Critics' choices for Christmas
Judis, John B. & Swick, Thomas & Shannon, Elizabeth & Howe, Fanny & Finn, Molly & Baumann, Paul & Coles, Robert & McCarthy, Abigail
BOOKS Critics' choices for Christmas Molly Finn MOLLY FINN, a New Yorker, is the author of three cookbooks. A musician, she sings with Amici Musicale. When not singing, she's reading. 'm...
...Utopian Pessimist by David McLellan (Poseidon Press, $22.45,346 pp...
...Seeing Voices (University of California Press, $17.95, 180 pp...
...A grim beginning, almost enough to discourage a reader...
...Living alone in an affluent Cape Town area, she grudgingly befriends a black vagrant found sleeping on her property...
...Two books that are not novels give a comparably intimate insight into lives we might not otherwise glimpse...
...To compensate for missing out on so many books---or, as I prefer to think of it, postponing the pleasure--I do keep tabs on their appearance...
...there is a real correlation between the ends of centuries and the peculiarity of our imagination, that it [increased anxiety] chooses always to be at the end of an era...
...Especially piquant are the portraits of figures such as Evelyn Waugh, Graham Greene, and the attractive and idiosyncratic conservative philosopher Michael Oakeshott...
...The Edsalls are deliberate, dogged, often repetitious, but also bold and authoritative...
...ith two prolix old favorites staring at me--Norman Mailer weighing in at an uncompromising 1,300 pages and four pounds (Harlot's Ghost, Random House, $30), and John Updike at 900 pages and three pounds (Odd Jobs, Knopf, $35)--it is good to be reminded that not all literary heavyweights need to be measured by sheer bulk...
...Wartime Lies by Louis Begley (Knopf, $19, 198 pp...
...to permeate the membrane between religion and peoplehood and bond one person into the whole...
...In 1943, at the time of her death, she was committed to establishing a front-line corps of nurses to go onto the field with soldiers in Europe...
...Also worth reading are E.J...
...What seems today like the apocalyptic warnings of a frightening sexual anarchy may be really the birth throes of a new sexual equality...
...The author is a skilled reporter for the Wall Street Journal, and he first published part of what would become a book in the pages of that influential newspaper...
...I haven't read a novel as harrowing since V.S...
...In the course of the year, for example, she revisits the great Mayan ruins in Mexico and tells us of her earlier enthrallment with Mayan civilization, "the only civilization I have yearned to be born into," particularly into the period that produced great architecture, astronomy, mythology, and mathematics...
...This year, Robert Angel's Explaining Economic Policy Failure: Japan in the 1969-71 International Monetary Crisis (Columbia University Press, $37.50, 333 pp...
...He has tackled a multiplicity of tasks from the daily ones of monastic life to leadership roles in worldwide movements--all with diligence, energy, even exuberance...
...And, after a brush with death he does not think of sin or judgment but simply of"how wonderful it all would be, unalloyed peace, serenity, and happiness just waiting for Christ...
...he is also a person of broad and deep spiritual sensibility, and this book reveals to good effect the personal qualities just mentioned...
...9 iographies and studies of D Simone Weil have been '~ proliferating...
...In Sleeping Arrangements (Knopf, $18.95, 195 pp...
...She is a writer of brooding seriousness and the fears, angers, and sadness she records cannot be ignored because they speak to the universal dread of suffering, decline, and loss, and compel her readers to make a similar effort to confront like fears...
...Here is Jesus the great teacher and healer, the passionate pilgrim and moralist, the prophet who dared challenge all sorts of "principalities and powers...
...Lustiger's own story--his mother died at Auschwitz--is startling, and of the utmost significance for Catholic-Jewish relations...
...has the clearest explanations of U.S.-Soviet relations during the Reagan era...
...She teaches literature at the University of California at San Diego...
...We learn almost everything by indirection or association, the emotional colors of the story falling into place like a kaleidoscope's symmetrical mosaic...
...And worth it, too, to share her musings on, and anecdotes of, a writer's lot in this age of literary decay...
...Finally, Melissa Fay Greene's Praying for Sheetrock (Addison-Wesley, $21.99, 337 pp...
...Your presence, concern, and caring are part of the cure, whatever the sickness...
...He has no good deeds to look back upon...
...Jim Sleeper's The Closest of Strangers (Norton, $21.95, 346 pp...
...I mourned as a daughter and left Judaism behind...
...She detaches herself by her humor and scholarship...
...Robert Coles ROBERT COLES, a Pulitzer Prize winner, is the author of many books, including the acclaimed Children of Crisis series...
