These guys know how to write:

...The alternative, he warns, is to squander finite resources and stumble toward social chaos...

...That there can be pleasure industries at all, exploiting our apparently limitless inability to be pleased, can only mean that our economy is divorced from pleasure and that pleasure is gone from our workplaces and our dwelling places...

...Somehow, his quicksilver tongue and felicity of phrase save him...

...When it comes to sloth," the performer confesses, "words fail me...

...The solution to our ecological and social problems is cultural, not economic or political...

...Berry is like nothing on God's green earth-a color he's partial to...

...In this sense, the American Catholic church was always an artificial construct, its pre-Vatican II solidity a kind of illusion...

...The "industrialization" of farming, which has reduced an ancient and honorable way of life to the mechanized business of food "production," is now devoid of such affection...

...Catholics forged a unique identity through a commitment to those rituals and social interactions...

...True, Berry preaches doom...

...Berry counters this Faustian bargain with an explicitly sacramental understanding...

...It has to be part of the air we breathe, not an elective in a broader, hence defining, curriculum...

...Where did he pick up such powers of prestidigitation...

...Stafford, the brilliant short story writer and novelist, emerges as a prickly, difficult, and troubled woman, but she emerges whole, a complete character...

...The vast, industrialized farms of America have ruined the landscape and the health of the soil, rendered the skills of millions obsolete, and destroyed the possibility of rural culture...

...Perelman, as with the writers Jean Stafford, J.D...

...To begin with, nobody has the right to be that bland...

...On the church, a topic inherited from his famous evangelical Catholic parents, Sheed presents an acute diagnosis of the problem, one that seems no closer to resolution now than it was sixteen years ago when the essay was first published...

...But don't be deterred...

...What we do has inescapable consequences for how we think and what we value...

...Thus: the sprawling seminaries of the fifties may be ghost towns-but we are all priests now...

...But the tab on White is tame next to the savaging reserved for an irrepressible old fraud such as Richard Nixon...

...In tone, temperament, and literary style Sheed and Berry are about as close as Frank Sinatra and Pete Seeger...

...He takes no prisoners-unless they're willing to do some weeding...

...His flashing strokes cut into the object of his attentions with economy and precision, and with a palpable, almost sensual, bite...

...Without a fundamental reverence for the integrity of the natural world, we are destined to destroy it and ourselves...

...Moreover, the monolithic application of so-called "scientific" methods threatens the stability of the food supply in its failure to recognize the limits of nature...

...Salinger is a model of how to blend literary and historical observation...

...In some ways the best, or at least the most thorough and deeply engaging piece is simply titled "Church...

...What is particularly sneaky about IQ," the self-confessed "Dumbo" slyly proposes, "is that it takes a good one even to criticize it...

...This gloomy message is mitigated by Berry's unpretentious style, his judicious use of metaphor, considerable analytical strengths, and hard-won vision...

...His sharp wit and fabled irony never grow dull with use...

...But the lack of local community and culture that has enfeebled American Catholicism is endemic to modern American life as well...

...Berry presses forcibly against every commonplace assumption in these essays, from a prickly critique of the implicit condescension and cultural prejudices in Theodore Rosengarten's popular oral biography of the sharecropper Nate Shaw (All God's Dangers: The Life of Nate Shaw), to a nuanced criticism of feminism's complicity with the dominant culture of exploitation ("We need a broader, deeper cynicism...

...And then he criticizes it, sort of...

...American Catholicism thrived in a segregated urban immigrant community...

...It is a language under the discipline of experience, not ideas or rules," and it is especially vivid because it is "never far from judgment...

...He's stern, censorious, uncompromising...

...Instead, allegiance was reserved for the church's "constellation of practices, built around specific holy places...(which met) the paired psychic needs for permanence and change, dignity and recklessness...

...Essays in Disguise does not disappoint on this score...

...Whether it is in noting an affinity between Thomas Merton and Salinger or in knowing precisely what makes John Updike's Rabbit Angstrom run, affection and generosity characterize his assessments...

...He evokes with power the pull of the sacraments and the liturgical drama of the church...

...But few critics equal Berry in illuminating the connections between our dispirited communal life, vague but racking unease, and the oppressive monotony of our increasingly "disembodied" work...

...A return to the "economies" of household and community is needed...

...We are given a tribute to Wallace Stegner and the "great community of human experience," a defense of "regional" writers, and an explanation of Berry's refusal to buy a computer...

