Critics' choices for Christmas:
Carmody, Emil Antonucci, Holmes Rolston, III, Karen Sue Smith, Sally Fitzgerald, David Herlihy, Robe
BOOKS Critics' choices lor Christmas Emil Antonucci EMIL ANTONUCCI, an instructor at Parsons School of Design in New York City, is currently the design consultant to the NYC Campaign Finance...
...The dictionary is "critical," say the editors, because it subscribes to no "bloc theory" of revolutionary origins...
...Finally Mama will allow the doll to go if Nettie Jo makes her a new little dress...
...The saddest of these books is Bill McKibben's The End of Nature (Random House, $19.95,226 pp...
...And now, in Beauty and the Beast and in The Mitten, people, animals, and a Central European world-we-have-lost are rendered in luscious and almost three-dimensional detail...
...Once again we can raise our hats to the gifted, literate clinical neurologist, Oliver Sacks, for taking us into yet another foreign land (Seeing Voices: A Journey into the World of the Deaf, University of California Press, $15.95, 180 pp...
...Finally, a useful manual at home: The Collins Bible Handbook by Jacques Musset (distributed by Harper & Row, $ 14.95,528 pp...
...For a sense of the inventiveness and tenacity of the human spirit in the face of today's empires, John leCarre's engaging The Russia House (Knopf, $19.95, 353 pp...
...Putnam's Sons, $12.95, 29 pp...
...They reflect the preoccupations of someone who has been trying to take the temperature of the times...
...Father Joe Hackett's largely absurd life proceeds, detail by inexorable detail, exactly noted and recounted by a master of comedy (which is to say, of matters of the most serious moment), here at his best...
...Sally Fitzgerald SALLY FITZGERALD is a co-editor a/Mystery & Manners: Flannery O'Connor's Occasional Prose, editor of her letters, The Habit of Being, and the Library of America's O'Connor, her collected works...
...Sierra Club Books, $ 18.95,317 pp...
...Callicott, a philosopher at the University of Wisconsin, Stevens Point, builds on innate human sentiments that can yield at once the fullest quality of human life and appropriate love for nature...
...An Audubon Society-like field guide to the geography, historical time frames, flora and fauna, personages, and themes of the Hebrew and Christian Scriptures...
...Pity the poor artist...
...The second man, a figure germane to the old order, an autocratic prince and colonel of a legendary regiment, whose loyalty to the Tsar is the quasi-religious myth he serves, instead drags his suffering command through the winter wastes of Siberia, searching for his idol, in the prideful hope of rescuing and reinstating him...
...K. Hall, temporarily out of print), depicts Italian working-class New Yorkers in the early 1950s, and moves seamlessly from broad comedy to genuine revelation...
...are a harder lot: absolutely ruthless, and prepared for any amount of bloodshed needed to end a long-entrenched regime, itself historically steeped in blood...
...Few of the traditional words for Christian faith and hope surface, but many equivalents arise, because the reflecting, the regretting, and the giving thanks are so honest and artful...
...she respectfully explores the Chihuahuan, Sonoran, Mojave, and Nevada Basin deserts, describing geological changes, flora, and fauna from the ancient disappearance of a lake to the burrowing of a grouse with precision and grace: "small King's Dalea bushes scraggle along and under the ground, purple-flowered, ropes of reddish roots alternately exposed and buried" and "where the tufa erodes away, frond patterns ice the granite surface or form imbricated patterns on the sides of the rock, leaving lacy dendritic tapestries...
...Much attention is given to the peasant opponents of the revolution, who made up the chouannerie (a kind of guerrilla movement) and to the revolt in the Vendee...
...a collection of gritty essays by the Washington Post reporter...
...I am not suggesting that Hollander is even hinting at a program for the future, but I think anyone trying to formulate the art or taste of the future will find this book essential reading...
...A new collection of her stories, Women and Children First (Ivy, $3.95,179 pp., paper) makes available splendid short works which have brought pleasure to readers of the New Yorker, Atlantic, Antaeus, and other magazines...
...is gorgeous in a different way, and in a different setting...
...Karen Sue Smith KAREN SUE SMITH is an associate editor of Commonweal and directs the Iona Center for Pastoral Liturgy at Iona College, New Rochelle, N.Y...
...sings Nettie Joe, skipping off to sew...
...He redesigned Commonweal in 1965 and 1987...
...as he stifles under the trivial concerns that confine his soul as though in a seed case buried in winter ground...
...Richard Cartwright Austin is a Presbyterian minister who has devoted his career to defending people in their natural environments...
...Price's recognition of evil racism, in this book is what makes his preoccupation with goodness so important...
...and Lynn Garafola's Diaghalev's Ballets Russes (Oxford University Press, $29.95, 512 pp...
...In The Mysterious Lands (E.P...
...his English teacher ("this woman plainly knew that poetry mattered like blood or money...
...with its prodigiously precise and engaging Black Forest domestic setting, each page bordered like the Book of Kells with honeybees, mice, and folk art motifs, will not have forgotten it...