...Reaction to this "sexual anarchy" was typically reactionary: worries about sexually transmitted disease (particularly syphilis, which had reached epidemic proportions by 1900), concern that the liberation of women would erode family life, and efforts to impose codes of Victorian morality on the whole population...
...a diversity stemming from a communally chosen and communally serviced form of life...
...As a Washington correspondent, I read my share of monographs and hearings, and some are better than the books found in Crown or Walden...
...Actually, I began the year not in the air but on the sea, sailing the cruise ship Norway during the first week of the Gulf War and spending long hours on the deck reading Freya Stark...
...nor can we legislate or intimidate men and women into shame and repression of the past...
...Letty Pogrebin's book ends on a note of hope--her belief that peacemaking and the thirst for justice can transcend the divisions between women of different ethnic and nationalist loyalties...
...Lustiger, a philosopher by training and Jewish by birth, takes on all comers in a series of conversations with two politely aggressive interlocutors...
...though wellresearched, the book avoids the pitfalls of academic dryness...
...It's the tower where Cornelius Jansen lived and thought up your religion," a woman says, introducing the Brussels neighborhood...
...introduces us, yet again, to the rural South as the homeland of black people--in this case, McIntosh County, Georgia...
...He takes the full measure of Waugh, right down to his fancy spats, and is appreciative but skeptical about Oakeshott's powerful brief against rationalism in politics...
...The Monk's Tale: A Biography of Godfrey Diekmann, O.S.B...
...William Styron's account of his bout of major depression, is nearly mined by selfindulgent, melodramatic writing, but the end teaches us to distinguish this horrible illness from "feeling depressed" or "blue...
...and three books from last year--Sidney Blumenthal's Pledging Allegiance (HarperCollins, $22.95, 386 pp...
...In all the biographies we get the same story of a short life and a developing system of enlightened ethics...
...What is to be fought for," Bauman writes, "is above all the right to secure communal, as distinct from individual, diversity...
...Before a more recent trip to the French Alps--getting ready for the Winter Olympics--I read A Life of Her Own- A Countrywoman in Twentieth Century France, by Emilie Carles (Rutgers University Press, $19.95,264 pp...
...346 pp), and Just Balance: Reflections on the Philosophy o f Simone Weil by Peter Winch (Cambridge University Press, $15.95,234 pp...
...Daniel E Moynihan's The Law of Nations (Harvard, $22.50, 211 pp...
...it is the first Holocaust book she has read and it will lead her to others...
...Joe GouM's Secret, by Joseph Mitchell (Viking Press, 1965) appeared originally in the New Yorker and tells the story of one of the most literary and ultimately pathetic of New York's homeless: Joe Gould, "author" of the Oral History of Our Time...
...Robert Kaiser's Why Gorbachev Happened (Simon and Schuster, $24.95,476 pp...
...there, as elsewhere, in this second half of the twentieth century, members of the two races have struggled hard with each other--and Greene's account of that struggle is a triumph of the literary-documentary tradition, a kind of social history that commands the reader's intense and grateful scrutiny...
...A monopolization of force is inherent in the universalizing tendencies of modern social and economic organization...
...Modernity's epistemological uncertainties make an acceptance of ambivalence and pluralism essential...
...Magically, Coetzee infuses his realistic account with such portentous themes...
...It is worth reading the book to follow this course from despair to acceptance...
...As if in justification of my attraction to travel writing, I found it to be the best thing I had read about contemporary Florida--far surpassing the works of writers who live here...
...This latest and supposedly last Rabbit held a certain interest because the first third takes place in Florida...
...Every year, Washington's Economic Policy Institute publishes outstanding monographs, but above all, I would recommend its annual The State of Working America (M.E...
...His eagerness to reconcile Judaism and Catholicism, and his views on the possible religious significance of the state of Israel, are designed to please no one...
...is outstanding...
...David Callahan's biography of Paul Nitze, Dangerous Capabilities (HarperCollins, $24.95,572 pp...
...Fully aware of things as they are, in the 1980s he could yet say, "I for one refuse to be part of the faintheartedness, the pessimism, the fear, that seems currently to have affected so many...
...As the two bicker their way through their emotionally charged dialogues, the history of the Spiegelman family-from their comfortable middle-class life in Poland in the mid-1930s to the gates of Auschwitz in 1944 unfolds...
...There, as elsewhere, blacks and whites have eyed each other with grave doubt and suspicion...
