Critics' choices for Christmas
Mayhew, Alice E. & Burns, David & Lekach-man, Robert & Munrb, Eleanor & Wortz, Melinda & Conarroe, Joel & Neville, Robert C. & Romano, Carlin & Fox, Richard Wightman & Hauerwas, Stanley & Perkins, Pheme
BOOKS Critics' choices for Christinas Alice E. Mayhew ince I publish books for a living, I shall refrain from praising any one of my house's offerings, except I shall fall off the...
...In fiction, parts of Saul Bellow's More Die of Heartbreak (William Morrow, $17.95, 335 pp...
...The new "science of chaos!' may reveal the deep structures embedded in phenomena hitherto viewed as completely random...
...Here Maclntyre delivers on his promise in After Virtue to develop an account of rationality and justice that is tradition specific...
...She secured 150 interviews with the principals, who provide the stories at the heart of the book...
...for its investigztive digging, and David Herbert Donald's Look Homeward: The Life of Thomas Wolfe (Little, Brown, $25, 502 pp...
...In the later chapters of the book Stella presents his critique of modern and contemporary abstraction...
...As a result, he supplies exactly the imaginative resources of the New Testament for thinking about our current religious situation as well as the problem of war...
...Margaret R. Miles's contribution, "Nudity, Gender, and Religious Meaning in the Italian Renaissance," presents a discussion and rejoinder to Leo Steinberg's The Sexuality of Christ in Renaissance Art and Modern Oblivion...
...he collaborates with his wife Phylis...
...The books that matter to me excel in stickiness — they refuse to go away, whether I gave them the short form or the long form...
...Had these themes framed the American Catholic debate since 1965, both church and country would have been better served...
...Lohfink in this book reclaims for New Testament studies the importance of community and, in particular, the figure of Jesus...
...There has been a pervasive, though not universal, assumption that to be is to be the kind of thing that is the object of vision or intuition...
...They stand beyond the orientation points that are supposed to define the philosophic task, and yet they not only have hope but are proceeding confidently in new substantive directions...
...That was the final irony...
...both Harvard University Press...
...The editors chose writers for this project who understand the discipline of seeing, not just analytic and language-based methods of learning...
...Thus Stella reveals his interest in the quality of felt presence, specifically the feeling of expansive pictorial space...
...These books not only are meant to make us think differently, they each exhibit a moral passion to help us live better...
...focuses on this issue with the precision of a burning glass...
...is about a black youth who had just graduated from an exclusive New England prep school and was on his way to Stanford University, when he was shot and killed by a plainclothes cop, apparently in self-defense, in the midst of an attempted robbery...
...This is a rich intellectual history of the concept of "deep time'' and the effort to reconcile physical evidence with theological images...
...is a fine contribution because it takes seriously the social construction of "feminism" itself...
...Didn't scientists, writers, and artists of the past also study individuals against their background...
...is flooded with examined nostalgia for her childhood in the Australian rainforest...
...There's a straight narrative in this book as well, swift-paced and vivid as all Dillard's work is...
...And professors, it was argued further, had an even greater moral obligation than the ordinary citizen to reveal whether or not they had embraced such a conspiracy: they had the independence of the academy to protect...
...In a supposed effort to protect their autonomy, universities kicked out those professors who insisted on shielding themselves (and their .colleges) from political truth squads...
...In Time's Arrow, Time's Cycle: Myth and Metaphor in the Discovery of Geological Time (Harvard, $17.50, 240 pp...
...David Weissman makes a far more thoroughgoing critique of Western culture's philosophic assumptions in Intuition and Ideality (State University of New York, $14.95, 308 pp...
...Bender has grounded ideas and arts in their evolving cosmopolitan context...
...This novel makes it clear that in addition to being our most intelligent writer (though Bellowites may object to my saying so), he is also our most consistently satisfying stylist (and here the Updikians may register a protest...
...They use gold leaf, oil slicks, and table salt — and a little help from Julia Child, "a celebrated applied biochemist" — to reveal atomic structure...
...Community is itself the fruit of a vibrant life of mind and senses...
...Some I hope to finish...
...Women must see themselves as individuals, with the same capacities and opportunities as men...
...David Burns DAVID BURNS is project director for the American Association for the Advancement of Science...
...Ernest L. Fortin, A.A...
...The planet needs an inclusivist mentality in order to survive...
...what we have lost is created space which we could feel...
...Stephen Jay Gould has attained popular acclaim by writing well about what he knows best — paleontology and evolutionary theory...
...BOOKS Critics' choices for Christinas Alice E. Mayhew ince I publish books for a living, I shall refrain from praising any one of my house's offerings, except I shall fall off the wagon praise one by Daniel Callahan, a former editor of Commonweal, Setting And Calvin Trillin, who doesn't know how not to be funny about important matters, has collected some of his Nation t Say Something Nice Is, $16.95, 212 pp...
...Which Rationality...
...The menu of a Tour de France bike rider shows energy flows (a kilowatt-hour of electricity equals 3.6 "JD" — jelly doughnuts...
...I especially admire "The Ballad of the Sad Dybbuk," which makes me, and everyone I've shown it to, laugh out loud...
...on my rendering of that history...
...A History of Private Life: From Pagan Rome to Byzantium, ed...
...The books above might all be described as philosophical...
...language is not a tool humans use but a matrix that creates and sometimes uses humans...
...I (Abingdon Press, $22.95, 353 pp...
...The Harper's Atlas of the Bible, ed...
...Robert Hughes's The Fatal Shore :4.95, 688 pp...