...So is academic life, Berry asserts...

...At his boldest, Sheed suggests there is something basically incompatible between American life, with its Pelagian myths and materialistic convictions, and the social and political pessimism of Catholicism...

...ves as if for the first time...

...Like some visitor from Mars, Berry questions the meaning of "progress" and "better...

...Again and again, Berry exposes the conformity of opinion that passes for most cultural criticism...

...Usually a bite on the rump...

...He comes straight at you when he writes...

...Our destiny is creaturely, not princely...

...What he praises in the thought of a black Alabama sharecropper is equally true of his own work...

...The solution...

...Given its hierarchical structure and traditional notions of authority, its devotional and clerical traditions, Catholicism could never develop indigenous forms of social loyalty or expression rooted deeply in America's improvisational culture...

...Which brings us back to why we like our Ikes, men who seem to take no sides, to have no sides, whatsoever...

...Say what...

...The confusion and defections after Vatican II revealed how irresistible American notions of individualism and freedom are (as the entire world is fast learning...

...As with God in the late Middle Ages," Sheed teases in his skeptical way, "all that there is to know about the Mafia seems to be known by now except whether it actually exists...

...The fear of hard physical labor is symptomatic...

...Educated to be passive consumers, we are all but helpless in providing ourselves with the basic necessities of life...

...Sheed steers smartly about in these treacherous waters, but more on that shortly...

...We always knew the doctrines were farfetched," Sheed writes...

...When the immigrants' children prospered and moved to the suburbs-coming into their full American inheritance-little held them to a church that failed to offer "a serious alternative culture that really looked American...

...You pick up a book by Sheed expecting to put it down again soon-in a gale of appreciative laughter...

...Even those chained to word processors may be tempted to concede Berry this point, and lament the atrophied "possibilities and purposes of the life of the body in this world.'' Hard work, especially when it involves joint effort, does seem to rinse the synapses, washing memory in ever brighter colors, thus deepening our hold on the moment...

...This collection includes material from as far back as 1974 and ranges from literary briefs in defense of Hemingway and J.D...

...He wants to make the standard of measurement explicit, and as the title of the book suggests, humane...

...Berry suggests it is a hollow victory...

...Salinger to acerbic political and cultural commentary to appreciations of talents as varied as Frank Sinatra, John Updike, and the author's own gregarious but sedentary "indoorsman" father...

...In these superb essays the world is revealed as the place where God comes to meet man, and where we encounter our true selves as if for the first time...

...There is precious little health in us...

...The quintessential Sheed sentence is something of a conjuring act...

...Yup, that's what the man says...

...Beyond that, things look bleak...

...Sheed does a masterly job of situating Holden Caulfield and the enchanting (to a point) Glass family in the literary landscape, and throws in a fascinating footnote on the cultural impact of the Battle of the Bulge to boot...

...But Sheed lends credibility to his argument by locating Catholicism in specific social and symbolic forms...

...The tribute to Frank Sinatra, though obviously sincere, reads like the album liner notes it actually was...

...Stripped to its bare bones (or increasingly defrocked congregations), this is a tough judgment on an institution whose antagonists, at least, still fret over its malignant cultural and political influence...

...If Sheed is right about this, one can always object that even in its attenuated form Catholicism is a useful source of tension with the assumption of American exceptionalism...

...Yet he rarely succumbs to sentimentality...

...Diversity of all kinds, especially in farming and in community life, is encouraged...

...Many of my dearest memories come from the times of hardest work," he writes, weaving his recollections of tobacco farming into a devastating critique of the isolating conditions of modern, sedentary work...

...In general, aside from its own highly specialized standards of quantity and efficacy, 'technological progress' has produced a social and ecological decline...

...But as Sheed notes, columns are the "fast food" of literature...

...Of the preternatually vain Lowell, Sheed observes "his self-esteem was surely enough recognition for anyone...

...And this accounts for the accelerating division of our country into defeated landscapes and victorious (but threatened) landscapes...

...Only a broader "cultural revolution" might reinvigorate the church, Sheed writes wistfully...

...In fact, even in the more analytical literary essays Sheed gives us character, action, color-all the things that make for vivid writing...

...Anyway, if history turns out to be kind to Richard Nixon, it will be because history doesn't have to look at him...

...He does not shy away from the word totalitarian in describing the operations of our economy, the fatal logic of progress and "technological mystification," the destruction of our ecology, and the manipulative nature of our politics...