...The Holocaust," Bauman writes, "was not an irrational outflow of the not-yet-fully-eradicated residues of premodem barbarity...
...A neighbor with whom I trade books passed Wartime Lies on to me...
...All have a familiar echo as the last decade of our century draws to a close...
...But the wings you have tied on them will not guarantee them life...
...is excellent--suggesting that Roosevelt might have avoided the shoals of the cold war...
...Chances are if someone asks me if I have read a new book, my honest reply will be: "No, but I read the review...
...which must also be autobiographical), is a study of hell seen through the eyes of a Polish Jewish child during World War II...
...spare and beautifully written novels, both as stark and enigmatic as parables, lead my list of Christmas suggestions...
...He teaches and practices psychiatry at Harvard University...
...Our bureaucratic and technological age increasingly substitutes an instrumental rationality for moral constraint, Bauman argues...
...Showalter's book are not only in the sexual arena...
...Carles grew up in a small village in Dauphine, "the Appalachia of France" before its postwar transformation into a skier's paradise...
...Coetzee published Age oflron (Random House, $18.95, 198 pp...
...Which, of course, explains why it has not been as popular...
...aesthetic duplication, as in The Picture of Dorian Gray...
...In the end, he gives us an invaluable record of a time and place, and a merciless and poetic examination of a man grasping for meaning at the end of a seemingly meaningless life...
...We are offered a rich mix of historical and cultural analysis, all rendered through stories of particular men, women, children...
...She no longer believes in a next world, she writes...
...Alex Kotlowitz's There Are No Children Here (Doubleday, $21.95,324 pp...
...But seventy...
...Attempts to redefine gender, to explore sexual and psychological borders, and to understand the meaning of feminine liberation filled the art and literature of the day...
...As she describes the Genitron, an electric clock above the Pompidou Center in Paris, flashing the remaining seconds and minutes of the decade, time cannot be stopped or turned back...
...The early chapters are perhaps the most fascinating, recounting the hunger, cruelty, and unrelenting cycle of labor that were, and in some ways still are, a peasant's lot...
...is eminently worth reading-- Moynihan is far ahead of his colleagues...
...Laura Cunningham's heroine (it has to be herself) is orphaned, then brought up in a Bronx apartment by two extremely eccentric uncles and a demented grandmother...
...At the university he fitfully befriends Tom Donlon, a diligent and unassuming Fordham University student who is wrestling sheepishly with a religious vocation...
...Cannon has now written three books on Reagan, and this is his best and the best...
...m getting used to hearing friends say "I hardly ever read fiction any more" with a little of the same smugness that goes with'Tvejust about lost my taste for beef...
...peace is prerequisite for everything else we care about, especially equality and justice...
...Coetzee, I think, is the more formidable presence on the page, although Plante's astringent story of a death and its equivocal consequences is something Bernanos or Mauriac would be proud of...
...Her genius was manifold...
...indeed, one who would not be at home in any other house...
...Each author is temperamentally economical, the former possessing a more muscular prose, the latter an almost ethereal touch...
...Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote in 1886 that"the begetting of one's thoughts on paper...is a kind of male gift," and writers of the period fantasized about alternate forms of male reproduction, such as "splitting or cloning, as in Dr...
...I'd especially like to recommend four of these recent studies: Simone Weil by Gabriella Fiori (University of Georgia Press, $34.95,380 pp...
...How others dealt with the randomness and the vicissitudes of life, how they sum it up, how their experiences parallel ours, or afford contrast, adds depth and dimension to our own reflections on the past...
...Her picture of the dreary past makes a return to it impossible, and she is optimistic about the future...
...on the role of race in American poli t i c s - a n d Lou Cannon's biography of Ronald Reagan (President Reagan: The Role of a Lifetime, Simon and Schuster, $24.95,752 pp...
...A Truer Liberty: Simone Weil and Marxism by Lawrence A~ Blum and Victor J. Seidler (Routledge, $17.95, 6 December 1991:727 reader there is the sense that despite these contradictions, Weil's was a life of the mind, and that she had carried her thought as far as it could go...
...In the world of male "Clubland," and in the literature of "quest romances," written especially for boys ("little boys who read will become big boys who rule"), the need for male superiority and exclusiveness became a virulent theme...
...Once a man begins to recognize himself in another, he can no longer look on that person as a stranger...
...here is one book I especially want to recommend this year, Elaine Showalter's Sexual Anarchy: Gender and Culture at the 'Fin de Si~cle' (Penguin, $9.95, 242 pp...
