doing any harm.'' That insight might also stand as a beacon in John LeCarre's portrayal of the moral ambiguity and death of persons that takes place in the world of the terrorists and their Israeli opponents (The Little Drummer Girl, Knopf, $15.95, 430 pp...
...West is a slick, brilliant, sexist writer of considerable theological naivete, and something of the strangeness of which Capra writes must have got through to him for him to write a story of gatherings of the defective and eccentric, who are mysteriously called together in remote places...
...thinkers can't design delivery of social services, and social workers can't organize a passionate care for the res publica...
...A well crafted book, it will no doubt serve as a model for other histories of the American working class...
...Every idea, every part of his six-stage development idea, is alive and applicable to all sorts of corners in life...
...Cardinal Mundelein of Chicago was considerably less appealing than Dorothy Day but his life and times offered Edward Kantowicz more than enough material to write Corporation Sole: Cardinal Mundelein and Chicago Catholicism (University of Notre Dame Press $19.95, 295 pp...
...He holds spirited opinions about their discoverers, the long since forgotten and the pantheon who advanced our knowledge of the skies, the seas, plants, animals, our bodies, and ourselves...
...A JOB that brings thousands of books to one's desk in a publishing season, as mine does, strikes bibliomaniacs as paradise...
...It multiplies social roles and rules, fragmenting the integrity of character, culture, and external norms...
...He would have taken in the Reagan staff, and Brandeis would have taken him over the coals...
...and the introduction briefly tells how she brought into being, at first singlehanded, the Volunteer Missionary Movement, which now sends lay people to serve as missionaries to Africa, New Guinea, and elsewhere...
...If markets knew anything about politics, Peter Hannaford's The Reagans...
...the Professor was desperate for it to pay the psychiatric bills of his wife, who was disturbed by the backlash from her decision in the America of the inter-war period to marry a Jew...
...It is in the context of a Christian commitment to social justice that Solle writes of the nuclear threat and of peacemaking...
...LOVERS of Ursula LeGuin's stories will snatch up The Compass Rose with joy (Bantam Books, $3.50, 271 pp...
...It is by a physicist, Fritjof Capra, who previously wrote The Tao of Physics, and it is called The Turning Point (Simon & Schuster, $16.95, $3.50 paper, 464 pp...
...Galileo Studies (Humanities, $46.25, 278 pp...
...In The Art of Telling: Essays on Fiction (Harvard, $15, 229 pp...
...Certainly the "news" is only marginally historical-we prefer ageless tales of lust, lunacy, and villainy to the intricate separation of the truly new from the definitively past...
...Her books include The Catholic Thing and The Passionate God...
...Ararat is mostly about the mid-life crisis of a Russian poet in the mold of Yev-tushenko, and is structured like one of those Russian wooden dolls that nest one inside the other...
...Crisply written and vividly grounded in a study of airline stewardesses, Hochschild's The Managed Heart: The Commercialization of Human Feeling (University of California, $14.95, xii + 307 pp...
...She could feel the breath of horses on her cheeks...
...It was Brandeis who conceived and organized the invasion of the courts by the markets, as well as their subsequent counter-invasion by the courts...
...Moral civilization is making a mental image, forcibly, of not only my own but of others' wants and then consciously trying somehow to serve them all...
...The tale unfolds very gently...
...Somehow the mystical experience cannot be communicated in theological language, whereas the storyteller's art can become a "painting with words" -a running with them-until they flood over into the emotions, and then into that timeless, wordless world of bliss...
...Using the changing pastoral ideals of the Protestant clergy as a focusing lens, Holifield traces the relationships among theology, psychology, and changing social and economic patterns in America across four centuries to reveal, from angles that are both panoramic and wonderfully close-up, the revision of selfhood that has evolved in American religion...
...The lesson of history is Auctoritas, si...
...She was lifted up...
...I highly commend Diane Ravitch The Troubled Crusade: American Education 1945-1980, (Basic Books, $19.95, 384 pp...
...Rosemary Haughton ROSEMARY HAUGHTONj writer and lecturer, is part of a small community in Gloucester, Mass., offering hospitality to homeless people...
...Walzer's basic argument is that many of the most important spheres of human life -family, community, religion, friendship, civic democracy -are utterly unsuited to the market's ruthless criteria of commodity and exchange...
...It is an invaluable glimpse into the imaginative world of Judaism in the New Testament period...
...I heard in this book the cris de coeur we heard in Ronald Blythe's Akenfield, this time from social planners who have both caring and skills in caring...
...Cary Reich's hilarious account of the exploits of Andre Meyer, Financier: A Story of Money, Power and the Reshaping of American Business (Morrow: $15.95, 396 pp...
