Critics' choices for Christmas:
Editors, Jane Howard, Andrew Sullivan, Emilie Griffin, Michael Dorris, Dan Wakefield, Diane Apostolo
Critics' choices for Christinas lane Howard JANE HOWARD is at work on her fifth book. Lost in the Interior, a report on the Middle West. A good antidote to self- pity is Spare Days (Arbor...
...On the more scholarly level, my selections are Moshe Barasch's Giotto and the Language of Gesture (Cambridge, $44.50, 196 pp., 80 illustrations), and Richard Wollheim's Painting as an Art (Princeton, $45, 384 pp., 358 illustrations...
...The color plates of Church's estate, Olana, are not just first-rate reproductions but also present a visual argument for the development of his art...
...a collection of eight short stories that portrays New Jersey with a wit, affection, and sense of wonder that are apparent from the first sentence of its opening story...
...Tjiere can be few more contrasting figures in literature than Oscar Wilde and Philip Larkin, but they easily top my list for 1988...
...The centerpiece of the book is a computer program written by Dawkins to simulate evolution by natural selection...
...In more ways than one, he is the voice of what might have been...
...A self-confessed theological amateur, Dyson believes in a God whose knowledge grows with time...
...and it was only a two-week vacation...
...is about recent attempts to decipher the nature of the universe...
...A war in progress we dare not forget...
...In my own spiritual development there is a constant prompting-I could almost call it a drive- toward a world vision...
...Nisbet is an American sociologist who uses the conservative tradition to draw a stinging critique not only of the federal bureaucracy and its managerial classes but American militarism and the Wil-sonian impulse to set the world straight...
...DAVID TOOLAN...
...Emilie Griffin EM1LIE GRIFFIN writes about spirituality from the vantage point of the marketplace...
...Her most recent book is Clinging: The Experience of Prayer (Harper & Row...
...The "List Critique" remained comparatively unknown till 1971...
...He is that rare voice from Washington that really does represent learning from experience and reflection...
...The slimmer sister thinks wistfully of a Vermont Thanksgiving weekend where there was ". . . no subtext, . . . no hidden rage or regret...
...Clancy's strong intelligence is enhanced by the generousness of his catholic faith and the essential courtliness of his being...
...How exactly does one choose...
...My favorite of the new creation writers is neurobiologist William Calvin...
...If there is any guilt in these stories it is Baptist guilt, not clearly connected to someone else's list of rights and wrongs...
...I: A History of Power from . the Beginning to AD 1760 (Cambridge, $16, 549 pp., paper) a tour de force that makes good on its bid "to provide a history and theory of power relations in human societies...
...The unsentimental narrative mixes the swirl of emotions-anger, despair, determination, hope, resolve, courage, love-that inevitably accompany loss, and it profoundly involves us from first page to last...
...My novel reading was confined to summer vacation, when I devoured Iris Murdoch, The Book and the Brotherhood (Viking, $19.95), Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Love in the Time of Cholera (Knopf, $18.95, 348 pp...
...Having recently written a highly personal nonfiction book and just con-tracted to write another one, I found myself going around telling people that books of this nature (not just mine, of course) seemed suddenly to have become a better form than fiction (novel and short story) for conveying deep truths about the human condition, especially in the realm of spirituality...
...Last Notes from Home (Random House, $18.95, 397 pp...
...You will not be surprised to know that when he informs the congregation of this revelation in a sermon, the vestry votes 5-3 to recommend that he seek psychiatric counseling...
...In a roundup review, Evelyn Waugh named it one of the two best books of the year...
...It was wintertime," Wolitzer writes, "and the flu was swirling through the coatrooms of all the private schools of New York...
...Some eighty-odd new poems, of which on my reckoning there are around ten of quite outstanding quality, are an unexpected gift from the old man...
...Davies sees evidence for a creative force built into the very fabric of creation that moves toward consciousness and order...
...Also, I have bad reading habits...
...His nonfiction book, The Broken Cord, will be published by Harper & Row next summer...
...Keith Burris KEITH BURRIS writes editorials and columns for the Blade, the Toledo, Ohio newspaper where he is an associate editor...
...Nor is there any there-but-for-the-grace-of-God-go-I condescension...
...is a first novel by a North Carolina writer named Peggy Payne, and it shows the assurance and mastery of a fully accomplished author...
...But his work isn't merely horrifying, it's wonderfully, subtly three-dimensional...
...Closer by far to my own experience growing up in the 1980s than the idiocies of Mclnerny or Easton Ellis, it was funny, moving, contrived enough to let you see the strained artifice of the young writer...
...Mellinkoff's text will be an appropriate gift for any reader...
...Nu [God only knows], and are all the so-called saints really so good?' The Evil One has an answer ready for everything.'' Singer has a story ready for everything, and continues to enlighten us while he skillfully entertains us...
...Martin's, $18.95, 338 pp...
...He personally knew ten of the thirty-seven subjects of his third book, Mostly Good and Competent Men: Illinois Governors 1818 to 1988 (Sangamon State University and Illinois State Historical Society, $24.95, $14.95 paper, 397 pp...
...And The Quilt: Stories from the Names Project (Pocket, $22.95, 160 pp...
...is more deliberately reflective...
...The normally astringent Perry Anderson writes of this first installment of a three-volume opus magnum "not lesser than [Max Weber's] Economy and Society in analytic structure, it is superior as literature...
...All things happened through it, and not one thing that has happened, happened without it...
...Hope, a novelist now living in London, is the white boy and his remembrances are complex and moving...
...Each square, no matter how simple, is riveting, as survivors and loved ones attempt to encapsulate the essence of a man, woman, or child, dead of AIDS, into a small patch of cloth and words...
...Larkin is emerging, it seems to me, as the finest English poet since Au-den...
...In expressive and lucid prose, Thomson reflects on his expatriate life in Paris (1925-40), on his work as a composer, and, in long and largely unpunctuated letters to Gertrude Stein, on their numerous collaborations...