...They see in the present French government a kind of "monarchical republic" that has finally reconciled the political traditions of ancient and revolutionary France...
...houses...
...Norton, $24.45, 353 pp...
...Powers, Homer of the American Rectory Wars, whose heroes contend with various forces of gravity to which the clerical spirit is subject: lassitude, loneliness and, in some instances, the consolations of malt liquor...
...I also read lots of Roald Dahl to my children...
...Clement's memoir of her time as an intellectual groupie is, in the words of Milton Berle, a laugh a minute...
...learn planting, growing, and marketing techniques, as well as the mail order business...
...Nash, a professor of history and environmental studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, also author of the classic Wilderness and the American Mind, traces the recent history of expanding ethical concern...
...A gentle, rather simple Nicholas II, one of those, like Kafka's men, "who do not know the reason for their condemnation nor the hour of their execution," nevertheless knows that both impend, and he spends his last days searching the past for some deeper acquaintance with himself, and with his tormented subjects, who have called him Little Father, but whom he has weakly allowed to be fatally misgoverned and oppressed to the point of desperation...
...In Wheat That Springeth Green (Knopf, $ 17.95,335 pp...
...Dahl's wicked and foolish characters are perfect for the grown-up reader to impersonate and spoof...
...The first is David Lodge, author of such hilarious and clever books as Changing Places (Penguin, $4.95,251 pp., paper) and Small World (Macmillan, $15.95, 339 pp...
...The white horse upon which they gallop away toward happiness wears a saddle-blanket made of white peacock feathers...
...The wholesome blue sky and green Yorkshire countryside, the kindly bobby, the water-color English folk in their dowdy, ageless clothes and Wellington boots, the wicker baskets and cobblestones, and especially the deliberate, pandemically civilized concern for the stray dog make you sure that there will always be an England...
...They rather concentrate on tensions and contradictions: for example, on the persecution of recalcitrant minorities by those who pretended to know the "general will" of the people...
...Recent environmental titles run into the hundreds, some biological, others economic, social, or political, and across a spectrum from the technical to the popular...
...but, clearly the nonhuman world is high on the ethical agenda for the next decade, even for the next millennium...
...The most profound contribution of the revolution was the tradition of republicanism and politics itself, but Christianity also persisted, as did many popular customs...
...The book lays out the evidence: greenhouse climate change has the potential to cause very serious and very nasty impacts...
...Edited by Patrick G. Coy, it combines historical essays on the usual primary suspects (Peter Maurin, Dorothy Day, Ammon Hennacy), with discussions of the movement's politics, pacifism, and spirituality, and several chapters on lesser-known C.W...
...Of his mother, Elizabeth, Price writes: she'd "braid tighter our separate strands till at last she was half-blind, alone in a big house, in the grip of a pain so constant that she finally said to me, 'If I thought an icepick could find that nerve, I'd plunge it deep in my eye this minute and gouge till I killed it.'" With strength, delicacy, and humor, Price describes his teen-age encounters with the contralto Marian Anderson...
...and that fiction, as a reflection of life, should be usable...
...The manifest failures of the Russian and Chinese revolutions clearly have affected how contemporary historians view the events of 1789...
...his appreciation for the human body...
...The introduction by his wife, the poet Tess Gallagher, gives the biographical and literary context: what Carver had on his mind during the time he was writing, and why poetry rather than the short story, his usual genre, drew his spirit...
...Just as the prophetic charism historically came to rest with singular power on Martin Luther King, Jr., so ten years ago that power fashioned a prophet for Latin America: Oscar Romero...
...He uses case studies to describe the degrees and implications of deafness, all within the context of social and medical history...
...It is an inspired format for dealing with the complex task of understanding, not to mention producing, art in the late twentieth century, a task that seems to me to have become increasingly desperate...
...Events in Russia and in China are helping to dislodge the French Revolution from the proud place it once held in schemes of human progress...
...Four volumes that I have read recently offer good value...
...The changes wrought by revolution were not nearly as profound or as lasting as older interpretations pretended...
...Eric Foner's magisterial Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877 (Harper & Row, $29.45, 736 pp...
...This uniquely organized book is perhaps the most thoughtful and thought-provoking of the many similar texts this year has produced...
...And the cult of la patrie, another part of the revolutionary heritage, today fades amid prospects of a united Europe...
...gives a sense of Romero's evolving, unshakable bonding with his people...
...The protagonist is an aged cardinal, retired to a remote fishing village...
...David Burns DAVID BURNS directs the Climate Project of the American Association/or the Advancement of Science in Washington, D.C...
...The endangered earth is Time's planet of the year for 1989, and authors are voicing increasing concern for the natural world...
...The Violence of Love: The Pastoral Wisdom of Archbishop Oscar Romero, compiled by James R. Brockman, S.J...
...In the foreground stands the liberating advice to express one's grievances, fears, guilts, doubts everything that has kept one from trusting God enough to speak heart to heart...
...Religion looms quite large in the Dictionary...
...Like me, naturalist Ann Haymond Zwinger loves the Southwestern deserts...