...For connoisseurs, two 1983 British works in that tradition available on this side of the Atlantic are Nick Bosanquet's "The New Right" (Kluwer Nijhoff, $27, 211 pp...
...Tawney's Equality, and almost any of J. M. Keynes's Essays in Persuasion -all available and moldering in your local library...
...It should be read by the literate American public at large...
...and more intellectually available is a marvelous overview of the development of classical mechanics, From the Closed World to the Infinite Universe (Johns Hopkins, $5.95, 313 pp...
...Science as practiced seems to have no history...
...Updike is a byline I immediately read whenever he writes about books-and I leave aside here the debate about criticism vs...
...Bob Kuttner BOB KUTTNER is a contributing editor of the New Republic...
...Sadly, his new friend is unable to save him from the final brainwashing, effected by electric shock treatment...
...Of the recent crop, my favorite is Michael Walzer's fine and mannered Spheres of Justice: A Defense of Pluralism and Equality (Basic Books $19.95, 344 pp...
...The problem for the art world is not that it is unaware of its history, but that it has only the vaguest ideas what to do with the past except hang it...
...Her many published works include The Gnostic Dialogue, Hearing the Parables of Jesus and Reading the New Testament: An Introduction (all Paulist Press...
...Both volumes -the latter all prose, the former of prose and poetry -emphasize the links between the arms race and other forms of oppression, notably poverty and racism...
...In following this story we come to understand the powerful part American religion, particularly Protestantism, has played in shaping the "therapeutic culture" often identified with secular society...
...but was well worth waiting for...
...Dennis O'Brien DENNIS O'BRIEN is president of Bucknell University and the author of'Hegel on Reason and History (University of Chicago Press...
...They must win that justice by pitting their kit against the critical mass of public opinion, the critical sloth of the species, and most of the world's money...
...Nancy's man on the staff, therefore its point man, Mike Deaver, was his partner...
...In recent years numerous studies in immigration history have enriched our understanding of this phase of the American past...
...Meyer, who knew the score, never bought a stock except on inside information that the fix was in, and on the assurance that a complacent buyer was ready to take him out at a profit...
...The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco (Harcourt, Brace, and Jovanovich, $15.95,502 pp...
...His last novel, Souls and Bodies, was published by Morrow...
...Treading nimbly across general equilibrium analysis, the theoretical inconsistencies between macro- and micro-economics, the nonsensical assumptions about income distribution, Thurow does for (and to) mainstream economics what C. Wright Mills did for sociology when he translated all of Talcott Parsons into a few pages of deflated English...
...The broad sweep of both classic definitions offers us a badly needed defense in depth against today's push, belatedly suspect in the marketplace, to reduce economic analysis to a high-speed version of historical algebra to be counted on print-outs of past performance guaranteeing continued relevance...
...Werner Kelber's analysis of the interaction between oral and textual traditions in the formation of the New Testament warns us that all is not continuous evolution {The Oral and the Written Gospel, Fortress, $22.95, 254 pp...
...By locating the movement in the context of American social, religious, and intellectual history Piehl offers a broader and more helpful analysis of Day and the Catholic Worker than most previous studies...
...To be born an Adams-or marry one-proved a burdensome heritage...
...Judith Rossner's fictional imaging of an analytic treatment weaves a fascinating portrait of a young woman and her analyst both seeking their way in a world where the traditional relationships to men have been shattered (August, Houghton Mifflin, $15.95, 376 pp...
...Her hope is that the book can be used either as a manual for group work or as a personal resource...
...His PR commands a blue chip clientele...
...The Adams family, he proposes, began its descent from glory even as it achieved the pinnacle with the presidency of John, followed by the presidency of his son, succeeded by two more generations who acquitted themselves as statesmen and writers, among them a brilliant diplomat and a notable historian...
...Nor is it the TV trivia of culture that suggests chucking history...
...Both definitions together suggest a reader's guide considerably broader than the single-issue sloganizing expected from writers on economics when they are not displaying charts...
...Dorothee Solle, the German theologian, poet, and active worker for peace and justice, who spends part of each year in the United States teaching at New York's Union Theological Seminary, has two new books: Of War and Love (Orbis, $7.95, 192 pp...
...Recently I re-read my favorite religious novel, crafted by a mystic who is also a superb down-to-earth storyteller, Patrick White's Riders in the Chariot (Penguin Modern Classics, $5.95, 492 pp...
...One is the importance of the American tradition of religious liberty or the separation of church and state and how ardent Catholics were in defending this tradition against Old World Vatican bureaucrats...
...This story moves from an ideal of self-denial for the sake of other-worldly salvation through benevolent self-love, genteel self-culture, and muscular self-mastery to self-realization within a trustworthy culture, and finally to the realization of a spontaneous self set against cultural mores and social institutions...