...And I tend to pile up classical books that I feel I should read or re-read and then let them gather dust while I steal off to read something that seems less of a duty...
...In "The Recluse," a man justifies his desire to commit adultery when ". . .the Evil One kept comforting me: 'Was King David given permission to marry Bath-sheba...
...written by Cindy Ruskin, photographs by Matt Her-ron, dramatically proves the adage that a picture is worth a thousand words...
...Books by Politicians: This is a sorry lot generally but I can recommend two, one by an establishment pol and the other by a venerable proponent of the unconventional...
...Charles Peters's book Tilting at Windmills (Addison-Wesley, $18.95, 294 pp...
...On the down side, Peters is one who feels compelled to be a hedgehog when he is probably more of a fox...
...Of all the recent art books I can think of, this is the one which falls first and foremost into the categories of "a delight to see'' and ' 'a pleasure to own.'' Michelangelo Draftsman is most highly recommended for those persons who understand the mystery and the magic of an artist's drawings...
...Isabel Allende, Eva Luna (Knopf, $18.95, 304 pp...
...essays drawn from provocative talks on the subject at the New York Public Library by Mary Gordon, David Bradley, Jaroslav Pelikan, Frederick Buechner, Hugh Nissenson, and Alan Ginsberg, edited by William Zinsser...
...so one has a sense of Hawking's life-drama and everyone's need for spirituality...
...Scruton is a traditional conservative and a reactionary, but he has a heart and too fine a mind to embrace Reaganism or Thatcherism whole-hog...
...Covington introduces characters of such unpredictable originality, such unself-conscious compassion and generosity of spirit, that before Gathering Home is done you feel with them the kind of ease and trust that is usually reserved for family members...
...I asked my neighbor, Thomas Harris, after I finished The Silence of the Lambs (St...
...He wasn't wrong...
...It is still one of the best books of the year, whether you indulge in the lavish coffee table version with its hundreds of beautiful reproductions of Italian drawings and paintings ranging from Roman times to the twentieth century or go for the shoestring Penguin edition, still in print...
...a one of a kind spiritual classic, profound, mind-stretching, full of surprises-and it gets better with every reading...
...His book is called Untimely Tracts (St...
...This is a gift for the eye and a challenge to the mind...
...She is a mature and wise woman, unself consciously good, good enough to recon cile even what is beyond her capacity to grasp...
...The Brigadier," as Exley nicknames his brother, a colonel in the Army intelligence, has survived World War II, Korea, and Vietnam, only to succumb to cancer...
...Till now...
...Time's Covenant (University of Pittsburgh, $19.95, 213 pp...
...In addition, it puts us in touch with a strong, sensible person, with a unique imagination, and a splendidly independent spirit...
...No aspect of the art form escapes his attention: sets, costumes, choreography, or performers...
...Clear demarcations and links are drawn...
...One of the first things I ever heard about my mother's husband was that he once tried to tip his dentist...
...Greenstein insists that science expands, rather than shrinks, the list of unsolved mysteries, and in the face of the ultimate mystery he maintains a confident and respectful awe...
...Two very different spiritual journey books, one from a hard-driving journalist-author and the other from a physicist showing how science can give new life to the language of praise, get high marks: Dan Wakefield's Returning (Doubleday, $17.95, 250 pp...
...Somehow this appetite has to be fed not just with spirituality but also with commentaries on "the world"-in the broadest sense...
...Then I looked back on the books published this year that most moved me, that gave me the greatest insight into the spiritual condition, and found that most of them were fiction- novels and short stories...
...Within it there was Life, and the Life was the light of the world...
...Telling stories of the creation was first the business of tribal elders, then of theologians and philosophers...
...Volume two promises to hammer the case home in detail, but for now the reader understands that the Revolution in France, whatever else it did to foster a modern political structure (and culture), did not create a capitalist society...
...the essays and sermons of the late William Clancy...
...This book does what a literary biography should do: it sends you back to the works themselves with a little more knowledge about sources, some discussion of technical problems, and a survey of the critical literature, leaving the essential mystery untouched...
...are two good examples of the growing number of ecpnomists and policymakers making a successful effort to help the nonspecialist grapple with the major issues facing our country...
...I've found two books by scientists, Stephen Hawking and Freeman Dyson, worthwhile in shaping my world vision from another angle...
...Eric Larsen has just won the Heartland Prize for fiction for An American Memory (Algonquin, $12.95, 227 pp...
...Price takes the teenagers of his memorable first novel (Wesley Beavers and Rosacoke Mustian of A Long and Happy Life) into midlife crisis and as always makes matters of faith and prayer seem part of the natural order of everyday life...
...This year, thank God and Reynolds Price, it drove me to Mt...
...The trouble is," he replied, "I don't," which is to hint at the staggering amount of research on criminal minds that underlies this and Harris's two previous novels...
...Readers will recognize Monette's name in connection with his searing chronicle of his lover's death from AIDS (Borrowed Time...
...it's something inside where God might also be, like a hankering for more of life, or a wondering where something went wrong...
...For readers of Mr...
...Why are we here...
...which I am part way through...
...Daniel P. Moynihan's Came the Revolution: Argument in the Reagan Era (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, $17.95, 344 pp...
...He is also quintessential English: there are no Wildean flamboyances here, and the agonies he translates are those of the grey, pig-headed gentilities of a pre-Thatcher age...
...Elizabeth David is without doubt the best writer about food in the English language . Her Italian Food (Harper & Row, $27.50,241 pp...
...Michael Dorris MICHAEL DORRIS w the author of a novel, A Yellow Raft in Blue Water (Warner...
...As the smoke clears from a year of read- ing, the books I re-member best are those that brought the world into sharper focus, the books whose margins I filled with exclamation marks and stars, the books I gave as gifts...
