Critics' choices for Christmas
Franck, Doris Grumbach, George W. Hunt, Don Wycliff, Molly Finn, Chet Raymo, Helen Alvare, Paul Elie
Critics' choices for Christmas Doris Grumbach DORIS GRUMBACH, a novelist, essayist, and longtime contributor to Commonweal, is the author most recently of Coming into the End Zone (W. W. Norton...
...He teaches Nicolo to look at the moon: "The whole world stops as this stunning dancer rises," Alessandro said, "and its beauty puts to shame all our doubts...
...In The Storyteller a Peruvian novelist remembers his friend, Saul Zuratas, who has disappeared into the Amazon rain forest...
...Martin's, $16.95, 602 pp...
...Philip Stites, a vociferous opponent of abortion, targets Renee for protest after her decision to have an abortion inadvertently makes the evening news...
...His interpretations are not always convincing, but they are invariably intriguing...
...Alessandro lives in constant communication with the beauty and power of nature...
...If the stories that open and close Let the Dead Bury Their Dead (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, $19.95, 334 pp...
...His Steps to the Ecology of Mind (1972) made him the maitre a penser for an entire generation...
...are any indication, Randall Kenan, too, is a writer gifted with early maturity...
...Among a thousand Commonweal other subjects, Burgess tells, in his wryly self-justifying manner, of writing a profile of Graham Greene in 1980: "Later, [Greene] contributed to 'Sayings of the Week' in the Observer the following remark: 'Burgess put words in my mouth which I had to look up in the dictionary.' This turned me against him...
...Berry's views are in close harmony with those of Gregory Bateson's (19041980) in A Sacred Unity: Further Steps to an Ecology of Mind (edited by Rodney E. Donaldson, HarperSan Francisco, $24.95,368 pp...
...It would be hard to think of another factor—whether the coming of age of the baby boomers, the emergence of women, even the shift from an industrial to a postindustrial economy—that has affected American politics as deeply and persistently over the past quarter century as race has...
...To my mind, the book-of-the-year in Catholic biography is William W. Meissner's psychobiography of the founder of the Jesuit order, Ignatius of Loyola: The Psychology of a Saint (Yale, $35,480 pp...
...Roger Swain is another poet of the back yard...
...He was like a murderer annoyed at being called a shoplifter...
...When the book was first published, most reviewers focused on post-fatwa essays such as "Why I Have Embraced Islam" (replaced here by "One Thousand Days in a Balloon," which Rushdie delivered during his surprise appearance at Columbia University a year ago...
...A Room with a View (1908) and Howard's End (1910) are particularly delightful, but if you're anything like me, once you've started you' 11 read any book by Forster you can lay your hands on...
...At the heart of the genre is the notion that any place contains all places, and any time contains all time...
...Everything from the Big Bang to the formation of galaxies, suns, planets, earth, life forms, animals, and various stages of human development is narrated from the same mythic-scientific point of view...
...Janovy is distinguished professor of biological sciences at the University of Nebraska, and author of the popular Keith County Journal...
...Mario Vargas Llosa says it best in his novel The Storyteller (Penguin, $9, 246 pp...
...a posthumous collection of essays that explore literature, science, philosophy, and religion in a search to uncover the root sickness of the modem era...
...I read them while I cooked dinner, turning the pages while I stirred spaghetti, steam collecting on my glasses...
...He writes of mollusks and whales, rocks and old Fords and Chevys, gastropods, pelicans, and vermillion sunrises...
...Grove Weidenfeld published Little Wilson, Big God ($14.95) in 1987 and You've Had Your Time ($23.50) in 1991, and given their bulk (460 pp...
...It is, in considerable part, an effort to reckon what the Edsalls describe as "the political costs of a morally ambitious undertaking"—black equality...
...It is also encouraging that the prolife feminist message holds so much in common with the seamless garment approach to social justice...
...Vargas Llosa's novel, a montage of myth and recollection, is a Commonweal good example of this kind of storytelling...
...Along the way people lose their voices, women grow mustaches, and a seven-year-old impersonates Satan...
...He is the well-known host of Public Television's "The Victory Garden" and science editor of Horticulture magazine...
...Typically, writers under the sway of Marquez steal his magic, overlooking his realism—but Kenan roots his every sentence in the works and days of the North Carolina town of Tims Creek, creating the effect of a "dream [that] had the taste and feel of real life...
...Published in hardcover in 1991, it was reissued in paperback and with a new afterword this year...
...All are rendered in sharp, teasing prose...
...At Weddings and Wakes (Farrar, Straus, Giroux, $19,213 pp...
...Nicolo and Alessandro's lively conversation frames the narrative...
...For those who find it a mystery that talented people, armed with unlimited budgets and equally unlimited "artistic" freedom, can create a calamity, this is the book of answers...
...The rather depressing 1992 presidential campaign demanded personal restoratives, and I discovered one in Eric Alterman's dissection of our political media-celebrities (George Will, Henry Kissinger, John McLaughlin, Pat Buchanan, et al...