...reviewing...
...D. M. THOMAS'S Ararat (Viking, $13.50, 191 pp...
...Nonetheless, even hasty Thurow is far better than most other Ph.D economists writing laboriously...
...If Brandeis had played the game as Bernard Baruch (his ally of the Wilson years) played it with the media, he would have dealt in stock tips whispered and big money kept...
...Homemade Social Justice offers a neat, unswerving public-morals code that would have got a grateful shout from Montesquieu...
...Genevieve Stuttaford GENEVIEVE STUTTAFORD is nonfiction book review editor at Publishers Weekly...
...Academic literary criticism continues to be dominated by "theory" and the struggle between deconstructionist and humanist approaches to the business of reading...
...Brandeis's way of dealing with presidents was to hold them at arm's length in order to force them closer to his goals...
...The Philosophy of Moral Development, by Lawrence Kohlberg, Harper & Row, paperback, $20.95, 480 pp...
...Its cultural intepretation of these social facts is limited by an essentially individualistic idea of emotional interaction as a system of exchange and negotiation...
...Nagel shows why it was so in a humanizing portrait that reveals the Adamses through their letters and diaries full of the self-scrutiny that was yet another family burden...
...On the one hand, we face the challenge of letting the archetypes speak...
...As an antidote to all of this heavy social theory, try Milan Kundera's The Book of Laughter and Forgetting (Penguin, $4.95, 256 pp...
...The range of statements does not exclude the despairing, the naively insouciant, the conventionally deterrent-esque, and at least one ("I call for the immediate nuking of Russia [to end] this suspense") so ponderously satiric that it almost crushes its intended black humor...
...They give us mental images of alternatives...
...Wolfe's topic is "the rise and fall of growth economics...
...2. You can't change human nature...
...The hero's psychiatrist gradually comes to believe in his sanity...
...I recommend in contrast Gerard S. Sloyan, Jesus in Focus (Twenty-Third Publications, $12.95, 212 pp...
...Antidote: read any and all works available by the great French historian of science, Alexandre Koyre...
...They hold the only hope of a light to shine in the darkness of a postnuclear-war world, but also, just perhaps, the only hope of averting such a war...
...Jesus is brought into historical focus not only against the Jewish tradition in terms of which he spoke and acted but also in terms of other traditions of the holy: Buddhism and Hinduism are touched upon and there is an entire chapter on Jesus in the Koran (Qu'ran...
...One of the most written-about phases of this history is Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker movement...
...This one took over as the double agent brokering the feud between Brandeis and Roosevelt when his two heroes split over FDR's scheme to pack the Supreme Court...
...This book is going to make people like me, who believe the fruits of the earth and the properties of the five senses are to be enjoyed, not denied, try once again to think out more clearly how we can have our cake and eat it, and share it with everyone...
...Defiance, dependence, and wasted lives also inform historian Paul C. Nagel's biography...
...What did Jesus Christ really stand for, his church's law and power, or charity towards his enemies...
...We may soon become a fully de-historicized culture governed not by time but by eternity...
...I have myself done no more than skim it as yet, but I want to speak of it because anyone pondering the psychology of war and peace, of violence and non-violence, will need at some point to reflect upon these two men's theories and practices -and now, I think, to consider Green's thesis, stated in the introduction, which squarely confronts their asceticism: Tolstoy and Gandhi's faith was essentially anti-humanist...
...But by far the greater number of responses contain ideas for action, whether on a spiritual plane or a material and pragmatic one...
...This elegantly crafted study succeeds at a far broader task than its title announces...
...At one point it describes the confusion and disorientation which beset the group of physicists who were beginning to discover that their experiments in subatomic physics were resulting in the destruction of all their previous convictions about the nature of reality...
...Phidias is lovingly preserved where philogiston is forgotten...
...No westerner, however, can write about Eastern Europe with the inwardness of a native...
...Then The Managed Heart adds feeling to the body of such recent philosophical works as Alasdair Maclntyre's After Virtue (U...
...Jay P. Dolan JAY P. dolan teaches history at the University of Notre Dame and directs the Cushwa Center for the Study of American Catholicism...
...The recorder of the saga hides her manuscript in the attic trunk, to be found by her granddaughter after her death...
...Another British novelist who has found an imaginative provocation in Eastern Europe this year is Malcolm Bradbury, whose Rates of Exchange (Knopf, $13.95, 310 pp...
...and, the bulk of the collection, reviews on some sixty-two authors, the expected American and European, but also African, Japanese, and Indian...
...Their democratic energy is refreshing: all of them believe that everyone has ethical taste, whether developed, stunted, or latent-and all the authors provide specific, workable regimens for developing consciousness of right and wrong...