...Most of her facts are annotated and the viewpoints provided in quotations from acknowledged and usually witty sources...
...A staffwriterfortheNew Yorker, Frazier breaks with the magazine's dispassionate tone and fills the first page of his book exclusively with sentences that end in exclamation marks...
...To some she is a liberation theologian, to others a Marxist, to another a utopian, to another a Platonist, and to still another a mystic...
...Though she wrote a half a century ago, there is still no better literary source for understanding the intricacies of the Arab world...
...the biography of"one of the authentic giants of the liturgical renewal" is, according to Lawrence S. Cunningham who reviewed it (Commonweal, October 11, 1991) "a life told against the background of great events and great persons...
...The month at seventy seems disastrous, so without redeeming moments that, in despair, I am taking notes, hoping to f'md in the recording process a positive value to living so long, some glory to survival...
...A very different message comes from Doris Grumbach in Coming into the End Zone (W.W...
...Then she was not allowed to make up the minyan (the group of ten) required to say Kaddish (the prayers of mourning) for her dead mother--because she was female...
...His most recent book is The Spiritual Life of Children (Houghton Mifflin...
...Good biographers don't violate the space between...
...Public dialogue at the end of the nineteenth century created the use of the words "feminism" and "homosexuality...
...South Africa's fearless J.M...
...p ersonal histories fascinate because they can throw light and, perhaps, pattern, on our own...
...No one could accuse Cardinal JeanMarie Lustiger, the controversial archbishop of Paris, of being tedious...
...But his way of doing it, obviously, is not John McPhee's...
...He, too, is a wonderfully careful, determined, resourceful journalist, and he has reminded us of an entire people's twentieth century fate--the migration of the blacks from the Mississippi Delta up toward "the promised land," and of course, the disappointments and sorrows and suffering which accompanied that trek north...
...to glorify God and reify human devotion...
...Being a great juggler of contradictions, Weil becomes all the more mysterious the closer you get to the facts...
...In Age of Iron he gives vivid testimony to the apocalyptic uncertainties now pressing in on the white supremacist state...
...It is clear that she was engaged enough in the world's business to want to find a way to take an active role in reversing the tide of brutality...
...And in the very first note she speaks of the plague of AIDS and of the friends it has taken from her...
...I've spent this year reading about foreign policy for a book I've written (see next year's best...
...Perhaps it dispirits me that your children will never drown," she feverishly writes, while the deaths of South Africa's children are an everyday reality...
...Three books published this year ought to keep readers alert to this central aspect of our social, economic, political life...
...At its worst, of course, the ambition of intellectuals can be the very face of modem tyranny itself...
...The unnamed narrator, a callow and ambitious American of French-Canadian heritage, is nearly incapacitated by vanity and desire---or perhaps by the vanity of desire...
...Portrait is the absolutely perfect word---or at least one of what seemed like 10,000 absolutely perfect words...
...This book provides a valuable antidote to Peter Mayle's memoirs of Provence (A Year in Provence and Toujours Provence, Knopf), for it shows that country life in France is more than one long lunch followed by dinner...
...She discusses literature, art, and film, both American and English, and finds that the fin de siecle brings with it an earthquake of social and sexual upheavals, and that this occurs cyclically, perhaps caused by a "sense of an ending...
...Finally, two books that were not new but gave me great pleasure, and shared a connection beyond that...
...and yes, the Jesus who surely has made any number of religious authorities as nervous and worried as can be, hence the way he has been taken over by translators, interpreters, academics of various kinds, ecclesiastical big-shots, and theologians...
...Previously a Catholic chaplain at the Sorborne, Lustiger is not shy about controversy, and is eager to demonstrate Catholicism's compatibility with the highest standards of philosophical or scientific inquiry...
...And in the course of the year she becomes reconciled to age, "content with whatever age it is I am...
...Though you could argue that this is true to form, that only a New Yorker writer could rhapsodize over "fields of wheat and milo and sudan grass and flax and alfalfa and nothing...
...All the serious stuff about love, responsibility, faithfulness is embedded in a hilarious narrative, making one marvel at how a writer can make what should be a heartbreaking story light and funny without trivializing it...
...Jekyll and Mr...
...Rabbit Is Rich, however, got by me, though of course I read the review...
...Showalter's writing is crisp, full of verve, anecdotes, and wit...
...Driven by a naive faith in scientific reason and the dogma of progress, efforts to rationally manage social relations 726: Commonweal inevitably distance us from the sources of human sympathy...