...And a magisterial book on the ballet captured new attention in January when it won the National Book Critics Circle prize for criticism...
...Two decades later, the fatter of her heroines beds down with a very fat lover, and reflects that sex, for people of their size, is "about matter, and the shifting and arranging of that matter...
...She is as versatile as any novelist around...
...Photographs and text that sear the soul with their beauty and bestiality...
...This beautifully illustrated and conceived book does justice to that vision...
...The author imbues each of his character's acts with meaning and magically tells us what the meaning is without a ponderous word or gesture...
...How then do we finish Love in the Time of Cholera (Knopf, $18.95...
...Gabriel Garcia Marquez presents his imaginative world to us with a wealth of concrete detail, with myriad sights, sounds, and especially smells, with descriptions consisting of long lists of rather mundane nouns attached to astonishing, moving, utterly revealing adjectives...
...Finally in my world-chasing I must include Gerald Clarke's Capote: A Biography (Simon and Schuster, $22.95,631 pp...
...Plus, he writes like an angel...
...And as their stories unfold, the rug becomes the de facto protagonist of the novella and a powerful metaphor for many kinds of love, including maternal, erotic, and spiritual...
...Art as Religious Studies (Crossroad...
...A good antidote to self- pity is Spare Days (Arbor House/William Morrow, $15.95, 170 pp...
...a book that jangled all of my categories and made me look at Western history, and particularly figures like Petrarch and Picasso, in an entirely new light...
...Finally, some catch-up reading on constantly and consistently troubled areas of the world led me to Neal Ascher-son, The Struggles for Poland (Random House, $19.95, 242 pp...
...and is a collection of columns from the Times of London...
...Larry C. White has compiled a potent and persuasive indictment of the tobacco lobby in Merchants of Death: The American Tobacco Industry (Morrow, $17.95, 239 pp...
...is just that, a biography of a major American writer that focuses mainly on her wonderful novels and stories...
...My strongest visual memories from a new book are Michael Hirst's catalogue, Michelangelo Draftsman (Olivetti, $16.95, 170 pp., 63 illustrations...
...Handsomely illustrated and with an informative text, The Devil at henheim should provide a visual feast for the holiday season of 1988...
...He rejects the term predestined in favor of predisposed, and ranges across physics, biology, and computer science to show that matter and energy have innate self-organizing tendencies that efficiently bring new structures into being...
...MARGARET O'BRIEN STEINFELS William Julius Wil-son's The Truly ' Disadvantaged (University of Chicago, $19.95, 254 pp...
...There are passages of sublime writing-e.g., a faultless description of Wittgenstein pere's idolatrous passion for music-but they do not distract one from the philosophical depth of the book...
...Two are short story collections, appearing for the first time in paper in 1988...
...This leads to surprising insights like the (I believe correct) assertion that the Kennedys introduced snobbery to the Democratic party...
...Richard Dawkins's The Blind Watchmaker (Norton, $18.95, 332 pp...
...It was one of those books that changed my mood for at least a month...
...Martin's, $13.95, 65 pp...
...In my opinion, both Dawkins and Davies draw more profound conclusions than the weight of their evidence will logically bear, and the fact that they draw rather different conclusions confirms this...
...is a landmark in the critical analysis of poverty and racism in the U.S...
...God," Dyson explains, "is what mind becomes when it has passed beyond the scale of our comprehension...
...then goes on to offer a first-rate analysis of List's "national" economics and a less convincing critique of Marxism's alleged inadequacies in accounting for nations and national sentiment...
...involve the people he called the "working poor," and whose lives he infuses with dignity and grace...
...Before and decades after I was four myself, my father Robert P. Howard was a newsman covering state politics...
...Szporluk's book, Communism and Nationalism (Oxford, $32.95, 307 pp...
...Dyson's speculations are refreshing...
...Months after reading the stories, my wife, Louise Erdrich, and I still discuss its events as if we had just heard they had happened, yesterday...
...In The Ideal Bakery (Perennial, $6.95, 138 pp...
...I especially admire the care he takes with even his most incidental characters, telling us what junk is piled up on their back porches, and what they thought about when they were four...
...The book's plot involves a series of questions and revelations that take place over the course of a Birmingham, Alabama congressional campaign-and, in the course of its pages, Ms...
...Nearly all of the thirty-seven stories in Where I'm Calling From: New and Selected Stories (Atlantic Monthly, $19.95, 391 pp...
...He is really better than Will, because he is no apologist for the powerful or the smug, and because he is funny...
...He thinks politics is fun, not a punishment...
...Love will outlast the ruins...
...The party has never gotten out from under its sense of being superior to and removed from middle America...
...The twenty-two essays promise a comprehensive assessment of what the church is doing and where it may be going...
...is subtitled "Why the evidence of evolution reveals a universe without design...
...These characters, and those they get attached to, are memorably plausible...
...The moment of revelation is only reached after an arduous, genuine spiritual quest that begins when the cynical, hard-drinking hero pretends to be a priest in order to win the love- and hopefully the financial inheritance- of a dying aunt...
...I am an ecumenical reader- probably in the worst sense of the word...
...and Jean Dalby Clift and Wallace B. Clift, The Hero-Journey in Dreams (Crossroad,$ 15.95,228 pp...
...Monette's book, AIDS will never again be an abstract or distant disease...
...This collective biography-beginning with the slaveowner Shadrach Bond and concluding with the incumbent James R. Thompson, who may or may not ever retire-is vivid, droll, and scholarly: the author is also a past president of the state historical society...
...The one I keep returning to is the anonymously authored Meditations on the Tarot (Amity House, $19.95 paper, 658 pp...
...Most of all, one should meet Rosa...
...In Good Hearts (Atheneum, $18.95, 275 pp...
...Richard Ellmann's wistful biography of Wilde (Knopf, $24.95, $11.95 paper, 576 pp...