...Of course, when Beauty agrees to marry him, despite his twisted tusks, his bristling cheeks, and his sloping, leathery snout, he turns into a good-looking prince...
...The relationships of art have been drawn in so many intersecting lines of thought that, for most of us, they form a grid more like a cage than a map...
...The friends Miz Rabbit, Fox, and Panther are stuffed toys dressed in doll clothes who skip, dance, and speak to the meters of black English...
...Apparently fixed in his amber mask, he nevertheless retains the inward essence to respond, with humor and a flair for holy scandal, to what he learns from his long, thoughtful tramps along the sea-coast, and from his encounters there, by choosing to end his days in a prison cell, joyfully loosed from his cardinal sins of remoteness, abstract legalism, and pride, to which any prince of the church might be tempted as he flawlessly, if aridly, executes his official duties over the years...
...Can revolutions ever achieve society's total renewal...
...written by the Israeli hawk turned realistic dove, Yehoshafat Harkabi, is essential reading for anyone interested in peace in the Middle East...
...Dutton, $22.50, 3§8 pp...
...not only a superb account of the complex processes of North European art and its audience, but a thesis that knits up a good deal of raveled ideas and images shuttling back and forth across the great contradictions of contemporary art: classic-romantic, high art and low, the original work and its reproduction, private and public vision...
...Two are priests...
...Two new books provide background and perspective...
...We already know that they will slaughter the Romanovs huddled in the modest house in Ekaterinburg, and, apart from the poetic license of a metaphorical gentling of the mode of death, Pazzi offers no new "actual" account of events already recorded as best they can be by professional historians in an oft-told tale...
...and prepared for fruition, whether in death or new forms of life...
...The book provides rich possibilities for reconciling the esoteric agendas of the art world with those of vast, mass audiences of present-day society...
...Here, though, the hard life of the Texas high plains makes all sorts of faith, evangelical-ecstatic and Catholic-dour, so ordinary that they become dramatic...
...Monika Hellwig reviews the emergence of the human, critical, and public Jesus in Christology...
...Holmes Rolston, III HOLMES ROLSTON, III, professor of philosophy at Colorado State University, has written Environmental Ethics (Temple), Philosophy Gone Wild (Promethus), and Science and Religion: A Critical Survey (Temple and Random House...
...Patrick Jordan PATRICK JORDAN is an associate editor of Commonweal...
...The result for me was being brought up to speed by fine tutors and finding Catholic theology quite alive...
...The only social division that makes sense for him is between the "populace" by which he means the uneducated masses and the "public," the educated elites...
...Using the insights of process theology, he goes on to ponder the agonies of the creative process in which individuals are used and cast aside...
...If you like it enough to try Lodge's earlier novels, Small World stands separately but is a sequel to Changing Places...
...Disheartening insights into the American character, grossed-out by postwar wealth and power...
...The best book of the year may not have been a book at all but rather Thomas Edsall's Power and Money: Writings on Politics, 1971-1987 (Norton, $19.45, 374 pp...
...The basic premise of the book is the link between the tradition of North European painting and the modern cinema...
...In a manner all his own, Pazzi tells the stories of two men confronting death, and of those watching with them...
...Fred Siegel FRED SIEGEL is spending the year at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton...
...Far from it...
...The humbler Tsar is better able to mediate his world by meaning, and to find what he is looking for, in the acknowledgment of his failures and in the recognition that now the sacrifice of his life as of a seed falling into the ground before it can bear fruit is essential to the future of his people...
...and Sandy Levinson's Constitutional Faith (Princeton University Press, $19.95, 216 pp...
...Edward Kilmartin analyses the sacraments as the liturgy of the church...
...A sweet little stray dog begs in the marketplace, is hit by a car, and after a series of Herriotic veterinary adventures, finds a happy home...
...The first section of the book, "A New Atmosphere," is a useful summary of the greenhouse issue, even though it is based on secondary sources and contains several howlers...
...Alan Ryan's brisk biography, Bertrand Russell: A Political Life (Hill & Wang, $19.95,256 pp...
...written by none other than Peter Norton, creator of the Norton Utilities package...
...than facts...
...Despite Will's clowning, it is his serious innocence that is particularly appealing...
...Anyone who has seen Jan Brett's Goldilocks and the Three Bears (Dodd, Mead & Co., $12.95,29 pp...
...Take Price's father, Will, history's third best comedian "after Chaplin and Keaton...
...evidence that Buckminster Fuller was not the inventor of the geodesic dome...
...He makes plain what scientists know for sure about climate change (relatively little), and what they know only in part or not at all (a lot...
...has never had a more poignant ring for the artist...
...He conveys a tone of deep concern, but his suggestions about what to do are moderate and sensible...
...to mirror and engage the working of the viewer's soul rather than to gratify his conscious understanding...
...Biblical redemption included an ecological vision...
...Modern events affect historical perspectives...
...Price's honest gratitude toward life allows him to draw characters whose decency, faith in God, and engagement in the ordinary enterprise of family-making (which for him means including neighbors and friends as well as kin) exude power and beauty...