...I still marvel at Steve Stern's ability to juice up American Jewish fiction by trucking it down to Memphis in Lazar Malkin Enters Heaven (Viking, $16.95, 249 pp...
...Briefly, Hegel understood modernity through a dialectic of totalizing continuities;* Heidegger was equally totalizing in his call for an end to modernity...
...David Aune situates the writings of the New Testament within the literary traditions of their time...
...In Chaos: Making a New Science (Viking, $19.95, 352 pp...
...Taken together they represent a new day in philosophical ethics...
...It should be read as an unsolemn eulogy of the great Democratic tradition of FDR, Jack Kennedy, and LBJ, certainly not as guidance to the blow-dried, media-obsessed candidates who flit before us...
...But it's that anguish of self-search that struck me particularly: "How much noticing could I permit myself...
...a political thriller set in South Africa, which transcends its form...
...The plot revolves around a decent C.I...
...If you want a clear explanation, go for the best...
...Yet at Reed, as elsewhere, any professor who refused to answer questions about left-wing ties could expect to be fired by the trustees...
...But, to Mr...
...In Working Space (Harvard, $30, $14.95 paper, 196 pp...
...Song in Morning (Norton, $16.95, 364 pp...
...is less successful than his Nixon Agonistes, but like everything Wills writes it is crammed with fresh material, even compelling evidence that the young Reagan actually did work hard as a lifeguard and later as a union leader...
...Doug Adams's kinesthetic approach to George Segal's Holocaust Monument in San Francisco...
...The finest book I have read this year (or, for that matter, this decade) is Philip Roth's The Counterlife (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $18.95, 324pp...
...This book heralds a forthcoming systematic presentation of a metaphysical alternative...
...Right...
...Bender is not sure whether New York, with its rich tradition of cultural diversity and achievement, can still support a lively civic culture...
...They experience the suffering of Jesus as an identification with their own bodily experience...
...Pacific Shift by William Irwin Thompson, SierraClub, $15.95,197pp...
...While I remain unconvinced that his account of liberalism as a political ethic is compatible with current economic realities, we are in his debt for making the case so clearly...
...and on the conditions for the possibility of a wiser debate in the future...
...The Propheteers (Harper & Row, $16.95, $7.95 paper, 288 pp...
...He also invokes the insights of Gregory Bateson and the Nishitani School of Zen Buddhism, both of which reflect an ecological perspective...
...For those who live in cities, these quiet, rural lyrics will provide refreshment for the soul...
...which will soon be published...
...This involves a new, philosophically informed translation of many of the key Confucian terms...
...These new models of nonlinear systems suggest a constant beating together of order and chaos — "creating disorder in one direction while remaining trim and methodical in another . . . chaotic along one axis and orderly along another...
...is a it recounts the conitive Australia, the "fatal shore" to them petty thieves, ;cept for the black ilaves (and this is a who colonized the arrived by choice, choices were hard iramatizing the deis own country, Mr.' to modern historical publishers have no e Mrs...
...We agree, in short, that nonviolence is not for pacifists alone, and that just law and democratic governance are crucial examples of nonviolent conflict resolution...
...and Melvin Konner's somewhat bitter Becoming a Doctor (Viking, $19.95, 390 pp...
...Paul Volberding, University of California...
...The Confucian critique of Western culture implicit in Hall and Ames is remarkably similar to David Kolb's The Critique of Pure Modernity: Hegel, Heidegger, and After (University of Chicago, $25, 316 pp...
...Garry Wills's Reagan's America: Innocents at Home (Doubleday, $19.95, 472 pp...
...Robert C. Neville ROBERT c. Neville is professor of religion, philosophy, and theology at Boston University...
...I would wake on my deathbed and say, What was that...
...assumes the results of arguments such as developed in the other books and directs its analysis to religion...
...Harvey D. Egan, S.J...
...For those inclined to believe that the liberal tradition still has great viability, there will be no better book to read than Jeffrey Stout's Ethics After Babel (Beacon Press, $22.95, 300 pp...
...The book, published in connection with the PBS series, emphasizes methods...
...AIDS, The Lapis Press, 1850 Union Street, Suite 466, San Francisco, California, 94123, $5.95, 52 pp...
...The final section of the book, entitled "Visual Arts in Religious Praxis" brings the discussions directly into contemporary culture through essays on "Art and Social Justice," by Jake Empereur...
...stayed in my mind because of Inman's consummate decency and deft touch in handling Southern, smalltown newspapering...
...A fundamental theme underlying Stella's extensive and selective analysis of art history is the relationship between abstract imagery — particularly spatial expansion — and religious feeling...
...It is the dismal tale that one expects...
...One novel that did not draw widespread praise, Robert Inman's Home Fires Burning (Little, Brown, $18.95, 452 pp...
...Janet Martin Soskice's Metaphor and Religious Language (Clarendon/Oxford, $16.95, 200 pp...
...Baradudin...
...He wants his own book to be part of the dialogue...
...Indeed, she shows us that war is as much a matter of the imagination as it is of power politics...
...too much and I was too selfconscious to live . . . too little . . . and I would miss the whole show...
...Thomas H. Groome Margaret Gorman, R.S.C.J...
...On the contrary, in interesting ways, each of the books mentioned below is paleo-pragmatic, American in the rich speculative, hermeneutical, and critical senses associated with Charles Peirce...
...McClendon's book hopefully will set a new standard for works done in Christian ethics...
...and Dr...
...a sequence of deeply-felt meditations composed in accessible, rhythmand-rhyme stanzas...