...What finally emerges from Calvin's account of contemporary science is a vision of creation as inexorable, as beckoning, as dangerous and beautiful as the river itself...
...Price's people are steeped in Baptist faith, a straightforward, nonanalytical way of looking at the simple and complex, even the tragic...
...On the real-world front, foreign division: Thomas Gannon, S.J., has edited a serious and substantial work on World Catholicism in Transition (Macmillan, -$35, 402 pp...
...Gary Krist made a similarly impressive start with The Garden State (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, $16.95, 178 pp...
...One man's complex character becomes more than a metaphor for this American tragedy...
...Now the activity has been taken up by natural scientists...
...Astrophysicist George Greenstein covers much the same ground in The Symbiotic Universe: Life and Mind in the Cosmos (Morrow, $18.95, 271 pp...
...A local newspaper owner referred to her as "that meatax girl" as she slashed out at the world of letters and the theater with her pen from her corner in Nebraska...
...Again, the accompanying essays written by scholars in American art are accessible and informative to the general reader...
...Turning to history, let me begin with Michael Mann's The Sources of Social Power, Vol...
...This translation that "lets the original Greek speak for itself" has a freshness and power that brings the text to life in a vibrant way, is colloquial without being slangy, and maintains a wonderful rhythm that is missing in some of the recent versions...
...Memories: By all means read Christopher Hope's finely tuned memoir of growing up in South Africa, White Boy Running (Farrar Straus Giroux, $17.95, 273 pp...
...Paul Fussell' s Thank God for the Atom Bomb and Other Essays (Summit, $17.95, 295 pp...
...The same sort of independence is evident from the earliest of the Selected Letters of Virgil Thomson (Summit, $24.95, 413 pp...
...One of the many gems I have taken like treasure from this volume is novelist Buechner's definition of faith as ". . .homesickness . . . a lump in the throat...
...Editors' Choices On becoming editor of Commonweal last January, I was warned by my departing predecessor that there would be no time for novel reading, one of my favorite pastimes and usually an enormous relief from the tugs and pulls of the so-called real world...
...His feisty tone provokes the reader to design her own agenda...
...He breaks complexities open to show us the wonder in experience...
...Each piece is short, straightforward, so crisply told that we temporarily forget how hard it is to grab a reader's attention and not release it until the tale is told...
...here she crowds them with dense proof of her impassioned grasp of history...
...The other great book about youth this year is Brian McGuiness's first installment of Wittgenstein: A Life (California, $22.50, 321 pp...
...Its treatment of homosexuality also has a measured understanding that gay fiction usually lacks...
...He is our own Orwell...
...The second, a new discovery this year, is Jean Gebser's The Ever-Present Origin (Tr...
...So perhaps it's best to avoid summaries of his astonishing achievements and to say just this: Dance Writings is possibly the best book that you, or anyone on your holiday gift list, will ever read on the ballet...
...Quoting extensively from her early newspaper columns, critical essays, and letters, Woodress gives a vivid sense of Cather's precocity...
...He simply sent the husband, Uriah the Hittite, off to war...
...They assume as they breathe that the world is always on the verge of grace, made as it was for redemption...
...Woodress sensibly assigns a very minor place to the speculations about Cather's sexual orientation that have preoccupied at least two recent biographers, but doesn't stint when providing material that reveals her character and personality...
...For the Sunday philosopher, such as myself, I strongly recommend Bruce Duffy's The World as I Found It (Ticknor & Fields, $10.95, 547 pp., paper...
...Designed for the average reader, the history of Christian art is discussed by this art historian with regard to the scriptural, historical, theological, and artistic interpretations of each generation...
...So one prays, oh how one prays, for this man and his dead lover...
...by Noel Barstad with Algis Mickunas, Ohio University, $69.95, $29.95 paper, 614 pp...
...also sheds surprising light on that Gospel-and is lucid and eminently readable...
...He offers up a peach of a reflection, for example, on George Orwell...
...At sixty-three, devoutly Episcopalian, his therapies included prayer and this gracefully understated, sometimes lyrical journal of six harrowing months...
...My copy, acquired in 1954 when it was first published, is battered and stained with olive oil...
...And in the darkness, the light is shining, and the darkness never got hold of it...
...has just been reissued in an elaborate, extensively illustrated and (fortunately, only slightly) revised edition...
...I was especially taken with the child as archetype of contemplation in the Brewi-Brennan book...
...The only twinge of accord I felt with George Bush during the whole presidential campaign-speaking of Republicans-was upon reading that he, too, thinks well of Flights of Passage: Reflections of a World War II Aviator, by Samuel Hynes (Frederick C. Beil & Naval Institute Press, $ 16.95, 270 pp...
...Though as lamentably coy about homosexuality as Chabon is mature, it is as close an evocation of the struggle between the mind and the soul as I expect to discover...
...is Vicki Coving-ton's first novel, but you'd never guess it...
...This book includes thoughtful essays on the meaning of the federal debt and the imbalance of trade, as well as tongue in cheek observations on the subculture of Washington D.C...
...But O'Brien scampers through history showing how much the religious imagination needs a political component, or vice versa...
...Part memoir and part political tract, we follow the author from idyllic boyhood in West Virginia, to New York bohemia, to minor political career, to government service, and finally to starting a magazine that has made a difference...
...Though not in a voice from on high or within, God is revealed in Alfred Alcorn's absorbing novel Vestments (Houghton Mifflin, $17.95, 304 pp...
...One sees that sad land, for once, from within and one also sees how right Martin Luther King, Jr., was to insist that both the victim and the perpetrator are trapped in the internal symmetry of racism, and that both are worth saving...
...Diane Apostolos-Cappadona DIANE APOSTOLOS-CAPPADONA is professorial lecturer on religion and the arts at Georgetown University...
...The program generates "organisms" whose variety and complexity surprised even Dawkins...