...Lewis J. Paper's Brandeis (Prentice Hall, $18.95, 442 pp...
...The only deficiency of Professor Michael E. Parrish's Felix Frankfurter and His Times: The Reform Years (Free Press/ Macmillan, $17.94, 330 pp...
...A rare and fascinating exception is Michael Podro, The Critical Historians of Art (Yale, $30, 257 pp...
...I also come away from a consideration of the future of equality with new respect for the classics of English welfare-state economics, Sir William Beveridge's two great wartime reports, especially Full Employment in a Free Society, R.H...
...Frank Kermode plausibly compares the institution of academic literary studies to a church, but does not regard this as a self-evident condemnation, since culture cannot exist without some institutional framework...
...The novel relates the adventures of an amiable but naive British academic, lecturing on linguistics in this complex and confusing country, in which nothing is quite what it seems...
...Yet this story gives delight...
...Librarian of Congress Daniel J. Boorstin guides the reader on a voyage across recorded time to chart the breakthroughs in human achievement, from the homely clock to atomic theory...
...Only one complaint: Had Thurow done a second draft, this would have been in a class with Schumpeter and Keynes...
...The results -nearly one-thousand statements by people of all ages (including some young children) mostly private citizens, with a sprinkling of famous names -are arranged under fourteen headings, among them ' 'Fear of Facing It," ' 'Facing Up to It," "Dilemmas of Technology," "Proposals and Suggestions," ' 'Transforming Our Lives.'' The book concludes with suggestions for ways to use it as a group study guide...
...Last of this cluster is a remarkably stimulating collection of "grassroots responses to our most challenging question": What Will It Take to Prevent Nuclear War?, edited by Pat Farren (of A.F.S.C...
...The oral world of Jesus and Paul is one of presence and participation.' The text-oriented world of the written Gospel is one in which Christians must face loss, the non-appearance of the divine, and the crisis of death...
...He suggests that it is time for the general reader to understand what sort of universe the physicist has uncovered and to stop living with a cosmological vision that has no relation to the rest of our world...
...The four authors here have a lot of ethical genius...
...They saw humanism as the self-indulgent world view of the ruling classes of great empires...
...How could it fail to be, when its subjects were such disturbing individuals...
...The spiritual and political history of postwar Czechoslovakia is reflected in a complex and ironic tale of love and sexual intrigue, mediated through four interweaving monologues...
...Towns and Villages in Canada: The Importance of Being Unimportant, by Gerald Hodge and Mohammed Qadeer, Butterworths, Toronto, paperback $19.95, 250 pp...
...On the other, Fiorenza suggests, the fundamental mistake has been to think in terms of archetypes as unchanging forms rather than as prototypes to guide future, new developments...
...That vision is just as important as our imagination of the interpersonal and social world...
...He has that Zen type of innocence, conscious, limpid, yet able to shield his mind from the mental probes used to "diagnose" him...
...IN modern America it may be true, as Don Marquis joked, that "you don't have to have a soul unless you really want one...
...Johnson's Greenwich Village circle went on to celebrity as the Beat Generation, their pied pipers Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, Jack Kerouac, who became her lover...
...I found the book a fascinating and constantly surprising meditation on the themes of creativity, sexuality, and death...
...The three I have picked are thus a year or more old...
...Though this was happening throughout the Catholic world at the time, the effect was so strong in the United States that most American bishops became more Roman than the Romans themselves...
...His book presents dozens of practical ways for parents and children to make fairness to others and to the planet a part of the family's vocabulary and repertoire of shared work...
...One of them is the kind that absolutely requires re-reading unless one is scientifically better educated than I am...
...The American College and University: A History...
...Milan Kundera's The Joke, first published in Czechoslovakia in 1967, has only just become available in an authorized translation (Harper & Row, $14.95, 267 pp...
...Think how the boredom would fly from parish life if priests and ministers would join examples and practical steps to all their over-confident adjurations...
...Sloyan's accomplishment in a brief, eminently readable book is exceptional...
...She teaches essay writing at Hamline University in St...
...Yet the interpersonal work we do demands that we actively manage and use our own feelings to perform the white-collar "emotional labor" needed to manage the feelings of others...
...the concluding volume of his trilogy The Lust for Power, is a disturbing book...
...This reveals Wall Street's entire lack of a clue as to what's up -or going down...
...Johnson's so-called minor characters are the bright, talented women of the fifties who, like herself, then a student at Barnard, shocked their decorous parents by embracing bohemianism, only to find themselves again cast in the role of self-effacing female by a male milieu of renegades, poets, and novelists they felt privileged to be acknowledged by...