...and such a remembrance is not something passive but active . . . the creative construction of one's life...
...James Gleick is a writer (for the New York Times), not a scientist, but he has the essential qualities of understanding and confidence...
...This book is illustrated in full color by the prominent French artist Niki de Saint Phalle, who is known for her exuberant, colorful, playful, joyous, irresistible style...
...She has prepared many exhibition catalogues, including the introductions for the James Turrell exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Larry Bell exhibition at the Hudson River Museum...
...Stanley Hauerwas STANLEY HAUERWAS is professor of theological ethics at Duke University...
...Nussbaum's book is a wonderful discussion of the Greek dramatists' understanding of the fragile and tragic character of life, Plato's attempt to secure moral goodness from tragedy, and finally Aristotle's reclaiming of the dramatists' vision...
...However, each in its own way breaks through the sterile disciplinary divisions that enthrall contemporary intellectual life...
...C. Sebastian Moore, O.S.B...
...Thomas Bender in New York Intellect (Alfred A. Knopf, $25, 422 pp...
...On this topic Stella quotes Berenson, Space-composition is the art which humanizes the void, making of it an enclosed Eden, a domed mansion wherein our higher selves at last find an abode...
...Thomas E. Wangler James Michael Weiss For further information on graduate programs and resources, contact Dr...
...His analysis illumines our situation in an extraordinary manner...
...The truth of post-modern culture is that things are too multiple and uncoordinated to be genuinely post anything...
...Still, it is creepy to realize that the man's Star Wars obsession may very well stem from his World War II role as Brass Bancroft, secret agent, charged with protecting our intertia projector, a weapon capable of shooting enemy planes out of the sky, from Nazi spies...
...His style is sophisticated and seamless, enlivened with urbane humor...
...In this year of strange and wonderful events — the Ollie North extravaganza, the failed attempt to convert Robert Bork into a raging moderate, and Gorbachev's provision of a sorely needed photo opportunity for our floundering president, it is possibly appropriate that the books that instructed, entertained, or moved me were all political...
...His book Christian Existence Today: Essays on Church, World, and Living in Bttv/sen (Lambert Publications) is forthcoming...
...Joseph Horowitz in Understanding Toscanini (Alfred A. Knopf, $30, 492 pp...
...He entertains with anecdotes of his first thirtyplus years, including his friendship with members of the Duke Ellington orchestra...
...is a very good novel...
...The latest medical and scientific findings were provided by immunologist Dr...
...All will help to shape history...
...Art as Religious Studies, edited by Doug Adams and Diane Apostolos Cappadona, Crossroad, $17.95, 247 pp...
...Computer graphics show the complexities that arise from simple formulas and models, if repeated with nonlinearity and feedback: They display the deterministic patterns buried within virtually all data...
...is richly textured, sensuous, and filled with resonant echoes of Hopkins, Keats, Moore, and her other poetic idols...
...This issue is of great interest today, particularly in the writings of French philosophers such as Jean FranCois Lyotard, who argues eloquently that the non-verbal and non-narrative felt presence of a work of art is its real content...
...Call this the New Age or the Age of Ecology or what you will, it's apparent many people have a new interest in the way human life unfolds in the matrix of the natural world...
...Margaret mething nice in her Tom the proprietors y banning publicat and Paul Greeniking, $19.95, 391 le helped create an ler, and filled the coffers of the kiosks in all the airports serving Heathrow where customers purchased armloads of this volume to take to England where many wondered, with reason, what all the fuss was about...
...M. L. Rosenthal also has a fine ear, as one would expect in one of our more eloquent critics, and in As For Love (Oxford $11.95 paper, 54 pp...
...Not only do leading authorities describe the personal, family, social, religious, economic, and architectural living spaces of people in these times, the volume is rightly illustrated with a wealth of photographs of archaeological objects and decorative arts to illustrate what is described in the text...
...and George Goethals's discussion of "Images and Values: Television as Religious Communications...
...In Luria's cases, one patient is cursed with such an open switchboard of brain-lines he's inundated with data, as helpless as the patient in the second case, a victim of organic brain-injury...
...Put just that way, the idea may not seem so new...
...A notably fair writer, Ambrose reviews Nixon's notorious early campaigns against Jerry Voorhees and Helen Gahagan Douglas and concludes that particularly in the Douglas race, Nixon was not the only one guilty of mudslinging...
...A "New Age" advocate since the 1960s, and a founder of the Lindesfarne Association in the 1970s, Thompson argues that the hero worshipping of individuals, whether rock stars, sports heroes, movie stars, gurus, or television evangelists, is no longer appropriate...
...But it is criss-crossed with subjective "songlines" or "dreaming-tracks," treks by the ancestors and creator-gods of the aboriginal people of the region, projected outwards by the living to maintain the old ones in memory and, simultaneously, to vitalize the earth...
...the key idea is that Western philosophies presuppose some kind of transcendent normative principle, whereas all principles for Confucius are wholly immanent...
...The New Testament in Its Literary Environment, David E. Aune, Westminster, $22.94, 260 pp...
...Her study of the role of food, 4 December 1987: 713 both in practices of fasting and distributing food, shows that there are distinctive patterns of religious experience and expression among women...
...The Faculty: Mary C. Boys, S.N.J.M...
...Its title is intentionally ambiguous...
...The first is by Gerhard Lohfink, Jesus and the Community (Fortress Press, $9.95, 211 pp...