...As 1988 draws to a close, I anticipate two new books which should appear in time for the Christmas season-Roger Lipsey's An Art of Our Own: The Spiritual in Twentieth-Century Art (Sham-bhala, $40, 520 pp., 120 illustrations), and Ruth Mellinkoff's The Devil at henheim (California $29.95,100 pp., 43 illustrations...
...Yet he is writing not in difficult formulas for scientific colleagues but instead in plain, well-turned English for the general reader...
...has some pap in it but it is generally a wise and enlightened guide to the practical problems of American government, written from the standpoint of one who has become a congressional animal yet remains a social critic...
...Books on -isms: Conservatism is still the reigning fad and the two best books I have read on the subject are by conservatives, but men not firmly attached to the right...
...She never was lukewarm...
...Sandra S. Phillips's Charmed Places: Hudson River Artists and Their Houses, Studios, and Vistas (Abrams, $29.95, 160 pp., 184 illustrations) is another art book that benefits from an accompanying museum exhibition...
...I had to dig to find out he's a Fabian socialist...
...And Denby's insights are so unrelentingly original and compelling that anyone who reads this book will never be able to view "The Nutcracker" in quite the same way again...
...He's right...
...A spate of recent books by astrophysicists, quantum mechanicists, molecular biologists, and neurobiologists address the age-old question: Where did we come from...
...and David Shipler's 1986 book Arab and Jew: Wounded Spirits in a Promised Land (Times Books, $22.50...
...in which Marvin Barrett calls himself "a man, certainly no better and probably not much worse than most, who narrowly escaped bad trouble, or at least learned to redefine what bad trouble might be...
...Featuring treasured medieval manuscript illuminations as its focus, the essays in this volume are accessible to thesnonspecialist and focus on the importance of the tradition of book illustrations and the splendor of the medieval period...
...this universe could not exist without life, he concludes, nor could we exist in any other universe...
...First, there is Conor Cruise O'Brien's God-Land: Reflections on Religion and Nationalism (Harvard, $15.95, 97 pp...
...Each story is informed by a steady, non-judgmental moral vision, a tension between the reality and social myth of contemporary lives, and each is formed with vivid, elegant prose that wastes no word...
...How can you make up stuff like this...
...And the Clifts' book is rich not only with theory but real-life material...
...His discussions of Titian, Poussin, Ingres, Manet, Picasso, and de Kooning are more than memorable...
...Set mostly in the Pacific Northwest, Carver's stories helped to generate a boom in fiction with a sharp regional accent, a category enriched this year by three remarkable new voices...
...Like George F. Will, he is an academician by training and has written not only in political theory but aesthetics...
...In the sumptuously illustrated publication of his 1984 Mellon Lectures, Woll-heim argues that we can only come to grasp the true nature of a painting when we recognize the fundamental fact that art is the process of the creative experience...
...Larkin has changed my mood more permanently...
...Faith is waiting...
...Thomson is gloriously self-assured...
...And it is hard not to like Peters because he has tried to learn from his own errors-he's not afraid to admit he's been wrong and to examine those instances with as much curiosity as the occasions in which he believes others have been mistaken...
...James Woodress's Willa Cather, A Literary Life (University of Nebraska, $35,583 pp...
...Carver regarded his characters with a clear-eyed compassion and empathy rooted solidly in his own experience, which had included victories over bankruptcy and alcoholism and marital strife...
...I cannot list the books of the year that were most important to me without mentioning a new translation of the books of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John by Andy Gaus, The Unvarnished Gospels (Threshold Books, Dusty Ridge Rd., RD3, Putney, VT 05346, $12, 272 pp...
...collects the reviews of Edwin Denby, who wrote many of his best pieces for the late New York Herald Tribune...
...Steven Englund STEVEN ENGLUND is an American writer living in Paris and working on a biography of Napoleon...
...Dance Writings (Knopf, $40, 608 pp...
...managed both to be unconvincing and inspiring: unconvincing in its literary and philosophical claims for Wilde's pre-eminence, but utterly coherent in its moral defense of Wilde's integrity...
...Suddenly the theological and cultural implications of Giotto's work are more appropriate than ever...
...He ought to be declared a national treasure...
...What a sense of recognition...
...when Sebastian, the story's protagonist, is washing a pile of dirty dishes and finds "the bright core of his conviction: what he believed in quite simply was the redemptive power of God's love as personified by Christ...
...The first is Roger Scruton, Britain's most gifted and astute conservative polemicist...
...is an astonishing piece of work, at once scholarly and intensely personal, full of dazzling science and intriguing speculation, as thrilling to read as to shoot the river rapids in a rubber raft...
...He answered all letters, and he certainly didn't waste words: "I thank you for your extremely indignant letter...
...This is a book to read over and over...
...In his new style of interpreting art from the vantage point of the artist and not the spectator, Wollheim challenges our traditional understanding of art and the method of seeing the works of art...
...In another world entirely stands Paul Monette's Love Alone, Eighteen Elegies for Rog (St...
...I tend to read several books at once and not necessarily finish every last one...
...There is more substance here than in most romans d'idees, enough to make even the "math shy" (like me) rush out and buy a copy of Philosophical Investigations...
...I am probably too impressed by a book that accomplishes this, when one 'does, though I am unapologetically non-ideological...
...Faith is less a position on than a movement toward- less a sure thing than a hunch...
...Guatemala: Eternal Spring, Eternal Tyranny by Jean-Marie Simon (W.W...
...which I recommend only to the stoutest of heart...
...modestly and pellucidly edited by Anthony Thwaite, are a revelation...
...In this case, the interest is in the relationship between the domestic environments of several of nineteenth-century America's leading painters, including Thomas Cole, Samuel F. B. Morse, and Frederic Edwin Church...
...One interesting reflection was his statement that everyone needs a world-picture as a basic thinking tool (even if it's wrong...