...Simon Schama (Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution, Knopf, $29.45, 512 pp...
...Levinson's argument traces the conflicts over constitutional interpretation to the Reformation struggle between Catholics and Protestants over how to interpret Scripture...
...Don't think such wholesomeness produces naive prose...
...There is much work to be done beginning with a better understanding of what is happening a never-ending task of monitoring and analysis...
...For those puzzled as I have been at the connection between dance and modern culture, two powerful and readable books Modris Eksteins's The Rites of Spring (Houghton Mifflin, $24.95,384 pp...
...His text is wonderfully fluid and readable and is well supported by scores of curious, contemporary illustrations...
...Certainly no other book on art appearing this year provides as much intellectual excitement and sheer visual nourishment or a greater breadth of learning and insight...
...McKibben, a writer for the New Yorker magazine, fears that global warming, a consequence of the world's industrialization, will wreak profound changes in the natural order...
...cope with storms, fire, and recurring doubts, the primary one being, "Do you want to work this hard for the rest of your life...
...The cinema is the vehicle for bringing the visions and artistic strategies of the past into private life, permitting even the most untutored individual a personal participation in art...
...and David Tracy describes where postmodern trends leave Catholic theological method...
...concern is fully justified...
...and Joseph Cunneen) by the late Jean Sulivan (acclaimed in France as the most important Catholic writer in that country since Bernanos) is a beautiful and complex novella set in Spain...
...Jay B. McDaniel's God and the Pelicans: A Theology of Reverence for Life (Westminster/John Knox, $11.95,192 pp...
...Price has learned that life matters...
...The tradition of North European art and the modern cinema both work by "using optical experience to stand for psychological experience...
...reunites narrative and analytic history to illuminate the end of the first Reconstruction just as the second is coming to a close...
...brings together six essays by Tony Rothman writing with great erudition on fads in cosmology...
...Nettie Jo is strictly American, and black, and she is going to be the flower girl at Cousin Willadean's wedding tomorrow...
...Demanding, uncommon, quenching...
...The strategy of using the past as a springboard to the future is an old tradition in the arts, the Renaissance being the obvious example...
...He cannot even find, much less save, the emperor, but the appalling hecatomb he offers up in the effort (even after he knows it to be hopeless) costs the lives of nearly all his men, and finally his own by suicide...
...and his fortune to have had wonderful mentors, black and white...
...we have no choice...
...a collection of essays in the ever-expanding literature on the Catholic Worker movement...
...Whether you are an artist or student of our culture, you will find the book valuable, rich in detail, lucidly written, and bravely committed to seeing the world of images whole, without pretension or prejudice as to high or low art...
...Peggy R. EUsberg PEGGY R. ELLSBERG teaches in the English Department at Barnard College...
...The two principal characters, the owner of a restaurant and the pastor of a dwindling Catholic parish, are moved by the most striking feature of their town's life, the fact that virtually nothing happens, to probe the dryness and darkness of their own souls...
...Anne Hollander, author of the brilliant book on the image of the body in western art, Seeing Through Clothes (Viking, 1978), provides in her new book, Moving Pictures (Alfred A. Knopf, $22.95,512 pp...
...The particular charm of this book lies in the illuminated borders of each page, which tell their own story...
...A classical, contemporary example of the theological mind at its clearest is Nicholas Lash's Easter in Ordinary: Reflections on Human Experience and the Knowledge of God (University Press of Virginia, $29.95,313 pp...
...Cross-referenced and beautifully illustrated in full color, a book of many hours for all ages...
...David Herlihy DAVID HERLIHY is Mary Critchfield and Barnaby Keeney Professor of History at Brown University and president-elect of the American Historical Association...
...Here comes the bride...
...Some readers, it should be said, find Dahl's grotesque characters and biting satire too acerbic and frightening...
...No pale pacifism here but practical instances of what Richard Gregg called the power of nonviolence...
...Louis house...
...Michele Landsberg, in her generally reliable Reading for the Love of It: Best Books for Young Readers (Prentice Hall Press, $10.95, 325 pp., paper) deplores Dahl's "sadism and black humor," which seems to me a wild misreading...
...But, alas, humans fail...
...Where shall he enter the insane cloverleaf of conflicting trends...
...McDaniel begins with a pelican chick, abused by its older sibling, and, like most juveniles in nature, doomed to die an early death...
...The pictures are a chiaroscuro mixture of cloudlight, twilight, candlelight, and moonlight, with a Cezanne palette of color...
...Most of Dahl's books come with plentiful illustrations by Quentin Blake...
...Among other things, Nice Work is a wry romance, a fine short course in contemporary literary theory, and a detailed evocation of an industrial plant...
...As they move through the great swath of the liturgical calendar when nothing special is being celebrated, Mojtabai prods us to strip the gawdy outer garments from faith and contemplate the naked essence...
...More reserved, but still charming and instructive is Robert Mac Neil's memoir, Wordstruck (Viking, $ 18.95,230 pp...
...A monkey whose haberdasher might have been the Tailor of Gloucester carries a tray of fruits that might have been arranged by Lutece...