...Cultural history flourished because some authors bothered to widen the focus we had traditionally given to familiar subjects: James Patterson in The Dread Disease: Cancer and Modern American Culture (Harvard University Press, $25.95, 416 pp...
...Because this work is so much of a piece, I can suggest its special quality by quoting some representative lines: When field and woods agree, they make a rhyme That stirs in distant memory the whole First Sabbath's song that no largess of time Or hope or sorrow wholly can recall...
...Stephen F. Brown, Acting Director of Graduate Programs, Box E, Department of Theology, Boston College, Chestnut Hill, MA 02167...
...And he predicts that the necessary global perspective, which includes outer space as well as our own planet, will develop from the West Coast of the United States and the Pacific Rim countries...
...Just like the computer graphics of cellular automata or the deep structures of Mandelbrot sets, "The system is deterministic, but you can't say what it's going to do next...
...Joel Conarroe JOEL CONARROE is president of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation...
...This book, along with Stout's earlier Flight From Authority (Notre Dame, 1981) establishes him as one of our most sensitive and nuanced thinkers in modern religious thought...
...She also serves on the editorial boards of the Journal of Biblical Literature and the Catholic Biblical Quarterly...
...The water was history...
...It is clear to Thompson that our own era is courting chaos and death...
...But maintaining that perception depends upon a female social network — a network that is undermined by too much individualism...
...Her book On Glory Roads: A Pilgrim's Book About Pilgrimages (Thames & Hudson) came out this past spring, and her Memoir of a Modernist's Daughter (T/fang) will appear in March...
...Stephen E. Ambrose's Nixon: the Education of a Politician, 1913-1962 (Simon & Schuster, $22.95, 752 pp...
...Anthony J. Saldarini Margaret A. Schatkin Francis P. Sullivan, S.J...
...Classical Paintings in the Teaching of Pastoral Care," by Archie Smith, Jr...
...What is so remarkable about Maclntyre's achievement is his ability to combine close historical analysis with philosophical argumentation while never losing his narrative line...
...I believe, however, that what Ramsey has done in this book is the culmination of an extraordinary career in helping us think about these matters, and it should not be missed by anyone...
...William Hazeltine, Harvard Medical School...
...Several books enriched autobiography — Arthur Miller's moralistic Timebends (Grove Press, $24.95, 640 pp...
...It is a tense, complex, and sympathetic story, set in the Middle East, which the author once covered for The Wall Street Journal...
...But in this work, urban community is not just background setting...
...Jordan Gutterman, the University of Texas...
...Extended globally, such a dual process of conceiving and appropriating might truly give birth to the living brain-in-space of which "Gaia" scientist James Lovelock, and others, speak...
...Of the five, A History of Private Life is the best overall value, but these are all lasting additions to one's library...
...Carlin Romano CARLIN ROMANO is book editor of the Philadelphia Inquirer...
...He discusses the perspectives of composer Karlheinz Stockhausen, novelist Doris Lessing, and film maker Peter Weir as examples of artists who provide inclusive and ecological points of view...
...he revisits the period 1680-1840 when geology first conflicted with biblical accounts of Creation and Noah and the Flood...
...The general reader may enjoy the pleasure of learning about little-known worlds...
...No more can theologians say that philosophers are simply not dealing with issues of substance...
...for its sardonic verve...
...Reading the New Testament (Paulist, second edition) is forthcoming...
...Finally, Harper & Row has brought us a wonderful new Bible Atlas (The Times Atlas of the Bible in Great Britain...
...Ignatius's great credit, this man, afflicted by the proverbial American innocence, is in no sense the ugly American...
...The debates surrounding these issues have been among the most heated in contemporary art criticism and feminist theory...
...This volume is rich fare, offering scholarship, theory, and practice in an admirably pluralistic and ecumenical selection...
...for its well-justified anger...
...Hermeneutics can be neither explanation nor univocal argument...
...She is the author of numerous books on the New Testament including The Resurrection (Doubleday...
...Lincoln Caplan's The Tenth Justice (Alfred A. Knopf, $19.95, 325 pp...
...Raymond G. Helmick, S.J...
...The deep freeze in which the American philosophic spirit has been laid away for so many years has been opened up, and the recent thaw has unleashed creative energies in several directions...
...Like Maclntyre's and Stout's books, Nussbaum's book is filled with insight and close analysis of philosophical text...
...Seymour, whose specialty seems to be mournful accounts of intractable animosities in places like Belfast, here evokes the claustrophobic atmosphere of apartheid in a parable of personal loyalty to misguided masters by a British spy, entangled in a failed African National Congress action...
...Biography could be proud of many works, among which I especially liked Robert Ferguson's Enigma: The Life ofKnut Hamsun (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $30, 453 pp...
...The best have the deepest understanding...
...Read all of Ms...
...for its judicious handling of all pros and cons, its confidence and readable style...
...This book makes clear that the often-made charge that Maclntyre cannot avoid relativism is deeply flawed...
...On the one hand, as comparative philosophy, it describes a thoroughgoing reinterpretation of the thought of Confucius, working to free it from the encrustations of later Confucians...
...Readers not yet conversant with the wonders of this book need not take my word for its quality — no novel in recent memory has been praised by so many discriminating critics, a list that includes, among others, Julian Barnes, Robert Alter, Edward Said, Martin Amis, Cynthia Ozick, David Lehman, Richard Locke, William Gass, Mark Feeney, and Paul Gray...
...by James B. Pritchard, Harper & Row, $49.95, 254 pp...
...These are important agreements...