...Godfrey Diekmann's life has spanned this turbulent century--he was born in its first decade and still lives and works in the last...
...Brian Boyd's two-volume biography of Vladimir Nabokov (Princeton University Press) comes quickly to mind...
...last spring...
...Compared to the other two rather autumnal books, Letty Pogrebin's Debora, Golda, and Me : Being Female and Jewish in America (Crown, $22, 377 pp...
...As the behavior of Nazi doctors and scientists attests, our most basic assumptions about human value and dignity are vulnerable to an intellectual devotion to "professionalism" or "objectivity...
...My two favorite political books from this year's crop are Thomas and Mary Edsall's Chain Reaction (Norton, $22.95, 339 pp...
...John B. Judis JOHN B. JUDIS is the author of William F. Buckley, Jr.: Patron Saint of the Conservatives (Touchstone paperback, 1990...
...They will die at seventy-five or eighty as stupid as when they were bom...
...a book I resisted for a while because it was so offensive even to think of a comic book about the Holocaust...
...For the first time he allows himself to consider the possibility that the master he served so selflessly was something less than a great gentleman and a great political figure--that he may in fact have been self-important and have done great harm...
...Age of Iron is literally amesPaul Baumann PAUL BAUMANN is the associate editor of Commonweal...
...In this comic book, the Jews are mice, the Nazis are cats, the others-Poles and other non-Jews and nonNazis--are pigs...
...She quotes Frank Kermode, who suggests that "we project our existential anxieties onto history...
...is a wry and moving portrait of an aging English butler as he looks back over his life of service and forward to what remains for him...
...Coetzee is astounding, but Plante is no mere recreational boater...
...As in Graham Greene's The End of the Affair, the story is told by its most religiously alienated character...
...fyou are like me, and someone asks you to look back over the books you have read in the past year, picking out the best, you will be most awed by the prodigious number you haven't read...
...It may be the best "book" published this year on American foreign policy...
...to create community...
...AIDS has taken the place of syphilis, the right-wing movement in America still tries to impose cultural and artistic censorship on our population, the senators who sought to degrade Anita Hill could have quoted Teddy Roosevelt at the turn of the century: "There is no place in the world for nations who have...lost their fiber of vigorous hardness and masculinity...
...Others may bemoan the tedium of long-distance flights, but I delight in the rare gift of several uninterrupted hours to get lost in the pages of a book...
...Equally erudite, but in a more literary and unmistakably English vein, is Noel Annan's masterly history, Our Age: English Intellectuals Between the Worm Wars, A Group Portait (Random House, $30,479 pp...
...Millions of Americans live well outside the pale, so to speak--lives of vulnerability and jeopardy in a nation that is the world's richest and strongest...
...This nagging suspicion forces the butler to reconsider the values to which / he has dedicated his professional and personal life...
...The homeless population of America's cities, camped out on hot air vents, must be reminiscent of London in the 1890s, where hordes of people made a home in Trafalgar Square and the city's parks...
...I know of no better way to learn of what it means to be born black and poor in America, then by paying close heed to Lafayette and Pharoah Rivers, two brothers whose lives, as we learn of them in this book, ought to give us plenty of pause...
...Elizabeth Shannon El IZABETH SHANNON,afrequentCommonweal contributor, is the author of I Am of Ireland (Little, Brown...
...Like it or not, a bond is formed...
...gives a frank and at the same time affectionate portrait of a much misunderstood poet who, during his days in the Village, "made good friends with, and played Maecenas to, Joe Gould...
...Norton & Company, $19.95, 256 pp...
...Late nineteenth-century concern with the horrors of an imminent feminist takeover were fed by fantasy, not fact, and yet "the nineteenth century had cherished a belief in the separate spheres of femininity and masculinity that amounted almost to religious faith...post-Darwinian 'sexual science' offered...testimony on the evolutionary differences between men and women," f'mding, of course, that "women's nurturant domestic capabilities fitted them for home and hearth...while men's aggressive, competitive abilities fitted them for public life...
...She lives in Brookline, Massachusetts...
...This year, the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations published hearings on "Relations in a Multipolar World" (part 1), which included a brilliant foreword by Moynihan and outstanding testimony by University of California political scientist Kenneth Waltz...
...Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel, is the author of Unquiet Days: At Home in Poland, recently published by Ticknor and Fields...
...Ritual has the potential to heal and warm...
...the last two decades of the nineteenth century in England were a time of severe economic depression, and the expression "unemployment" was coined, an expression used with frightening and relentless repetition in America today...
...gets the nod...