...The breadth of critical material in John Updike's Hugging the Shore (Knopf, $19.95,896 pp...
...In his ambitious The Discoverers (Random House, $25,768 pp...
...He is completing work on a social and cultural history of American Catholicism...
...It is a thrilling story...
...Its meticulously detailed account of Reagan's campaign to win the Republican presidential nomination in 1980 provides an uncanny preview of his ongoing campaign to run the presidency as a staff operation, subject to incisive intervention by Nancy as Lady High Executioner when the staff failures back up into pressures on Ron...
...Myths That Preserve Social Injustice: 1. Doers and thinkers are two kinds of people...
...Another one, "Sun," is a triumph: a party of women in the early twenties of this century, acting in secret, are the first to discover the South Pole...
...It is a very funny book about very serious matters, composed with great stylistic virtuosity and sophistication...
...The subtitle is important, for Walzer demonstrates persuasively that equality is a substantial precondition for pluralism, contrary to the laissez faire view that pluralism depends on gross inequality...
...Her work has appeared in the Columbia Journalism Review, Family Circle, the Village Voice and other magazines and journals...
...Eliot Janeway eliot janeway is publisher of The Janeway Letter and author of several books, most recently, Prescriptions for Prosperity (Times Books...
...and The Arms Race Kills Even Without War (Fortress, $6.95, 128 pp...
...The collection represents eight years of writings, mostly for the New Yorker, astutely grouped for piecemeal reading: self-interviews and sketches of "insufficiently famous Americans" who include Updike's neighbor's wife and his mailman...
...IN the course of examining the hoary claim that social justice is bad for economic prosperity, I have read a number of works, some old, some new...
...Among recent autobiographies and biographies that appeal to me particularly as an offspring of the 1950s and a New Englander with an enduring interest in colonial history are Joyce Johnson's Minor Characters (Houghton Mifflin, $13.95, 276 pp...
...Justice Brandeis was the father of public interest law, of protective investor law, of public utility law, of antitrust law, of state government activism (only now catching up with federal government activism), and, more than incidentally, of Zionism...
...Perhaps those who still think in terms of control and competition will succeed in burning up the earth before the turning tide can drown their hideous constructs of war and oppression...
...But take the book in terms of its own tradition, inherited as much from Smith and Rousseau as Marx and Weber...
...Sure enough the wheels began to plough the tranquil fields of white sky...
...Who reads about Priestley to understand modern chemistry...
...Another message is heard-that only through laughter and the people's carnival spirit may we retain our oneness with Christ's humility and good fellowship...
...Paul, Minnesota, and is on the advisory board of the Land Stewardship Project there...
...Dubbo witnesses the scene in its visionary form...
...For that reason it is a great shame that his book is regarded as being appropriate to "educators...
...There were no "basic building blocks," only shifting relationships, which had to be differently described at different moments...
...What a privilege it is to read four authors who are skilled in methods, literate in their fields, but whose kit and literacy are servants to a spacious and life-giving morality...
...Steven Tipton steven tipton teaches sociology of religion and ethics at Emory University...
...My Christmas gift suggestions are guidebooks to what really counts as a new year...
...Edith Turner EDITH TURNER has worked as co-editor of Primavera (a women's literary magazine), and collaborated with Victor Turner on Pilgrimage in Christian Culture (Columbia University Press...
...He is the author of Revolt of the Haves, and has just completed a book on ideologies of equality and efficiency, Economic Growth/Economic Justice...
...But do not be deceived, the canvas is a filmy backdrop through which one can perceive the workings of great perennial questions, many of which vex us today...
...She also co-directs Movement for North American Mission, whichprepares lay missionaries to help build community among the marginalized...
...IN the last decade the number of history majors graduating from American universities has dropped by one half-from about 20,000 per year to 10,000...
...The opinion, the sloth, and the money are the kit of self-serving corporations and self-serving state leadership...
...Still, this license to indulge acquisitiveness is hardly an absolute, for living in a tiny Manhattan apartment I'm thwarted by the laws of displacement: a book added, a book jettisoned...
...Both men are unsentimental egalitarians, inquiring dispassionately where the welfare state went awry, with the reliable good sense and rewarding prose of English Fabians...
...It is that...
...The British Marxist critic Terry Eagleton has produced a packed polemical survey entitled Literary Theory: An Introduction (Minnesota, $29.50, $9.95 paper, 244 pp...
...Shared life is what Edwina Gateley writes about in her Psalms of a Lay-woman (Claretian, $5.95, 128 pp...
...Hannaford ghosted his stuff...
...Some might make the mistake of losing patience with these tales for the mood at first seems somber...
...and Paul C. Nagel's Descent from Glory: Four Generations of the John Adams Family (Oxford University Press, $25, 416 pp...