...Aune also follows the genres of gospel, epistle, and apocalypse beyond the New Testament into other early Christian writing...
...That's the extraordinary thing about these four books...
...it is not a life until it is truly remembered and appropriated...
...cannot help but be the most discussed book for the next decade...
...But whateverthe prospects for cosmopolitanism, Bender has illuminated a long-standing civic ideal and reminded his fellow historians that there are broad publics to be studied historically and addressed today...
...Computers make possible "trial-anderror geometry...
...The Life It Brings: One Physicist's Beginnings (Ticknor& Fields, $16.95, 171 pp...
...covered a rarely touched-on subject — the work of the solicitor general — with novelistic pace and inside scoops...
...It is crammed with wonderful stories, candid personal judgments, and unabashed nostalgia for old-time Boston politics...
...While Maclntyre does not pretend to solve the social and political challenges confronting us, indeed he makes it clear why there is no solution...
...Trillin offered much hilarity and some practical suggestions, including one for a campaign slogan to fit any season: "Never Been Indicted...
...by Paul Veyne, Belknap I Harvard, $29.50, 670 pp...
...A very different but no less admirable sensibility informs Wendell Berry's Sabbaths (North Point, $6.95 paper, 98 pp...
...Stout provides a non-foundationalist defense of liberalism as a tradition...
...In tackling two centuries of New York intellect — artists as well as writers and thinkers — Thomas Bender has embraced the oldfashioned goal of producing synthetic history for a broad audience...
...No admirer of his subject, Ambrose highlights several occasions when Nixon behaved in principled fashion...
...The Australian outback where he also journeys is an "objective" landscape of sand, rock, trees, and gulleys...
...He also gives us insightful sketches of his mentors and colleagues — Oppenheimer, Schwinger, Dyson, Gell-Mann, Yang and Lee, and others at Princeton's Institute for Advanced Study...
...A. agent who tries to buy some peace in the middle of that shooting gallery, and fails...
...In The Ring of Truth: An Inquiry into How We Know What We Know (Random House, $24.95, 307 pp...
...and Georges Perec's Life: A User's Manual (Godine, $24.95, 608 pp...
...Ellen W. Schrecker is the first scholar in the last quarter-century to look in depth at McCarthyism in education (No Ivory Tower: McCarthyism and the Universities, Oxford University, $20.95, 437 pp...
...history is not a divine or any other kind of story, but a fundamentally ambiguous collection of stories, or story parts...
...Ambrose comes closer to turning Nixon into a normal human being than I would have believed possible...
...It too contains detailed and informative historical articles along with a wealth of illustrations of archeological finds, plans of sites and buildings, and artists' reconstructions...
...Mary Daly Robert J. Daly, S.J...
...We are in these authors' debt...
...With great power, Maclntyre shows that that charge reflects the liberal account of rationality which itself is deeply flawed...
...is a history of public culture and a quest to revitalize today's public culture by exposing and nourishing its roots...
...Others 1 did finish, even if they're still not finished with me...
...is an extraordinary account of the metaphorical character of religious language...
...may seem an odd book to couple with those of Maclntyre and Stout, I believe it to be part of the same conversation...
...Bruce Chatwin's The Songlines (Viking, $18.95, 293 pp...
...By this I do not mean Richard Rorty's neo-pragmatic chorus singing the finale of the philosophic tradition...
...Lane Fox's careful study of the transition from pagan to Christian in the ancient world demonstrates the ongoing vitality of "Pagan" religious forms which the cliches of church historians had reduced to insignificance...
...His introspections show that his becoming a physicist was inevitable — a surprise only to himself...
...There is no single moment of epiphany in this beautiful appropriation of a landscape and a pioneer people, rather a gradual coming-to-awareness of herself apart from her background "condition of isolation and intellectual loneliness...
...In this effort he contributes original insights to the artists he explores...
...Like her earlier books (The Kingfisher and What the Light Was Like) Amy Clampitt's Archaic Figure (Alfred A. Knopf, $8.95 paper, 113 pp...
...They show the impact of Galileo's "Dutch" telescope in Venice...
...The most unusual, daring, and soonto-be-controversial is David L. Hall and Roger T. Ames's Thinking Through Confucius (State University of New York, $14.95, 393 pp...
...In Systematic Theology, History of Christian Ufe and Thought, or Christian Ethics...
...Though Martha Nussbaum's The Fragility of Goodness (Cambridge University, $59.50, $19.95 paper, 544 pp...
...Biblical Studies may be pursued as a minor field...
...As she has done so often, Carolyn Bynum insists upon accurate rendering of the details of women's and men's experience...
...I find myself increasingly attracted to thinkers who simply refuse to be pigeon-holed by their disciplines...
...In conclusion, I find myself extremely hopeful about our current intellectual situation...
...I want to recommend two books that at first seem completely different from the books recommended above...
...There are those who find her compressed diction suffocating — a bit too tea-cozy cozy — but I find it evocative, especially when read aloud...
...But harmony of earth is Heavenmade, Heaven-making, is promise and is prayer, A little song to keep us unafraid, An earthly music magnified in air...
...for its daring, fairminded choice of subject, Annie Cohen-Solal's Sartre (Pantheon, $25, 555 pp...
...Sacks, also author of The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, makes the point: "a human life is not a life until it is examined...
...Annie Dillard, in her new book An American Childhood (Harper & Row, $17.95, 255 pp...
...The modesty of his account of liberalism as well as the modesty of his defense are commendable...
...Everywhere but at Reed College faculties supported political tests as a condition of employment...