...In Women and Children First, we attend a New York Buddhist retreat, where someone describes monks in Lhasa who are supposed to be over a hundred: "Hey, it's Lost Horizon city up there...
...Reading to children under the age of four has been more fun than ever in 1989, partly because of the year's dazzling harvest of fabulously illustrated storybooks...
...marble bas-reliefs are draped with roses and trailing peacock tails...
...My favorites among them include Jan Brett's Beauty and the Beast (Clarion Books, $ 14.95,29 pp...
...Probably his best-known children's story, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (Bantam, $2.75, 176 pp., paper) was made into a serviceable film, starring Gene Wilder as Willie Wonka...
...K. Hall, $5.95, 279 pp., paper...
...The combination is wise and warm, bringing solid theology to bear on living faith...
...Nettie Jo's Friends by Patricia McKissock, illustrated by Scott Cook (Alfred A. Knopf, $12.95, 29 pp...
...Harper & Row, $ 12.95,242 pp...
...Her first novel, when she was barely out of college, was the furthest thing imaginable from the usual autobiographical first work: she invented a new Hasidic tale, funny, suspenseful, and breathtakingly beautiful, called Judah the Pious (G...
...In Hope for the Land: Nature in the Bible (John Knox, $12.95,262 pp...
...statistical mechanics of Boltzman, Shannon's information theory, and Rifkind's algeny concept...
...the third an emperor, demi-deified for most of his life, but now doomed, together with his family and the old order he represents...
...In his most recent novel, wonderful to have after so long a silence, Powers again turns his awful attention to the rectory, and perfectly renders the presiding shepherd of an affluent American parish (St...
...He calls the bloody suppression of the Catholic peasants of the Vendee a genocide...
...is he ever "in touch" with them...
...Francine Prose has a wide range and a distinctive voice, effortlessly mixing amusing satiric perceptions and astonishing spiritual revelations...
...When Joe finally puts forth the shoot that reveals the life lodged in him after all, his impulse toward growth, like the cardinal's, is expressed in the protection of a defiant young nay-sayer he has come to see is right in his conscientious protest...
...His courage and purity of purpose have enlarged the humanity of a hemisphere...
...argues that no laws of history made revolution in France inevitable...
...Though Lodge is a distinguished literary critic whose fictions depict university life, his novels transcend the genre of academic comedy...
...concludes that the revolution blocked progress in France for at least a decade, and he shows great sympathy toward those who resisted its policies...
...when people are made whole the land they inhabit is restored to its own integrity...
...Everyone should read Reynolds Price, who writes with substance and without cynicism...
...is an anthology of writings by scientists...
...Perhaps our prescient artists have begun to see around a corner, glimpsing a greening field of increasing ecclesiastical recognition of the spiritual demands in the political realm, heretofore somewhat scanted...
...He is an excellent writer, and his treatment of the mind-boggling climate system, as full of loops and feedbacks as a Rube Goldberg machine, is a model of clarity and thorough-ness...
...Whatever world Prose imagines, she renders with impeccable precision and telling detail...
...puts into fiction many of the lessons conveyed in her arresting report on life in Amarillo under the shadow of assembling nuclear weapons, Blessed Assurance (Houghton Mifflin...
...Henrietta, the restaurant owner, thinks she may shrivel of loneliness...
...God's covenant is with the Hebrews and Christians and also with the land...
...As in his other masterful volumes, Sacks deals with the essential being of his subjects...
...Their chief criterion was literary excellence and every piece passes the test...
...Michael Buckley studies American atheism...
...Even more importantly, the old man's gesture bestows life and freedom on a kind of secular "holy family," for love of whom he forgoes his own, as he confers his ring of office on the young revolutionary he has come to understand and respect...
...Ultimately, the Schneider book is more satisfying because it offers practical help in the difficult choices which confront us in the real world...
...On earth, only humans are ethical agents...
...The Market Square Dog by James Herriot, illustrated by Ruth Brown (St...
...a critique of "nuclear winter...
...He proposes instead a fiction-writer's kind of truth what in truth could have happened to this sad family at this pass in their lives and for the most part makes us believe it, even at its most asiatically fabulous, but most especially as he imaginatively enters into the emperor's thoughts and feelings and penetrates events by means of metaphor...
...The Sea Remains (Crossroad, $13.95, 118 pp., translated by Robert A. Donahue, Jr...
...And he knows from whom he has learned all this: from the subjects of his memoir, Clear Pictures (Atheneum, $ 19.95,304 pp...
...This bicentennial year of the outbreak of the French Revolution has understandably inspired a spate of books...
...that it should be attended to...
...They drop a sewing needle at her feet in the moonlight...
...make sense of the evanescent movements that fill the stage...
...A second fiction writer whose work has long been admired by critics and a growing band of devotees is Francine Prose...
...Bosher sees no value in the classic Marxist interpretation, that this was a "bourgeois" uprising, a step toward the equally inevitable proletarian revolution...
...Clare...