...Recycling, and other relatively painless acts of good faith, don't impress him...

...We are a nation of "fantasists," a "people who cannot think about anything important...

...Our liberation from "drudgery" is an unquestioned article of secular faith...

...Catholicism is a "communal religion" that requires a strong sense of society's a priori authority, not a voluntarist's choice of an ad hoc collectivity...

...The two are not casually related, but integrally and inexpungably connected...

...His reading was so extensive," Sheed warns of Perelman, "that just looking up his references could give one a pretty good education, and looking up his tailor could do the rest...

...Such eschatological considerations bring us, rather neatly, to the apocalyptic ruminations of poet, essayist, and novelist Wendell Berry...

...A well-stocked supermarket is not a sign of prosperity or health but a perverse ritual of wastefulness and a measure of our spiritual alienation...

...Odd words in either case for a man who puts such great stock in people doing their chores-and liking it...

...As readers of Commonweal have long known, words are not something that fail Sheed often, and Essays in Disguise is further testimony to that agreeably chronic condition...

...An extended review of Ian Hamilton's biography of a notoriously uncooperative J.D...

...Like the magician who innocently turns his palms up to the audience before pulling a bouquet out of the air, Sheed teases the hidden prize out of his long elegant verbal sleeve...

...Or, "It seems he was strictly a line poet, string them as you will, so that his poems are like all-star teams that haven't practiced together...

...Character counts...

...Berry protests the "logical sterility" of competition as an ideal and our inability to protect any value existing outside the marketplace...

...Man's measure is found in the proportions and balance of nature, not in rationalizations of our unlimited appetites...

...All truly human activity-even the life of the mind-is built upon the reciprocity and affection of community life...

...When he writes elegiacally of friend and neighbor Jean Stafford, Sheed's empathy and understanding of human frailty are humbling...

...The argument for placing limits on America's expropriation of resources and relentless material advancement is perhaps familiar...

...Essays in Disguise, Sheed's third collection of criticism and commentary, is brimming with the author's shrewd asides...

...The intolerable irony in our dissatisfaction is that we have removed pleasure from our work in order to remove' drudgery' from our lives," Berry writes...

...This helplessness spurs on our consumption of "things" in a futile search for self-justification...

...The pollution and waste intrinsic to the modern economy are not merely technical problems, but spiritual disasters as well...

...On the humorist S.J...

...Our workplaces are more and more exclusively given over to production, and our dwelling places to consumption...

...Please, ladies and gentlemen, keep your eye on the dove...

...As that way of life and worship receded, so did the religious bonds it reflected and engendered...

...Salinger, and others, Sheed is a clear-eyed eulogist...

...Demurring from the popular rehabilitation of the Eisenhower presidency, he shakes his head in wry befuddlement...

...It is an unblinking (well, he bats a lash or two) analysis of the foundering of the American Catholic church ("Fortress America," "Alcatraz") in the unnavigable wake of Vatican II...

...Berry, a Kentucky farmer and sometime academic, has been called prophetic or Utopian, depending on your politics...

...A quick sketch of the journalist-historian Theodore White's "lunchmanship" is outright hilarious...

...We must achieve the character and acquire the skills to live much poorer than we do...

...It is our present principled and elaborately rationalized rape and plunder of the natural world that is the new thing under the sun," he writes...

...Oh, there are some arid spots...

...Berry must be the only important American writer in whose work the word "topsoil" figures centrally...

...Rather, it was "an amalgam of quaintness plus an awful lot of football...

...Whether demanding greater discrimination from Garry Wills in the characterization of "liberals" or something less grandiloquent from Robert Lowell, Sheed never sacrifices a person for an idea and is suspicious of those who do...

...Likewise, the swollen churches can't meet their mortgages-but, then our life is our prayer...

...Surprisingly, some shorter columns leave very little aftertaste...

...For those allergic to barnyard animals or the ingredients in the better recipes for topsoil, Berry's prescriptions for salvation present formidable obstacles...

...As Alexander Schmemann has written, the distinctive characteristic of secularism is not atheism or pluralism, but the "negation of worship.'' With his pitchfork, field horses, compost pit, and trusty Royal typewriter Berry challenges that cruel secular conceit...

...Moreover, the organizational demands of mass production centralize power in unprecedented ways, leaving us free to "recreate" but empowered to do little else...