...Stella elaborates his arguments in a lucid and often dramatic prose style, beginning with a thorough discussion of Caravaggio's contribution to the development of expansive pictorial space, and continuing his analysis with reference to Raphael, Rubens, the Caracci, and other Renaissance and Baroque masters...
...A Rube GRADUATE STUDIES IN THEOLOGY AT BOSTON COLLEGE The Department of Theology at Boston College, a leading Catholic university in an ecumenical setting, shares the resources of eight other schools in the metropolitan area through membership In the Boston Theological Institute...
...and Vance Bourjaily's family business in The Great Fake Book (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, $17.95, 305 pp...
...He points out how Reagan's mode of rugged individualism, in both the national and the planetary arenas, fosters competition and hostility, while his personal style cultivates the image, the actor in place of substance...
...The books mentioned above set an agenda for theological engagement that I hope will make it as fruitful as it is exciting...
...Women's history has evolved and deepened over the last decade, focusing less on female victimization and more on the social construction of gender...
...His voice is utterly distinctive — if you came across one of these poems in the middle of the Sahara you would know immediately that it is a Rosenthal...
...Clarity, accuracy, and excellent bibliographical summaries make this a must for work in classics, Jewish studies, and Christian origins...
...Another book that fits that mode, though not as philosophical as the above, is Jean Bethke Elshtain's Women and War (Basic Books, $19.95, 288 pp...
...His current book is Visions and Nightmares: America after Reagan (Macmillan...
...Also of note is James McClendon's Systematic Theology: Ethics Vol...
...In each of these books, leading archaeologists, exegetes, and historians provide new insights and extensively documented resources...
...What we are left with is illustrated space which we read...
...for inviting us into cutting-edge science without making compromises, and Randy Shilts's And the Band Played"On (St...
...Richard Wightman Fox RICHARD WIGHTMAN FOX is the author of Reinhold Niebuhr: A Biography (Harper & Row paperback), and is working on a study of Protestant religion in modern American culture...
...Pheme Perkins PHEME PERKINS is professor of theology at Boston College...
...Their lives are not marked by crisis and conversion but by the sense of continuous development...
...In the course of my research I (not my research assistants) read, in addi4 December 1987: 715...
...He is consciously participating in what he considers to be the crisis facing abstract art today...
...This is a book that will reorient future discussions of women's past...
...Wills's thesis that Reagan is to be understood through the lens of Hollywood is plausible but less than convincing...
...I hesitate to mention Ramsey's book as it also contains an epilogue by me — an epilogue that provides a pacifist critique of the Methodist bishops' pastoral...
...He pays as careful attention to the development of genre, forms, and content in Jewish writing as he does to the Greco-Roman authors...
...The device of the text is a letter written by a mother to her son, with the intention of informing him of the facts of the AIDS virus, the means of preventing exposure, and the importance of showing love and compassion to its victims...
...Eleanor Nunro ELEANOR MUNRO is an art historian and critic...
...The best scientists are most likely to use plain English...
...In non-fiction, I respect James Gleick's Chaos (Viking, $19.95, "352 pp...
...In that respect, however, I cannot refrain from commending Paul Ramsey's Speak Up for Just War and Pacifism (Pennsylvania State University, $24.95, $12.95 paper, 240 pp...
...Incredibly, this book manages to be straightforward and factual, and charming at the same time...
...I am also impressed by several recent poetry collections, and single out three for special mention...
...Even more, it involves a philosophic interpretation of the differences between Confucius's thought and the Western tradition that must be bridged in order to make a translation in the first place...
...J. Cheryl Exum Miles L Fay, S.J...
...On the other hand, Thinking Through Confucius means thinking by means of Confucius: Hall and Ames advocate the fundamental truth and contemporary relevance of central Confucian ideas...
...We see the spontaneous emergence of self-organization...
...Put simply, the pictorial space of abstraction has acquired artificiality at the expense of reality...
...Notre Dame, $22.95, 432 pp...
...Read Beloved (Alfred A. Knopf, $18.95, 275 pp...
...For sheer fun, Tip O'Neill's A Man of the House (Random House, $19.95, 387 pp...
...Anson's detective work bridges the Harlem ghetto and the New Hampshire countryside where Philips Exeter Academy is located, and his fine book dramatizes a wound in our society, and brings Edmund Perry to life in our own deepened consciences...
...Then, emerging from the chaos, astonishing geometric regularity...
...Philip Morrison's infectious curiosity and delight in discovery have made him a legend at M.I.T...
...Community is a conversation, one that he feels can attain special excellence in the metropolis...
...Last, but first, it is time to cease referring to Toni Morrison as a great black writer or a fine woman writer, though she is both...
...As he states, By 1970 abstract painting had lost its ability to create space...
...David Ignatius' s Agents of Innocence (Norton, $17,95, 444 pp...
...Joan Colebrook's A House of Trees (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $18.95, 256 pp...
...CORRESPONDENCE (Continued from page 690) ture of just-war reasoning...
...DOCTORAL STUDIES in the Joint Graduate Program with Andover Newton Theological School lead to the Ph.D...
...It is a long and complex book, but will repay any reader's labors...
...New York Intellect: A History of Intellectual Life in New York City, from 1750 to the Beginnings of Our Own Time (Alfred A. Knopf, $25, 422 pp...
...His narrative shows the interaction of these in a manner that illumines our current intellectual and moral context...
...Perhaps it helps if one's name is David...
...Cott argues that the 1920s were not a time of post-suffrage decline in women's fortunes — the usual historical judgment — but a time when modern feminism, with all its inner contradictions, took shape...