...In the nearly D fifty years since she died, _9 she has, despite her gender and her option for religion, established a permanent p/ace for herself among both pure and political philosophers...
...To this Fanny Howe FANNY HOWE is a novelist and reviewer...
...In the words of the protagonist of Paul Auster's latest novel, The Music of Chance (Viking, $18.95,217 pp...
...they may even be surprised that their difficulties with the patriarchy of Rome pale beside the strictures which, in Judaism, relegate women to nonpersonhood, and that the exclusion of women is carried to the point of violence in Israel...
...Verceuil, as he is known, is a "messenger" in the biblical sense, a stranger in whom one's own destiny takes shape and is given direction...
...Since 1988, when Clyde Prestowitz's Trading Places (Basic Books) appeared, there has been at least one outstanding book on U.S.-Japan relations each year...
...At sixty-five," she writes, "I must have been resigned to aging and death...
...Abigail McCarthy ABIGAIL McCARTHY, a famous "quonset person," is a long-time columnist for Commonweal...
...transfusion, as in Dracula...
...He is unsparing (and plain cranky) in his moral critique of the Enlightenment, and bold in his denunciation of French antiSemitism and France's widespread collaboration with the Nazis...
...Mitchell is a distinguished translator and poet...
...Those scholars who stop everything to write about her are performing the function of "incorporation"--making her part of the social system...
...Now, at seventy, although she wonders whether she could still make such a change, she and her companion, Sybil, plan to leave Washington for Maine...
...Reading this book now, it is fascinating to wonder what people would make of Joe Gould today, and what Joe Gould would make of homelessness...
...Naipaul's Guerrillas...
...The parallels in Ms...
...Modernity and the Holocaust (Cornell University Press, $29.95, 224 pp...
...The book's epigraph is a quotation from Hitler: "The Jews are undoubtedly a race, but they are not human...
...What can these two poor underprivileged boys paddling about in their recreation area hope for...
...The sequel, Maus, A Survivor's Tale, II: And Here My Troubles Began, has just been published (Pantheon, $18, 136 pp...
...But her poor health, aggravated by depression at being uprooted and a fear of being seen as useless, undermined this project...
...She believes now in the void into which her friends have gone...
...724: Commonweal She rediscovered her Jewish identity when she was confronted with the anti-Semitism in the worldwide women's movement--an anti-Semitism made all too visible in the "Zionism is racism" controversy at UNsponsored conferences in Mexico and Copenhagen...
...Where most biographers seem to hover closest, with greatest confusion, is over the issue of her so-called suicide...
...Hyde...
...The next book I give her will be Maus, A Survivor's Tale, by Art Spiegelman (Pantheon, $12, 159 pp...
...I found it happy reading because it is the story of a life fulfilled in the faith--rare in these days...
...The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro (Vintage, $9.95, 245 pp...
...There's nothing like a novel to make us look at ourselves, friends, lovers, families, acquaintances, even at public figures, with a fresh eye...
...e continue to struggle as a nation with the matter of race--the fears, the distrust, the outright hate that some of us inspire in others of us...
...She was no stylist, but her story stands on its own: One of six children, she struggled to get an education, became a schoolteacher, and, in her last years, an outspoken opponent of overdevelopment in the region...
...Get it at your local government printing office...
...Curran is a conflicted and battle-weary South African liberal, and her death from bone cancer both foreshadows and embodies her nation's hopeless situation...
...In Choosing God--Chosen by God (Ignatius Press, $19.95,423 pp...
...and Modernity and Ambivalence (Comell University Press, $43.50, 285 pp...
...and Theodore Marmor, Jerry Mashaw, and Philip Harvey's America's Misunderstood Welfare State (Basic Books, $22.95,268 pp...
...Coetzee (Waiting for the Barbarians and the Life & Times of Michael K) has been reimagining South Africa's tragic racial destiny for some time...
...She is a widely known feminist activist and writer who had to an extent rejected Judaism when she was fifteen...
...On a somewhat different tack, I much recommend Stephen Mitchell's The GospeI According to Jesus (HarperCollins, $23,310 pp...
...The correspondence between active and imaginative life is always very tenuous...
...The non-Jewish reader will be enriched by her meditations on the Jewish calendar year and her affirmation of ritual: "Ritual is food to the spiritually hungry...
...This critic, novelist, and former frequent contributor to Commonweal, fmds herself dreading her approaching seventieth birthday, hating the signs of aging, and preoccupied with death...
...Because of my work, I read a lot of travel books, often while traveling...