...It may be that I can turn the other cheek," she writes, "but I cannot ask my sister in Argentina, whose son has been kidnapped and tortured to death, to do so...
...What makes the book so appealing is the successful integration of oral history and photography into the larger story of the growth and decline of the brass industry...
...Power or empowerment...
...It is not alone of its kind, I don't even know if it is the best, but for myself and others it lives up to its title...
...ONE of the most enjoyable books I have read in a long time is Brass Valley: The Story of Working People's Lives and Struggles In An American Industrial Region, compiled and edited by Jeremy Brecher, Jerry Lom-bardi, and Jan Stackhouse (Temple University Press $29.95, 284 pp...
...The innermost core of the novel is an unfinished poem by Pushkin, for which Thomas provides a continuation...
...and the problems they continue to face today...
...is clearly one of the best books on the topic...
...is an overnight sell-out in Wall Street...
...Incredible harmonies of a-causal relatedness emerged, the universe dissolved, and was re-discovered as an inter-dependent system of systems, adapting and transforming, reacting on each other at every level...
...This same dissolution and rediscovery of reality was, and is, being experienced in medicine, education, economics...
...As he proceeds to unravel the plot further murders accompany his work...
...Kohlberg's entire philosophy of moral education wars against those assumptions...
...Pheme Perkins pheme Perkins is associate professor of theology at Boston College...
...A long awaited study is the book by Gerald P. Fogarty, The Vatican and the American Hierarchy from 1870-1965 (Anton Hiersemann-Stuttgart, 220dm, or approx...
...Koyre does not try to revive outworn physics, but he illuminates brilliantly the basic theoretical choices bound up in every scientific change...
...Denise Levertov denise levertov, poet and critic, is the author of numerous books of poetry and prose, including Life in the Forest, The Poet in the World, To Stay Alive, and A Wanderer's Day song...
...These four are the riders in the chariot, the chariot of the Merkobah mystics of the ancient world...
...Once perched at the pinnacle, he went into business for himself, as hustling proteges often do...
...I am going to list them because they are not, alas, dead dogs still being kicked: they have far too much currency among both social scientists and humanities people...
...Some of Fiorenza's questions might well be set up against Wayne Rol-lins's description of the Bible as tutor to the soul in light of Jungian psychology (Jung and the Bible, John Knox Press, $9.95,142 pp...
...In fact they wanted poverty -not, of course, destitution -but material and spiritual poverty...
...That's the way Andre Meyer took care of himself and the ladies he savored...
...Economics used to have two honorable traditions-institutionalism and economic history-which have been eaten up by mathematicians pretending to be social scientists...
...The achievement of Coward-McCann in allowing this invaluable description of the Reagan operation to sink without a trace is a triumph of ingenuity supported by perseverance...
...Basic Books, $24.95, 514 pp...
...the ways of life they created for themselves...
...Worth noting is that Archdeacon takes religion seriously and sees it as an instrumental force, along with enthnicity and race, in shaping our nation of immigrants...
...Breaking Bread: The Catholic Worker and the Origin of Catholic Radicalism in America by Mel Piehl (Temple University Press $19.95, 296 pp...
...private property or communal Franciscan living...
...Fred Rudolph has remarked that general readers "have had greater access to the history of almost any skirmish of the Civil War than they have had to the history of education in the United States...
...19143, $2.45, 32 pp...
...Can Christians let go of the unconscious identification of the divine with masculine power long enough to glimpse the liberation of Jesus's vision of Spirit-Sophia...
...Finally, if college history majors are a vanishing species, it may well be because educators seem so spectacularly uninterested in their own history...
...While I have doubts about the efficacy (and possible danger) of such workshops should they be conducted by less experienced and gifted psychologists or laypersons than Joanna Macy herself, the questions and realizations raised by the described procedures are in themselves valuable to anyone willing to examine his or her own feelings of fear and despair, and to search for the "empowerment" that can ensue when the hard glaze of "psychic numbing" is cracked open...
...is his greatest work: an ideal gift for a dedicated metaphysical uncle...
...Thomas J. Archdeacon has written a more traditional, but no less important study, Becoming American: An Ethnic History (The Free Press, $17.95, 297 pp...
...Borrow it from your internist's coffee table, or request it as a gift...
...Doctors are ambivalent about this book...
...She doesn't come up with a pat answer...
...In one of these short stories, "The Diary of the Rose," the reader is transported into a totalitarian state, watching an innocent man who has been detained as a lunatic...
...America became a nation of psychologists partly because it had once been a nation of pietists," argues E. Brooks Holifield in A History of Pastoral Care in America: From Salvation to Self-Realization (Abingdon, $16.95, 416 pp...