...Kolb argues: "Both cumulation and discontinuity are too holistic to describe our situation...
...Melinda Wortz MELINDA WORTZ is director of the Fine Arts Gallery, University of California, Irvine, and a regular contributor to Arts magazine, Artnews, and Artform...
...It frankly confronts the splits that have marked feminist discourse over the last halfcentury: splits that are built into feminism, that ironically give it its power and threaten to fragment it...
...David Tracy's Plurality and Ambiguity: Hermeneutics, Religion, Hope (Harper and Row, $15.95, 148 pp...
...Anthony Burgess's revelatory Little Wilson & Big God (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, $22.50, 460 pp...
...Neither can survive in the world without special care because memory, the essential tool of self-formation, is defective...
...they have the most confidence about what they know...
...They are exploring the mystery of consciousness, which reveals itself in the same arching process by which it affirms its connection with outer reality...
...DEGREE may be earned In Theology or Biblical Studies...
...For sure a primitive laser...
...is the book of the dreary Reagan era...
...Gleick's discussion of complex mathematics can be grasped even by those who failed calculus...
...Best Intentions, by Robert Sam Anson (Random House, $17.95, 221 pp...
...he has produced his strongest collection of poems to date, a winning melange of wit, wisdom, playfulness, and fine-tuned lyricism...
...in our reading of what has happened since then...
...Today many workers in psychology and the arts — especially writers of personal memoirs — ignore the boundary that once clearly separated the subjective mode from the objective...
...For those to whom the use of visual materials in religion courses is new, the book's introductory essay by Jane Dillenberger provides a great deal of practical information regarding the presentation of slides, the development of visual resources such as mounted reproductions, and trips to local museums...
...A resort to jargon is almost always a give-away that someone is in over his head...
...From Plato through Descartes to 714: Commonweal Husserl, Whitehead, and even the "realistic" analytic philosophy of science, the "object of mental vision" model has been assumed, to the exclusion of more realistic assumptions about what things are and how they can be known...
...weigh on me for their convincing atmosphere, as do Julian Barnes's Staring at the Sun (Alfred A. Knopf, $15.95, 197 pp...
...Peter Steinfels agrees with this, as a general proposition...
...The result is oral history at its best: tireless taping combined with creative "scrounging" (Schrecker's word) for documentary sources...
...They are usually good teachers and writers...
...appendix...
...ninety receive the page-by-page treatment we're willing to call "reading a book" when someone asks that cruelest of professional questions: "Have you read . . .?" Several hundred, though, get read for twenty to fifty pages or more...
...She wants to remember and record the "heart-stopping transition" when consciousness lifted out of the wakingdream of infancy...
...In a series of withdrawals, it began to illustrate the space it had once been able to create...
...Pagans and Christians, by Robin Lane Fox, Alfred A. Knopf, $35, 799 pp...
...for their technical brilliance, and Vladimir Voinovich's Moscow 2042 (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, $16.95, 400 pp...
...In the end, sailing for America 4 December 1987: 707 and a writer's career (she is also the author of the unsung masterpiece of social reporting, The Cross of Lassitude) she muses, "the water bore me away...
...Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women, by Carolyn Walker Bynum, University of California, $29.95, 444 pp...
...It is not only the best book we have for introducing people to the discipline of Christian ethics, but it is done in such an imaginative manner it offers fresh potential for thinking how best to do Christian ethics today...
...Feminism is both a theory about equality, she writes, and a theory about sexual difference...
...His insight into the art of his own time is especially remarkable since he was early on a proponent of flatness, as articulated in his famous statement that in his paintings "what you see is what you get...
...Martin's Press, $24.95, 630 pp...
...Gleick suggests that "chaos" may even help reconcile free will with determinism...
...Morrison's magnificent novels...
...Frank Stella takes his place among artists whose critical theorizing is as significant as their sustained practice...
...Communists, it was argued, had surrendered the protections of academic freedom because they had embraced a conspiracy that required their unquestioning obedience...
...Elshtain's intention is to provide an alternative to the structure of traditional war stories with their movement from brave and fearful beginnings to triumphant or tragic endings by combining a historical and philosophical analysis...
...Of particular importance is how metaphor, rather than being a way to 708: Commonweal avoid truth claims, is shown to be essential to understanding the kind of realism that should be characteristic of Christian theological convictions...
...Here we have books that probe the most profound moral issues in a manner at once compelling and scholarly...
...Finally, 710: Commonweal his discussion of his own work reveals his working process and illuminates the imagery of his newest relief paintings currently on view at The Museum of Modern Art...
...Stephen F. Brown Lisa Sowle Cahill Francis X. Clooney, S.J...
...To Peter Steinfels's questions about my methodology and "fairness," may I say this...
...His most recent book is The Puritan Smile: A Look Toward Moral Reflection (State University of New York Press...
...The past year has brought a banner crop of books whose minute attention to historical details opens up the worlds in which Christianity was born, shaped, and reshaped...
...David Neiman James A. O'Donohoe Pheme Perkins Ellen M. Ross Louis P.Roy, O.P...
...She is one of our best, period...
...Kolb's is a work of academic criticism but with a powerful conclusion made all the more powerful by the fine grain of his analysis of Hegel and Heidegger, the two great "definers" of modernity...
...So, too, Mona Simpson's family business in Anywhere But Here (Alfred A. Knopf, $18.95, $6.95 paper, 406 pp...