...Andrew Sullivan ANDREW SULLIVAN is the associate editor of the New Republic...
...This meditation is contained in, is illustrated by, a story, and Garcia Marquez tells this story with the same mastery we first met in One Hundred Years of Solitude...
...Peters combines Russell Baker's style of nostalgia with political good sense...
...Capote's relentless search for love, his nostalgia for a lost time of happiness, his hunger for peace and resolution, all are glimpses of God in the world for me...
...Sincerely yours...
...Another distinctly gifted young novelist is Meg Wolitzer, whose third book This Is Your Life (Crown, $17.95, 263 pp...
...If one is going to speculate about creation, then it is best to be immersed in it, and I cannot imagine any place more evocative of deep time and natural mystery than the Grand Canyon of the Colorado...
...Barasch's text is the first to examine the work of the great Italian master, Giotto, in terms of the significance and symbolism of gestures...
...There is a scene involving two dogs, a back yard, and two house-sitters which is funnier than anything I have read this year...
...Her articles have appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, among others...
...Freeman Dyson's Infinite in All Directions (Harper&Row, $19.95,323 pp...
...Hawking, at Cambridge, says he is trying to "read the mind of God" by concentrating on the first fraction of time...
...God and the Devil have always contended as real live "characters" and forces in the work of Isaac Bashevis Singer, and they of course appear again in his dependably marvelous new book of stories, The Death of Methusaleh (Farrar Straus and Giroux, $17.95, 244 pp...
...Brilliantly showing that this baggage is useless, Comninel jettisons it and then , proceeds to suggest a new Marxist interpretation of the Revolution based on a rigorous application of the principles of historical materialism found in Kapital...
...A whole array of insight and revelation about fiction, nonfiction, and God, is stored in the rich book Spiritual Quests: The Art and Craft of Religious Writing (Houghton Mifflin, $16.96, 192 pp...
...This is a book to savor and to use...
...PATRICK JORDAN sometimes say that editorial writing drives me to fiction...
...Larkin's personal life is unveiled in these new, sometimes painfully private verses as a strange microcosm of the small world around him...
...Clues to a world in need of vision...
...I first read him in my late teens, when his sensibility of restrained hurt, emotional intensity, and vicious wit made adolescent sense...
...In his new work he brilliantly demonstrates how seemingly improbable complexity can arise from the action of simple algorithms acting over immense intervals of time...
...begins with a flight to another deathbed, that of the writer and narrator Frederick Exley's older brother, in Hawaii...
...Hence Sir Karl Popper's The Open Society and Its Enemies gathers dust while I read Ira Ber-kow's biography of Red Smith...
...The spiritual consciousness in ourselves is well treated in two new books: Janice Brewi and Anne Brennan, Celebrate Mid-Life: Jungian Archetypes and Mid-Life Spirituality (Crossroad, $18.95, 296 pp...
...And those qualities make Where I'm Calling From a tour de force that includes the particularly poignant "Errand," a story about the death of Anton Chekhov that became Carver's last published work...
...His comfortable world is blown apart, and the rest of the novel is concerned with what happens to him and his wife and his church after this revelation...
...The late John A.T...
...In Borrowed Time, an AIDS Memoire (Har-court Brace Jovanovich, $18.95, 342 pp...
...Ostensibly a group biography of Bertrand Russell, G.E...
...And Susan Lowell offers a fresh and elegantly stylized look at the American Southwest in Ganado Red (Milkweed Editions, $9.95, 149 pp...
...In the coda to the eighteenth elegy, Monette, himself infected with the AIDS virus, apostrophizes the Christian reader thus: if you should pass beneath our cypresses you who are praying man your god can go to hell but since you are so inclined pray that my friend and I be still together...
...Dan Wakefield DAN WAKEFIELDW most recent book is Returning: A Spiritual Journal (Doubleday...
...he is frank and opinionated when writing to or about fellow composers, unbending but perfectly reasonable in his business dealings...
...Among novels, I enjoyed The Mysteries of Pittsburgh by Michael Chabon (William Morrow, $16.95, 297 pp...
...and Benjamin Friedman, Day of Reckoning (Random House, $19.95, 323 pp...
...eight short stories and a title novella that together won the Milkweed National Fiction Prize...
...His newest book, The Cosmic Blueprint (Simon and Schuster, $17.95, 224 pp...
...In a similar vein is another exhibition catalogue, Time Sanctified: The Book of Hours in Medieval Art and Life by Roger S. Wieck (George Braziller, $45, 230 pp., 240 illustrations...
...She began her career as a published critic while a student at the University of Nebraska...
...but he is more modest in his assertions about what it all means...
...I found myself wondering why...
...For one thing I like to be surprised by the grace of a writer's thought and style and that is a tall order for most political writing...
...Nolly Finn MOLLY FINN is a voracious reader, a musician who sings with Amici Musicale, and the author of three cookbooks...
...This exquisite catalogue is replete with such splendid reproductions of Michelangelo's drawings, including several for the Sistine Chapel ceiling, that the reader feels an intimate and direct connection to the artist...
...Jane Smiley demonstrates that she can write as compellingly of the glaciers, fogs, fjords, steads, skraelings, and passions of medieval Greenland as she did of contemporary married dentists in her short story collection The Age of Grief...
...I have pledged to heed the Writer's commandment: "Thou shalt not generalize, neither shalt thou seek to justify thine own works...
...Finally, two books offer interesting new takes on very old subjects: the French Revolution, and nationalism...
...With those warnings (and the recommendation that no sensible person should read a campaign biography or the dissections of Gail Sheehy), here is my list of recommended 1988 political books...
...She has edited several books dealing with art and spirituality including Symbolism, the Sacred and the Arts by Mir-cea Eliade (Crossroad), and (with Douglas Adams) a collection of essays...