...has been circulating widely by word-of-mouth contacts for a couple of years, has now brought out a larger book Despair and Personal Power in the Nuclear Age (New Society Publishers, $19.95, $8.95 paper, 200 pp...
...He concludes that neither literature nor "theory" deserve their privileged status, and would like to replace departments of literature with departments of "Discursive Practices...
...One would of course be foolish to expect THE answer from such a collection but what Pat Farren's collection does do is to reveal the unused pool of constructive and humane thinking and feeling that lies about us, and to confirm the sense that perhaps people are breaking out of their psychic numbing...
...Best of all, Starr demonstrates the sheer inefficiency of much for-profit medicine...
...I no sooner read Hodge's and Qadeer's Towns and Villages in Canada than I applied its basic notion-that the re-, ceiver of a service must keep his or her taste in proud balance with the influx from planners who usually live elsewhere-in my teaching of English composition...
...He does a far better job than some of the more widely acclaimed and better promoted works considering the same territory...
...His book is the definitive, objective case history explaining why, as the proverbial English nanny moaned during exuberant birthday parties, "it will all end in tears" to the surprise of the markets...
...science claims timeless truth, high art plays with mystic structure and religion escapes upward from mere history...
...Her memoir evokes the climate of a conventional era in transition, its youth at risk, restless, rebellious, self-destructive, all of which Johnson, now a top publishing editor, recalls with sober reflection and perspective...
...Jonathan Culler's On Decon-struction (Cornell, $22.50, $8.95 paper, 312 pp) is a typically patient, thoughtful, illuminating exposition of the ideas of Jacques Derrida and their application to literary studies...
...The legacy of this Romanization continues to plague the church today as Vatican bureaucrats still try to equate Auctoritas (authority) with Romanitas (Romanization...
...But the delicacy and tenderness of the medium will bear up those who persist, and give long-lasting pleasure...
...oddments, one that speaks directly to book-people assays the book-mailer...
...All the authors participate in the process, as well as the theorizing...
...All three books militate against the following outdated myths...
...Practical people, therefore, spend their conscious hours winning little battles, which means technical, how-to-do-it battles, and are well advised to gain their satisfactions from such discrete triumphs...
...they shrink from the implications about medicine's own profiteering...
...is bountiful, the writing urbane and surprisingly personal on occasion (as when he discusses sex and religion), his attitude toward his fellows generous...
...SOME of the books that have come my way recently, while none attempts so comprehensive a disquisition as Schell's The Fate of the Earth, explore other aspects of the state of emergency in which we are living...
...To science, history is a file of discards...
...The new awareness is still "unorthodox," but gains ground as the mechanistic, Cartesian view of life betrays its destructive results more brutally year by year...
...Justice Frankfurter worked his way up the political ladder, as faithful emissary to Brandeis's apparatchiks in the government, on the bench, at the bar, and in the media...
...A Political Portrait (Coward-McCann, $ 17.95, 317 pp...
...Art seemingly takes a different view of its history...
...4. The central issue of civilization, fairness for all, can never be won...
...Archdeacon incorporates these and other more traditional studies into a very readable history of immigration...
...This leaves much of the field to sociologists...
...Cheaper is Newtonian Studies (University of Chicago, $7.50,288 pp...
...they like the warning about corporate encroachments...
...They did not want wealth for everyone...
...The book is very expensive...
...is set in an imaginary country called Slaka that combines the characteristics of Yugoslavia, Poland, and Ruritania, and has its own language, or rather languages, ingeniously invented by the novelist, and many language games...
...So when asked to write about my favorite reading of the year, favorite ultimately means those books I value enough to cram into my library, usually a book read under deadline pressure that I look forward to re-reading at leisure...
...Serious students will ponder these two magnificent biographies together as the critical chapter in our modern history they account for...
...86,438 pp...
...It would be a valuable text for discussion groups to get their teeth into...
...written with verve and humor (a rather rare commodity in this field...
...Romanitas, no...
...The author's data are fascinating, and not only to Canadian regional development people...
...Perhaps, now as much as ever, we need to be cured of any presumption that the world of terrorism and that of those who enter it to stop the process can be treated in simple categories of good and bad...
...These urbane, perceptive essays demonstrate that a sophisticated familiarity with modern literary theory is not incompatible with the traditional practice of literary criticism...
...This is the history of the brass workers of the Naugatuck Valley in Western Connecticut from the early nineteenth century to the present day...
...a wickedly funny and deadly serious book, which reminds us why liberty and politics matter, and places them in the correct perspective against the other human pursuits, namely art, humor, fellowship, sex, and love...
...A case study of episcopal leadership, Corporation Sole (the sixth volume in the series, Notre Dame Studies in American Catholicism) examines how Mundelein brought order, centralization, and business management to Chicago's archdiocese and how this helped to raise the self image of Chicago's Catholics...