...This fulfilled one of the modernism's great dreams: the space in painting became available to eyesight alone, but unfortunately not to eyesight in a pictorial sense, but to eyesight in a literary sense...
...A plane table on the lawn at Monticello and' 'the van of Eratosthenes" (a yellow rent-a-truck) show how we learned to map and measure/The Morrisons show how deep-sea sediments can reconstruct "the Great Falls of Gibraltar," perhaps a thousand feet high, as the Atlantic ocean roared back into "the Mediterranean desert...
...Two books published in the sixties but reissued this year in paperback with new forwords offer psychological case histories of a related nature from the annals of Soviet psychologist A. R. Luria (The Mind of a Mnemonist, foreword by Jerome S. Bruner, $7.95 paper, 160 pp., and The Man with a Shattered World, forword by Oliver Sacks, $7.95, 165 pp...
...Soon to be published in the new year, his book Whose Justice...
...Thousands of books arrive each year, but only eighty or...
...Finally, the author sees the new technological age as inherently democratic and global, since people throughout the world can have access to the new modes of communication...
...is Jeremy Bernstein's autobiographical memoir of his improbable entry into theoretical physics...
...I read this book, like Maclntyre's, in manuscript, though both are soon to appear in print...
...Hundreds of professors were examined by the committees, and most 712: Commonweal were then disciplined by their own colleges — not for having been Communists or radicals, but for failing to cooperate fully with Congress or with the universities' own faculty or trustee investigators...
...In this book Maclntyre tells the story of four traditions: the Aristotelian, the Augustinian, the Scottish, and the rise of the liberal tradition...
...With a home computer and a simple program (which the book provides) you can create your own fractal patterns — snowflakes, lightning, and complex colors and shapes...
...This is Ramsey's critique of the Methodist bishops' pastoral, and in it he shows the extraordinary resources of the just war tradition for forcing us to confront imaginatively the moral problems of war...
...Water is also memory, in which we float in time...
...617) 552-3880 4 December 1987: 709 Goldberg machine of firecrackers, popcorn, and candles demonstrates the conservation of matter...
...Charles C. Hefling, Jr...
...Religion is thus left to provide hope in the face of multivalence of meaning and lack of authority...
...However, I believe each of them has extraordinary importance for those of us working in the theological vineyards...
...regularly for that redoubtable journal, complaining in its pages about the cheapness of its editor, Victor S. Navasky, Mr...
...A History of Private Life makes an excellent companion piece to Lane Fox...
...In the last halfcentury, in his view, literary work has atrophied...
...It is perhaps an indication of the times that all the books I have mentioned to this point are only tangentially theological...
...The M.A...
...conjures up exactly the double-world I spoke of before...
...Although essentially didactic in intent, each of the fourteen essays included in this volume is lively and inspiring, making the book an invaluable resource for teachers, whether in seminaries or universities, who want to integrate visual art into their teaching, of courses on religion...
...Roth's method of presenting complex issues from opposing points of view, all persuasively articulated, is nothing short of astonishing...
...a challenging narrative that ranges over a number of beautifully 4 December 1987: 711 evoked locales and examines a number of timely (and timeless) subjects...
...In a just world, editors of book review sections would name their favorites passages in 1987 books, not their favorite 1987 books...
...Nancy F. Cott's new book, The Grounding of Modern Feminism (Yale University, $29.95, 372 pp...
...he presents startling new ideas in a highly readable manner...
...Finally, Gerald Seymour's...
...We see how epiphany and oracular prophecy find new expressions in Christian garb...
...Institutions supposedly devoted to the life of the mind capitulated with frightening ease to the pressures of congressional scrutiny...
...The writer recalls and, in the same exulting instant, turns the light on herself as a knpwing adult...
...Robert Imbelli Pamela Oackson Philip J. King Matthew L. Lamb Frederick G. Lawrence Claire Lowery H. John McDargh William W. Meissner, S.J., M.D...
...Heresy, yes, conspiracy, no," as Sidney Hook put it...
...is something of a tour de force...
...They begin, as does all science, with observation...
...Elshtain achieves her purpose in an extraordinary manner, combining historical and philosophical analysis to help us see the peculiar character of modern warfare...
...Robert Lekachman ROBERT LEKACHMAN teaches economics at the Lehman College campus of the City University of.New York...
...Alasdair Maclntyre has done it again...
...The difference is subtle but real...
...The student and scholar cannot continue to work in the history of Christianity without careful attention to these books...
...Thompson uses numerous examples of contemporary leaders to underscore his thesis: that what the world must adapt is an ecological model for politics and human affairs...
...Our differences lie in our sense of the "fact" of an American Catholic heritage of thought on these questions prior to 1965...
...by Max Apple took Howard Johnson and other myths of American pop culture and whipped them into literature...
...In that respect her book is a nice complement to the analysis provided by Maclntyre...
...and Todd Gitlin in The Sixties (Bantam, $19.95, 513 pp...
...He has written books and articles about American literature and serves on the boards of Pen, Yaddo, and the National Book Critics' Circle...
...Roger...
...Amy Clampitt's ear is one of the glories of pur not altogether glorious poetic era...
...The screen paints stable lines breaking and branching...
...There have been, however, several outstanding books in philosophical theology and theological ethics that I should like to mention...
...Her book challenges us to consider what it would mean to have imagination, especially in the light of modern nation-states which are built on the presumption of the inevitability of war, capable of making war serve political ends...
...reappear on the inner screen every time (which is frequently) I read a novelist who can't combine fun and insight in the same line...
Vol. 114 • December 1987 • No. 21