...Two of my favorite writers, who deserve more attention than they have yet received, published fiction in 1989...
...Everything, everywhere "bears the permanent stamp of man," and this "seems infinitely sad...
...ably defends the ethic that Aldo Leopoldlaunched a generation ago in his Sand County Almanac: "A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community...
...is a collection of poems haunted by the author's terminal cancer...
...The Mitten, illustrated with the same richness of care and color, is a more Spartan tale, featuring a simple, snowy landscape, a boy, the mittens his Baba knits for him, and the Brett-trademark animals...
...and Bigfoot Dreams (Penguin, $6.95,256 pp., paper...
...He separates fact from speculation and distinguishes both from personal opinion...
...Austin interprets nature through the categories of liberation, creativity, Sabbath ecology, the Fall, and ecological visions...
...His words have the authentic ring of the Scriptures...
...The deeper truth about Will, though, is that he is "no chattering fundamentalist, but a silent wrestler in the scalding dark," a dark the author later describes in detail...
...The author of several canny and randy stories for grownups, Dahl has a fantastic Dickensian vision...
...Sulivan's voice is very fine in the singing of this tale...
...Bill McKibben is far more interested in feelings (and boy...
...This year's offering, Nice Work (Viking, $ 18.95,277 pp...
...He sees them rather as gallant runners in a sack race of a cosmic kind, in which they lurch along, repeatedly tripping, falling, but getting up to carry on until they can stumble across the finish line in what we ought to cheer as triumph...
...William A. Barry's Seek My Face (Paulist, $4.95,112 pp...
...A Revolution of the Heart (Temple University Press, $34.95,388 pp...
...by Stephen H. Schneider, who devises "numerical experiments" at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, is written by the best of a rare breed of experts who are skillful at communicating scientific findings in ways the rest of us can understand...
...It is for me a healing book because of its willingness to see art as encompassing all of us, not just a favored few...
...Unfortunately, he is some sort of warthog or boar in wealthy gentleman's clothing...
...Beauty goes to live in the Beast's palace, which is outfitted in the most sumptuous eighteenth-century Grand Style...
...It puts into readable, affectively attractive form the counsel that psychology and spiritual theology offer people wanting to meet Christ and unburden themselves...
...In a year when the static from judicially generated issues fills the political airwaves, two books, Robert Nagel's Constitutional Cultures: The Mentality and Consequences of Judicial Review (University of California Press, $27.50,244 pp...
...It concentrates on systematic theology and amounts to both a review of where speculative theology has been during the past fifty years and where it now stands...
...the exploits of a lesser ecclesiastic but still, venerably, "a priest forever" are sung by J.F...
...Tradition rebottled with an awareness of postmodern needs but not necessarily with mass-market tastes in mind...
...An international team of twenty-four historians, including four Americans, contributes ninety-nine essays, arranged alphabetically by key words...
...The McKibben book, excerpted in the New Yorker and picked up by the Book of the Month Club and nine overseas publishers, will appeal more to those who relish the Romantic poets, while the Schneider book will appeal to those who prefer non-fiction prose...
...examines the mix of scientism and subjectivism which has left contemporary liberalism politically rudderless...
...Price is too young to know better...
...looks at the cultural impact of the revolution on three levels: in the long term (chiefly popular customs), the middle term (the Enlightenment, Christianity, Romanticism), and the short term (literature, theater, art, and much else...
...This has been a poor year for books on American politics...
...an account of MacNeil's growing love affair with the English language...
...there are entries for "Dechristianization" and "Revolutionary Religion...
...My choices, I'm afraid, are a somber set of selections, little calcu-lated to bring joy or comfort...
...Where do we go from here...
...We must also choose among competing demands and sort out the costs and benefits of various actions which might encourage helpful trends and might reverse those that are harmful...
...Not that Powers regards them as warriors...
...His epitaph for a family friend, Mac Thorton, aptly describes the spirit of Price's own fiction: "consuming life gladly and giving it back...
...is unsurpassed...
...Finally, for all those either bemused or horrified by the academic fashion of decon-struction which suggests that words, like unruly children, just can't be made to behave, I recommend David Lodge's wry novel Nice Work (Viking, $ 18.95,277 pp...
...A. G. Mojtabai's novel Ordinary Time (Doubleday, $17.95,223 pp...
...It is a book I have been living in for some weeks and it has displaced all other art books in my thinking...
...We may not fully realize what we have done until "our sense of nature as eternal and separate is washed away...
...The September 1989 issue of Theological Studies is the third of this jour-nal's fiftieth anniversary issues...
...Many of these animals try to squeeze into one lost mitten...
...Global Warming: Are We Entering the Greenhouse Century...
...Two other Prose novels I have enjoyed are Hungry Hearts (Pantheon, $12.95, 224 pp...
...help make sense of what's happened...
...Reading Ryan on Russell made me appreciate Louis Hartz's 1955 classic, The Liberal Tradition in America, still the best book ever written on the subject...
...Exit the king...
...Scott Cook seems to have studied at the National Academy in the late Victorian period, and then loosed his painterly brush on the wildly animated and warmly glowing figures of Nettie Jo and her friends...