...Such imagination must take into account our theological disciplines and our attempt to understand the perplexities of the world we confront...
...Both biographies piece the full story together...
...complex equality" (Walzer's phrase) requires respect for the non-market spheres of human life...
...ALL three books are practical kit for the old horrible battle we wage: a few thousand idealists, with only wise books, protests, pilot projects, and demonstrations, must win social justice, somehow, for those without power...
...and Julian Le Grand's The Strategy of Equality (George Allen and Unwin, $27.50, $9.95 paper, 192 pp...
...Why have efforts to get in touch with our spontaneous inner feelings become an ever more important part of discovering who we are...
...It is one of the most authoritatively documented and most prophetically disturbing books I have read in the last three years, let alone in the past year...
...Reagan made his office with them during his interval out of office and in the media...
...Another major theme was the Romaniza-tion of the hierarchy and ultimately the rest of the institution...
...would have emerged as a best seller, certainly in Wall Street...
...Outside the theological sphere, two of the year's best sellers provide compelling insights into the world we must face...
...proved to my satisfaction that the achievement of The White Hotel (1981) was no fluke, though not all British reviewers agreed (not that they were unanimously enthusiastic about the earlier novel either...
...Elisabeth Schussler-Fiorenza's reconstruction of the women's story of both empowerment and repression in the New Testament period provides another challenge to ingrained habits (In Memory of Her: A Feminist Reconstruction of Christian Origins, Crossroad, $19.50, 376 pp...
...One is a definitive biography of Louis Brandeis...
...Martin Green's Tolstoy and Gandhi, Men of Peace (Basic, $23.50, 319 pp...
...Homemade Social Justice, by Michael True, Twenty-Third Publications, $5.95, 160 pp...
...Religion, anyhow, is surely about the timeless and eternal-what need we of the history of ages in the light of once and for all revelation...
...If Boorstin's enthusiasm for all this progress remains arguably unqualified, his history of thought is nonetheless exhilarating...
...A good text to get the adrenalin flowing in a graduate seminar...
...I: Apocalyptic Literature & Testaments, Doubleday, $35,1000pp...
...At the moment we are rather especially aware of depravity in the leadership of both commerce and body politic, so we can be especially grateful for such thinkers as keep using brains and endurance for justice...
...Her 'psalms' are simple to the point of starkness, the exact reflection of personal and yet universal experience, the awareness of vocation, the resistance, the discovery, the struggle to realize it, the growth of community, the doubts, hopes, prayers, celebrations...
...Lost in the shuffle last year was Alan Wolfe's excellent America's Impasse (Pantheon, $16.50, 293 pp...
...It expounds the theories behind the workshops she has conducted all over the United States, and recently in Europe as well, and provides specific exercises for continuing the same kind of psychological work...
...with an introduction by Howard Zinn ( Schenkman Publishing, 1331 Broadway, Cambridge, MA 02138, $15.25, $6.95 paper 239 pp...
...IOSEPH SCHUMPETER, posthumously recognized as the wisest of philosophers of the history of economic ideas, has given us our most practical definition of economics...
...All three books assume, despite the differing areas of interest, that everyone, not just the lucky or blessed, wants to and can move out of mere moral nature (seeing what you want and taking it) towards moral civilization...
...THE CHIEF difficulty for me in choosing books to write about is that I tend to re-read favorites for years and feel unfriendly to newcomers until they are forced on my attention...
...They answer Friedman, Gilder, Kristol, and the other neo's as well as anything written in our own day...
...Random House, $16.95, 247 pp...
...The book is a tour de force...
...An English Franciscan investigator, Brother William-a cunning man-arrives at a hilltop abbey where a mysterious death has occurred...
...As emotional cogs in the corporate machinery of a people-processing "personal-services" economy, we prize unman-aged feeling as if it was a rare and precious element because that it is precisely what it has become...
...She struggles with the problem of remaining loyal to the principles of non-violent action while also being committed to solidarity with the poor and oppressed who have taken up arms to liberate themselves from intolerable conditions...
...William Sullivan's Reconstructing Public Philosophy, (University of California Press, $19.95, 238 pp...
...is encyclopedic, appropriately reverential, yet appropriately judicious...
...They are indeed 'psalms', and they, like the other two books, grow out of a sense of transformation taking place, quietly, with mind-blowing unexpectedness, yet it is all familiar, at home in our lives, breaking them open to reveal the reality we never suspected...
...But moralists must do all three parts of the job-construct the code, delineate specific steps for enacting it, and finally, risk their own necks in the process...
Vol. 110 • December 1983 • No. 21