...Anita Pollitzer has written a welcome memoir of her art-school friend, Georgia O'Keeffe, that has been collected along with dozens of letters exchanged between the two in A Woman on Paper: Georgia O'Keeffe (Touchstone, $12.95, 290 pp...
...His survey of the evolutionary synthesis is spun as a kind of campfire tale told during a two-week-long raft trip on the Colorado River...
...Paul Davies is a theoretical physicist whose God and the New Physics was a bestseller several years ago...
...Hence my short list of recent and recommended books...
...actually lives up to its subtitle...
...It is also an invitation to do something about it...
...Revelation (Simon and Schuster, $18.95, 314 pp...
...His book, A Brief History of Time: From the Big Bang to the Black Holes (Bantam, $18.95, 198 pp...
...In his skillful analysis of the "Pact of Judas" and the "Noli Me Tangere" sequences from the Scrovegni Chapel, Barasch proves the visual connectors between Giotto's gestures and the contemporary law courts and church rituals...
...In their answer to the second question the books are widely diverse, and suggest a new boldness on the part of scientists to speculate about the meaning of their remarkable discoveries...
...One classic book that continues to make an excellent gift is Jane Dillenber-ger's Style and Content in Christian Art (Crossroad, $17.95, 240pp., 82 illustrations...
...and it sustains him through the sixty-eight years' worth of correspondence collected here...
...The task of selecting my favorite art books for 1988 is similar to that of identifying my favorite painting or museum...
...In Capote's failed life I glimpse the inner child, the contemplative...
...O'Brien is brash, opinionated, invigorating...
...Moriah, North Carolina and the world of Wesley Beavers and Rosacoke Mustian in A Long and Happy Life, then on to Raleigh, where the Beavers, now married and middle-aged, live in Good Hearts (Atheneum, $18.95, 275 These characters are familiar: their Southern way of speaking, their way of treating trees or the approaching darkness like a friend, their particular ties to kin and community, black folks and white, their sense of watching one another with keen intelligence, and theii habit of waiting on life (as from the from porch rocker) to show its own meaning...
...He is actually a fairly conventional Democratic liberal and about as wild a thinker as he is a quiet bourgeois in his private life, but he's refreshing...
...Neil Sheehan's A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam (Random House, $24.95, 861 pp...
...like sculpting in some thick wet clay and then casting it in bronze...
...Moore, and Ludwig Wittgenstein, the center of the piece is unquestionably Wittgenstein, whom Duffy renders with poignancy and nuance, and-it being a first novel-with a wonderful abandon in filling in inner space...
...In The Greenlanders (Knopf, $19.95, 558 pp...
...the poet and playwright Paul Monette chronicles the illness and death of his longtime companion, Roger Hor-witz...
...The River that Flows Uphill: A Journey from the Big Bang to the Big Brain (Sierra Club, $12.95, 528 pp...
...Norton, $19.95, 256 pp...
...None of this is to suggest, of course, that it's been a fallow year for non-fiction...
...is longer, seemingly more complex...
...Janice Harayda JANICE HARAYDA is the book editor and literary critic of the Cleveland Plain Dealer...
...the new novel by Reynolds Price-who is, incidentally, the most famous of North Carolina's current crop of authors (is there some kind of secret literary stimulant in the soil of that state...
...the poet and essayist Donald Hall brings to life twelve sets of absolutely indelible characters and situations...
...Peters believes in government as a positive force, in part because he believes rational people can learn from their mistakes...
...Dissolving power into its economic, political, military, and ideological components, Mann examines every important society in recorded history, though concentrating with increasing exclusivity on the West...
...Her next book, Chasing the Kingdom: A Parabolic Adventure, which explores the quest for perfection and peace, will be published in 1989...
...Are the -books which come to mind first the most appropriate ones or merely the ones I read most recently...
...a much-hyped book, but worth reading nonetheless...
...is just as good in a different way...
...Dawkins is an Oxford zoologist and author of the popular and influential The Selfish Gene...
...On the flight west from upstate New York with his twice-widowed mother, the writer/ narrator quickly shifts into the surreal reveries, flashbacks, and leaps of fancy that fill his first two books, A Fan's Notes, which appeared in 1968, and its 1975 sequel, Pages from a Cold Island...
...So it is that axiom that I follow in this brief list of suggested art books for 1988...
...In the bare details of its story, the risk of God has rarely been made as clear to me...
...Martin's, $16.95, 163 pp...
...represents the work of the best full-length essayist writing in America today...
...Throughout the trilogy, here concluded, Exley is outrageously comical, Rabelaisian, deeply puzzled about his country and both sexes, and deeply decent...
...Gathering Home (Simon and Schuster, $17.95, 240 pp...
...This wide-ranging treatment of religion as a territorial impulse has a cautionary message: both Americans and Soviets should take care not to see themselves as holy nations with missionary tasks...
...Carver's last book allowed his star to blaze most brilliantly just before it went dark...
...Eugene J. McCarthy's Required Reading: A Decade of Political Wit and Wisdom (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, $16.95, 256 pp...
...We still have the correspondence to come...
...Or is it the lasting memory of the images that occasion the appropriate selections...
...Finally, read Christopher Nolan's novel of his childhood, Under the Eye of the Clock (St...
...Although designed for the average reader, my preview copy of Lipsey's text suggests it is more appropriate for those specifically interested in religion and art...
...Of an all but unbearable tenderness and beauty, these elegies are yet deeply disturbing, both in the poet's untranscended anger and in his murderous rage at faith and church...
...There are judgments that I quibble with-for example, the conflation of religion with ideology-but it is a testimony to Mann's evenhandedness that this reader could not, for the life of him, figure out the author's parti pris...
...In their answer to the first question the books are consistent, and tell the story of a new evolutionary synthesis embracing galaxies and quarks, DNA and neural networks, from the big bang to the computers...
...Here is the beginning of the book of John, which helps me hear it and think about its meaning anew: "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was toward God, and God was what the word was...