...What sorts of things count morally...
...develops a sensitivity to all living beings, especially those who suffer...
...is perhaps his richest achievement so far...
...If you have a taste for Dahl, you'll also want to read his excellent autobiography, Boy: Tales of Childhood (Penguin, $6.95, 176 pp., paper), which was as fascinating to my daughter Kaitlin as to her dad...
...On philosophical and theological levels, several dozen titles have appeared in the last two years...
...He has seen everything...
...This complex, distilled, but deeply affecting study of William James, Newman, von Hiigel, and Buber, among others, is the choice product of the believing theologian's art...
...Beauty is greeted by a spaniel dressed like Mozart, and at dinner that evening chamber music is played by an elk, an otter, and a wolf gotten up in the most extraordinary plum-colored frock coats...
...They are just the sort of thing you hope will imprint on the new memory screen of a young child: fresh, clear, pure, and good...
...The revolutionaries in Searching/or the Emperor, by Italian novelist and poet Roberto Pazzi (Knopf, $17.95, 196 pp...
...The book makes clear the nourishment that both Carver and Gallagher found in the stories of Anton Chekhov, and without any sentimentality it places before us not only death but life, made the more precious for its quick passing...
...Nor is there any dispute that these problems must be urgently addressed...
...his parents, an aunt who suffered dark depressions, a cousin of his father's, a neighbor who contributed to his education, and other mentors...
...It does a wonderful job of making clear cut sense of DOS (disk operating systems...
...Every period in the history of art excavated, the most obscure minor artist out of the past presented to him on platters of glossy books...
...The rest of the story, narrated with tremendous elan, concerns the child's search for a sewing needle...
...Two other books stand out from the pack: From Creation to Chaos: Classic Writings in Science (Blackwell, $29.95, 280 pp...
...But this is merely a jumping-off point for the remaining four sections, which expatiate on human beings' relation to the natural world...
...The story juxtaposes and brings together a young, post-structuralist, feminist literature professor and a middle-aged, conventional, put-upon businessman in a Birmingham-like English city...
...More important, Dahl's world is never unrelievedly cruel: there are often deeply touching relationships between adults and children, such as between Charlie and his grandfather, Matilda and her teacher, the hero of The Witches and his grandmother...
...A good place to start is with Roderick Frazier Nash's The Rights of Nature: A History of Environmental Ethics (University of Wisconsin, $27.50,290 pp...
...Since the blazing summer of 1988, global climate change caused by a buildup of greenhouse gases has been high on everyone's list of things to worry about...
...is a good book for the slightly older preschooler and dog-lovers of every age...
...Two others we love are The Witches (Puffin, $3.95,208 pp., paper) and Dahl's latest, Matilda (Penguin, $14.95, 224 pp...
...J. B. Bosher (The French Revolution...
...It contains enough John Ciardi-like forays into literature to persuade the lukewarm reader to head for the library...
...a detailed, sensible chronicle of how it's done: overcome romantic notions...
...allies oppose the dangerous villains and enable goodness...
...art breaks down the cultural fences that separate us and helps to invent a culture that brings us together...
...All three authors, performing their individual rites of spring, dramatize the process of dry seed being slowly warmed to life (by the love that moves the sun and all the stars...
...In my home, Francine Prose is considered something of a household saint...
...Unfortunately, the evidence is already accumulating that he is right...
...J. Baird Callicott's In Defense of the Land Ethic (State University of New York, $ 10.95 paper, cloth $35.50, 325 pp...
...On a practical note anyone who has languished over an unreadable computer manual might want to turn to Peter Norton's DOS Guide (A Brady Book, $19.95,350 pp...
...The earliest piece is from 1600, the most recent from 1985...
...Did the violence of the French Revolution bring progress...
...This time Sacks sheds light on the inscape and language of the deaf...
...Raymond Carver's A New Path to the Waterfall (Atlantic Monthly Press, $13.95, 144 pp...
...Denise Lardner Carmody DENISE LARDNER CARMODY is professor and chair of the Faculty of Religion at the University of Tulsa...
...Father Gilvray, the pastor, is going blind and wondering whether his priestly life has accomplished anything...
...If you have ever thought of trading in your fast-paced urban lifestyle for life on a farm, read Terry Silber's A Small Farm in Maine (Houghton-Mifflin, $17.95,211 pp...
...The book is edited by Bernard Dixon, European editor of The Scientist, with the advice of an editorial panel which included Fred Hoyle, Peter Medawar, and Jonathan Miller...
...She wants to take her tattered doll, Annie Mae, to the wedding, but "Mama say no...
...The most useful section is a chapter on the daily experience and practice of nonviolence in the Catholic Worker's neighborhood centers, particularly the St...
...Martin's Press, $10.95, 29 pp...
...and an older book, Catherine Clement's 1983 The Lives and Legends of Jacques Lacan (Columbia University Press, $27, 232 pp...
...One of her most recent books is How to Live Well: Ethics in the World Religions (Wadsworth...