...Bauman's sociological perspective is perhaps foreign to most readers, but his writing is clear, and animated by a moral and intellectual urgency that is exhilarating...
...Although unfortunately both are seriously flawed, each is valuable for the vivid and concrete knowledge it gives us of two frequently misunderstood disabilities...
...The Debora of the title refers to Pogrebin's recovery of her spiritual identity, the Golda (for Israeli leader Golda Meir) to that of the secular...
...We must not allow fear to push us into cruel homophobia, make us abandon our commitment to women's sex~aal autonomy, or lead us to repudiate thefinde-sidcle vision of a future in which sexuality is a source of pleasure, comfort, and joy...
...In fact, like the proverbial angler in the cartoon, I find it tempting to talk about the ones that got away...
...There is, as the English say, something terribly sensible about Annan's every judgment...
...Warren Kimball's book on Franklin Roosevelt's wartime diplomacy, The Juggler (Princeton, $19.95,304 pp...
...It was a legitimate resident in the house of modernity...
...Later in the year, going to the Black Hills of South Dakota, I read Great Plains by Ian Frazier (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $17.95,282 pp...
...She has no ax to grind...
...It is her thinking that puts her in the realm of the blessed, and it is the avenue of her thought that we want to travel down to the end...
...Nevertheless the reader is drawn into the thoughts and happenings of that seventieth year, interested, perhaps, because they are so highly idiosyncratic...
...A strange man was called in to say Kaddish because he was more Jew than I...
...One of the mice, a troubled thirty-year-old cartoonist/writer, interviews his old, ailing survivor father, now living in Queens...
...her book is not a political statement nor a sociological scaremonger...
...to make objects and places sacred...
...Angel's book perfectly complements Karel von Wolferen's The Enigma of Japanese Power--my favorite from 1989...
...720: Commonweal 6 December 1991:721 An important message of this book, and one we can extend beyond its particular scope: Be there...
...Zygmunt Bauman (no relation), a sociologist at the University of Leeds in England, has written two extraordinary studies on the dehumanizing threat posed by our regard for "experts" and scientific rationality...
...In the course of the book the move comes about...
...Poking around the golf clubs and condominiums, Updike found and, in his obsessively detailed style, beautifully captured a Florida that, in spite of all the TV 6 December 1991:723 shows and newspaper stories, is more real than that of the drug runner and con man...
...He writes the way Baryshnikov dances: everything looks easy, and you barely realize how high he's flying...
...This is different...
...Plante is the most fastidious of craftsmen, and the construction of this novel is nearly flawless...
...Liturgical Press, $18.95,383 pp...
...He is a contributing editor of the New Republic and a Washington correspondent of In These Times...
...Another important book on the same subject is Nicholas Lemann's The Promised Land (Knopf, $24.95,355 pp...
...In an epilogue, the narrator, now grown up, is described as deformed by lying, "...changed inside forever, like a beaten dog, and gods will not cure that...
...In such an incredulous voice, the ways of God seem more undeflectable and emphatic than ever...
...Dionne's Why Americans Hate Politics (Simon and Schuster, $22.95,430 pp...
...Christian, especially Catholic, feminists, will find many resonances in her rebellion at the exclusions of women from ceremony and language...
...Needing a light paperback for the flight to France, I picked up Rabbit at Rest by John Updike (Ballantine Books, $5.99,425 pp...
...While women looked for a new feminist order at the turn of the last century, men too searched for new definitions of masculinity...
...At times he comes across as a bit too glib, but his exuberant, freeflowing prose not only captures but in a way replicates the vast, slowly emptying middle of America that he loves...
...Like the deepest thinkers of the century--Beckett, Rahner, Wittgenstein--she wore a halo of despair...
...Mitchell restores the lovely, fiery, utterly brave and unique voice (and manner, and point of view) of Jesus to us--and the result is a real gift, a blessing, even (one dares think) a moment of grace...
...The narrator's impatience with Tom's religious aspirations is brilliantly captured, as is the wounding pride of a very bright adolescent...
...He has come to Belgium to study at the Catholic University of Louvain...
...by Lawrence Mishel and David M. Frankel, which contains useful statistics...
...reincarnation, as in Rider Haggard's She...
...Verceuil ushers his white mistress over the threshold, enabling her to face death while affirming a previously unimagined solidarity...
...I wish I could give copies of her book as Christmas presents to members of the United States Senate...
...Showalter is both engaging and scholarly in comparing social, sexual, and political attitudes prevalent at the end of the nineteenth century to our ownf/n de siOcle...