...The quilt is a brave, glowing, defiant testament, a call to arms, an indictment, and a flag of hope...
...Necessarily-and mostly-I have been keeping up with that all-too-real world: Allen Blinder, Hard Heads, Soft Hearts: Tough-Minded Economics for a Just Society (Addison-Wesley, $17.95, 235 pp...
...These elegies have appeared since that book...
...but I am hoping there'll arise a reader stronger in faith, and more gifted in letters, than I, who can Open a helpful reply to Monette while there's still time...
...KAREN SUE SMITH have a penchant for off-the-track, over-my-head books that probe the history of human consciousness...
...I don't see how one can enjoy reading if one is that kind of critic...
...In my study of the relationship between religion and art, I have come to the conclusion that the evidence argues most often for a "middle path...
...It still does...
...Martin's, $19.95, 272 pp...
...feeling that what we have read is an extended meditation on a series of abstractions: time and the persistence of character through time, love, faithfulness, nostalgia, old age, and death...
...Roman Szporluk nicely reinvigorates the familiar topic of Marx on nationalism by analyzing a neglected manuscript of Karl Marx-his unfinished 1845 critique of a work by the well-known German economist, Friedrich List...
...348 pp...
...There are worse sins...
...That redemption sometimes comes showering down in a flash, and other times just hovers over everybody like a storm cloud of temptation...
...rejects the argument that the universe is at the mercy of random forces...
...Robinson's The Priority of John (Meyer Stone, $19.95, 443 pp...
...in place of Will's Georgetown fatuousness one finds a delicate and controlled sense of rage...
...He is at his best and most humorous answering readers who responded to his music criticism in the New York Herald Tribune from 1940-1954...
...Denby is often called the "father of dance criticism," a comment that is akin to describing Antonio Stradivari as the "father of fiddle-making...
...Both books explain the myth-making process as we actually live it in prayer, dreams, imagination...
...Bausch is a master of the art of the short story, and a keen observer of the small sadnesses and failures of everyday existence...
...George Comninel's Rethinking the French Revolution (Verso, $13.95, 225 pp., paper) cleans out the Marxist Augean stable of its concept of "bourgeois revolution"-an idea that Marx propounded only fitfully and implicitly, but which his epigoni have stalwartly, if un-convincingly, maintained...
...Raymo is as good a writer as the late Loren Eiseley...
...For a quarter-century, Raymond Carver wrote masterful stories about characters whose luck, as one of them put it, "had gone south on them.'' And when he died, on August 2, he left an extraordinarily rich legacy for someone who had not completed his fiftieth year: ten books of poetry, essays, and stories, and the manuscript of A New Path to the Waterfall, a book of poems that Atlantic Monthly will publish next year...
...Finally, two books of nonfiction powerfully bring home the tragedy and scope of the health crisis of our time...
...Another bespotted tale from the war that will not die...
...But you needn't care about flying, or have come of age fighting Japan, to relish this simple, elegant, and funny memoir by a former "midwestern puritan," as Hynes calls himself, who now is Woodrow Wilson Professor of Literature at Princeton...
...There and in three previous novels set in modern America, Smiley fills her pages with white space and dialogue...
...You'll be sorry when it ends, but glad to be able to turn right back to the beginning and immediately read it again...
...The latter traces the history of a rug, completed in 1920 by a Navajo known as La Tejedora ('' The Weaver''), through the succession of owners whom the rug seduces over six decades...
...As one follows Hawking on his problem-solving chase, it seems clear he wants to know what kind of God he is dealing with...
...There is no voyeurism or exploitation in these tales of men and women living emotionally and financially on the margin...
...Humanity is at the second consciousness level while God is at the third...
...Buon appetito...
...The fiction in Richard Bausch's Spirits and Other Stories (Penguin, $6.95, 237 pp...
...The story is that of a highly sophisticated, intellectual minister who is doing just fine as pastor to a like-minded congregation in an upscale academic suburb, when one Sunday afternoon while comfortably attending to his back yard barbecue, he hears the voice of God...
...Perhaps that is because he is a writer of similar temperament-a man of great intellectual integrity who despises cant and humorlessness...
...Chet Raymo CHET RAYMO, professor of physics at Stonehill College in Massachusetts, is a science columnist for the Boston Globe and the author of several books on science, most recently, Honey from Stone (Dodd Mead...
...I am afraid I do consider Schumann to be a greater and more original composer than Brahms...
...tells brilliantly how two very disparate sisters are bred in modern Manhattan by their enormous, famous television celebrity mother...
...Essays: For fun try Hunter S. Thompson's A Generation of Swine (Summit, $17.95, 304 pp...
...It was with God in the beginning...
...He also perceives the universe in terms of consciousness...
...Barrett's bad trouble, as he recovered from a heart attack, was learning that he also had stomach cancer...
...God speaks to several contemporary Americans, in a story that is convincingly realistic as well as profoundly illuminating of the soul...
...His cerebral palsy hasn't shaken the steadiness of his observant mind, or his Irish way with words...
...and Chet Raymo's "book of hours," Honey from Stone: A Naturalist's Search for God (Dodd, Mead, $16.95, 188 pp...
...One would not have thought the world needed another, but Fussell understands Orwell intuitively...
...Faith is journeying through space and time...
...The Collected Poems (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $19.95, 320 pp...
...The second conservative is Robert Nisbet whose book is called The Present Age (Harper & Row, $17.95, 145 pp...
...Greenstein rehearses the many improbable things that had to happen for life to appear in the universe...
...And God will pardon Paul Fussell, sooner than most, for writing well...
...a first novel that evokes with quiet eloquence the crippling effects of geographic and emotional isolation and three generations of a West Tree, Minnesota, farm family...
...He wants to make neoliberalism a sort of ideology and he can't think of much good to say about any Republican...
Vol. 115 • December 1988 • No. 21