...BOOKS Critics' choices lor Christmas Emil Antonucci EMIL ANTONUCCI, an instructor at Parsons School of Design in New York City, is currently the design consultant to the NYC Campaign Finance Board and the NYC Charter Revision Commission...
...In the background lies the practice of the Spiritual Exercises of Ignatius Loyola known as the "application of the senses...
...more images in a year than Michelangelo in a lifetime...
...His brush, poised above the blank canvas, trembles under the weight of all this history...
...It's very funny, deeply touching, and thoroughly engaging...
...An even longer and less flamboyant work is Critical Dictionary of the French Revolution (Harvard, $69.95, 1168 pp...
...Nagel presents a down-to-earth view of the limitations and liabilities of judicial policymaking...
...When Price, who has begun to notice that paintings of Jesus vary considerably, asks Will whether there is a photograph of Jesus' actual face, Will assumes there must be and answers, "Yes darling, they have his real picture in student Bibles...
...Read it and you'll hear the desert call...
...For a look at the disastrous consequences of policy toward the mentally ill that has enriched the psychiatric profession and cleansed the consciences of activist lawyers at the expense of those who needed their help, E. Fuller Torrey's compelling Nowhere to Go: The Tragic Odyssey of the Homeless Mentally III (Harper & Row, $18.95, 256 pp...
...Elizabeth Johnson discusses new analyses of Mary in light of exposing the female face of God...
...Decorated archways are hung with dozens of yards of silk...
...Science a la Mode: Physical Fashions and Fictions (Princeton University Press, $19.95,207 pp...
...The answers that Nash surveys, diverse in many ways, nevertheless insist almost unanimously that moral obligation does not stop with duties to other humans...
...But here, his own initial unfa-miliarity with the deaf is so similar to our own, his insights and discoveries flash open with the brilliance and resonance of a Wynton Marsalis trumpet air...
...and the legends surrounding the last days of Evariste Galois, a mathematician who helped develop group theory...
...edited by two French historians, Francois Furet and Mona Ozouf, and translated by Arthur Goldhammer...
...McDaniel shows deep compassion for the hungry, the lost, the forgotten, and the victimized, both animals and persons...
...Robert H. Bell ROBERT H. BELL, professor of English at Williams College, is currently enjoying a National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship to complete a book about comedy in James Joyce's Ulysses...
...is subtitled "Prayer as Personal Relationship in Scripture...
...No one disputes that human activities are making profound changes in the natural systems on which we depend, nor that the trends are troubling and, in some areas, even ominous...
...God creates, and inspires creativity in his creation, both in nature and in human life...
...A second novel, Household Saints (G...
...Rejecting all sociological analyses, Schama is free to exploit the drama of the revolutionary events...
...Patiently, day by day, the two priests are wakened to self-awareness and rediscovery of their real vocation, while the ruler is brought to understand and accept the final obligations imposed by his own vocation...
...The heroine of that story, "Tibetan Time," considers that, "for many people, the moment before they crack into a fortune cookie is probably the closest they ever come to a moment of genuine spiritual awe...
...Their authors, two European and one American, all concern themselves, in very divers ways and settings, with lives long unexamined by the living: men of high position, so hedged about by circumstance (and degrees of pomp) and the outward reassurance of their essential places in the religious and social functioning of their worlds that they have lost all sense of the dormant state of their own souls, and of sacred vocations vitiated in important ways...
...Humans, animals, trees, flowers, endangered species, ecosystems, rivers, earth...
...Acceptance of this realization at last establishes him truly in his ordained role...
...The illustrations are magnificent...
...In The End of Nature (Random Houses $ 19.95,226 pp...
...Avery Dulles surveys ecclesiology...
...Three books variations on the theme of breakthrough to higher levels of spiritual consciousness commanded my lingering attention this past year...
...They are also grouped into five major sections on events, actors, institutions, ideas, and historians, respectively...
...Beauty's life at the palace is luxurious and amusing, and the Beast himself is thoughtful, intelligent, and kind...
...his developing skills in drawing and painting, music, and poetry...
...But the book is also honest: it says frankly that there are no simple answers either for scientists or policymakers...
...The story of a gifted, emotionally-abused child saved by her teacher, Matilda, illustrates Dahl's genius for creating larger-than-life, wicked characters and bringing about believable fairy-tale transformations...
...Francis and St...
...Israel's Fateful Hour (Harper & Row, $22.50,256 pp...
...and her new version of the Ukrainian folk tale, The Mitten (G.P...
...The characters are treated with pointed but tender irony, so that they learn from each other and we can learn from them...
...Finally, their antics in high gear, they race past Nettie Jo as she stands on her dimly-lit porch, her hair ribbon and braids alert, her pinafore flipping upward...
...In this struggling toward something higher, the divine spirit is present...
...John Meyendorf writes about the understanding of salvation in recent Orthodox theology...
...The scene at Pasternak's grave is triumphant...
...Emmett Kennedy (A Cultural History of the French Revolution, Yale, $35, 449 pp...
Vol. 116 • December 1989 • No. 21