...Angel challenges the prevailing view of the Nixon "shocks"--arguing that Japan's palsied policymaking precipitated Nixon's harsh reprisals...
...fairly seethes with rebellion and advocacy...
...The other book, Dylan Thomas in America, by John Malcolm Brinnin (reprinted by Paragon House, $12.95,303 pp...
...But Maus is extraordinary, combining the kind of intimacy found in Anne Frank's diary with the graphic power and drama of a Kathe Kollwitz woodcut or even one of Goya's "The Disasters of War" plates...
...Curran, to her daughter in America...
...My only complaint is that Plante makes his protagonist such a paragon of spiritual aridity that he is sometimes a tedious companion...
...I read very little fiction and even less that is recent, though I make an exception for Updike...
...Examining a snapshot of her grandchildren swimming in bright orange life preservers, Curran is offended by the antiseptic conceits of American assumptions about the nature of life...
...It's hard to choose from among the many fine small-scale novels I've read recently, so different from each other and, like pieces of chamber music, all subtle and low-keyed explorations of intricate and intimate thematic material...
...The drive to incorporate her thought into contemporary social theory indicates a need for her perspective at this time...
...read too many old books and not enough new ones to compile a credible list of this year's best books, so let me include some books from 1990 as well and add the qualification that if a worthy book is missing from my list, it may be because I haven't read it...
...His lively style and bubbling curiosity immediately draw the reader into the subject, but the book's clumsy editing almost drove this reader to cast it aside in disgust...
...Callahan began this book as an undergraduate thesis, but easily bests veteran Time correspondent Strobe Talbott's Nitze book 722: Commonweal and many of the current academic biographies of the "wise men...
...introduces two black boys who are growing up in a Chicago ghetto...
...I stand on its edge, suffering the usual guilt of the survivor...
...Throughout the book, Updike combines brilliant passages of description with realistic and often hilarious dialogue...
...subtitled A Journey into the World of the Deaf, consists of three essays by Oliver Sacks...
...Sharpe, $14.95, 315 pp...
...The year is 1959...
...Annan can sketch in a complex argument or compose a profile with a flurry of expert strokes...
...Thomas Swick THOMAS SWICK, travel editor of the Ft...
...For twenty years her Jewishness lay dormant, while, as a lecturer, author, and editor of Ms...
...in 1990, and David Plante, author of the highly regarded Francoeur family trilogy, came out with The Accident (Ticknor & Fields, $18.95, 151 pp...
...magazine, she grew ever more prominent in the women's movement and in the causes feminist women fought for...
...In low-key, almost monotone prose this author's variation on a well-known but always shocking theme demonstrates how lying saved the narrator's life and left him, at the end of the war, in dancing school, wearing brown tweed knickers and holding the "deliciously moist" hands of a pink-faced, flaxenhaired doll, still lying to avoid the Polish pogroms...
...However, even the footnotes are interesting, and Sacks's gift to the persistent reader is a picture of a complex, unfamiliar subculture with a unique language and a growing sense of power in a hearing world...
...I wish your children life...
...More important, he makes intellectual passions come alive...
...When Doris Grumbach was fifty-four, she left the life she had led for more than thirty years, her marriage, her long-time tenured job, everyone she knew, the city she had lived in for twenty years, and went off to another, different life in Washington, D.C...
...Did she want to die, or didn't she...
...Two 6 December 1991:725 sage from the dead, the transcript of a letter sent by the narrator, the dying Mrs...
...This haunting book may help us to take a long look at how and where self-deception lurks...
...His new book, Grand Illusion: Critics and Champions of the American Century, will be published next year by Farrar, Straus and Giroux...
...728: Commonweal...
...The parallels she discusses are fascinating in their similarities, but depressing in their recurrence...
...are stunning treatments of our most pressing but largely hidden moral confusions...
...Instead of rewriting the essays, which originally appeared in the New York Review of Books, the author simply put all his second thoughts into extended footnotes...
...Do they speak out of the preposterous notion that it's frivolous to read novels, that "serious books" about "important problems" put us in closer touch with what matters...
...Darkness Visible (Random House, $15.95, 84 pp...
...My copies of East Is West and Beyond Euphrates are both hardbound from the London publisher John Murray, but many of Stark's works have recently been reprinted here in paperback...
...The Accident is a severe, almost ascetical exercise, its principal action concerned with what Catholic novels once called a"mystical substitute...
Vol. 118 • December 1991 • No. 21