...Alterman's argument is a bit too apocalyptic for my taste, but his concerns are well-placed, and his analyses and anecdotes are often very witty and incisive...
...With "ethnic cleansing'' and a worldwide epidemic of archaic xenophobia and sadistic violence, one cannot afford to ignore this incisive analysis...
...and 406 pp...
...Except that Strong Motion hasn't found a large audience...
...Burgess's books make clear that a career of miscellaneous journalism, for all its drawbacks, is not to be despised...
...His essays will appeal particularly to readers of a certain age, who remember such things as dime-store turtles, the odors of witch hazel and wintergreen, and the dark luster of horse chestnuts collected in shoe boxes for...for what...
...Without saying anything, it says so much....In that sense, it's better than the sun, which is always holding forth and butting at you like a ram...
...Should I slip, it is where I will fall...
...Atnas Svilar's journeys take him from the mountain's famous monastery to Marshal Tito's summer home, La Scala, to his business in California...
...And he speaks about the war which even at this age "I can't get out of my blood...
...I tend to be suspicious of the trendy, perhaps overly so...
...I've thought often this year about Jonathan Franzen' s second novel, Strong Motion (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $22.95, 508 pp...
...Volcano Lover (Farrar, Straus, Giroux, $22, 419 pp...
...This is a touching, sometimes gut-wrenching book that takes the reader inside the base ecclesial communities at the root of liberation theologyTwo of my favorite books came out last year and are already in paperback...
...Rereading it is even better than reading it the first time...
...In 1980 he had abandoned hell and sin and was on the way to dispensing with God, but the imputation of Jansenism still rankled...
...Another outstanding study, this one wedding history with analysis, is Steven Vineburg's Method Actors: Three Generations of an Acting Style (Schirmer, $24.95, 364 pp...
...So, it is in this Audenesque spirit that I recommend the following random selection of recently released books...
...Helena (Pantheon, $22,277 pp...
...To be sure, these are necessary...
...Anne Tyler's Saint Maybe (Ivy Books, $5.99, 337 pp...
...Her deep love for Pope John XXIII, "for whom the church existed not to serve itself, but the Spirit," colors her view of other popes in her lifetime who "continued to envision women's total lives in terms of the alternatives of motherhood and virginity, unaware of male bias, oblivious to psychological and spiritual stifling imposed on women's human development...
...they will finish understanding that there exist in America communities of opinion which transcend party identification...
...In its few densely written pages she honors Nobel Laureate McClintock, who died recently in her nineties, as the remarkable scientist who for decades was the lone 30: 4 December 1992 pioneer of a new biology...
...So, unfortunately, does Andrew Hacker's in Two Nations: Black and White, Separate, Hostile, Unequal (Scribners, $34.95,258 pp...
...The final essay, by the Thai activist Sulek Sivaraksa, a man of exceptional courage and integrity, confirms and supplements Berry's Christic ethic for human survival...
...In Landscape Painted with Tea (Vintage, $12, 342 pp...
...Serious, witty, romantic, melodramatic, written in the best crisp, accurate, and unpretentious prose, these books have lasted beyond their day...
...Helen Alvare HELEN ALVARE is director of planning and information for the Secretariat for ProLife Activities of the National Conference of Catholic Bishops...
...Auden once said that "Pleasure is by no means an infallible, critical guide—but it is the least fallible...
...What he discovers there is astonishing: woolly mammoths, shamans, coyotes, scientists, witches, a weird assortment of colonial Americans, and at least one computer company CEO...
...W. Norton & Company...
...Jessica Bayne JESSICA BAYNE is a senior at Columbia University and an intern at Commonweal...
...Arno Gruen' s The Insanity of Normality (Grove Weidenfeld, $19.95,226 pp...
...It helps determine the emotional life of his characters...
...Salamon's report, from misconception to disastrous aftermath, centers on the making of the mega-bust movie, Bonfire of the Vanities...
...Professor Abe, who is prominent in Christian-Buddhist dialogue, has taught at Princeton, Claremont, and Purdue universities...
...Cunneen treats both women and the church with respect and love...
...He rethought and recast all traditional Buddhist fundamentals...
...In his little book E. M. Forster, Lionel Trilling singles out Forster's characteristic focus: "All novelists deal with morality, but not all novelists...are concerned with moral realism, which is not the awareness of morality itself but the contradiction, paradoxes, and dangers of living the moral life...
...He] loved the stars for being unassailable, and believed that each and every one of them was his ally...
...As someone daily growing in appreciation for the value of good mothering, I was immediately attracted to the thesis pursued in Sally Cunneen' s Mother Church (Paulist Press, $ 11.95,222 pp...
...Sally Cunneen's Mother Church (Paulist Press, $11.95, 222 pp...
...His second novel, The Dork of Cork (Warner), willbepubHshed in the spring...
...Her organization is ingenious, moving always from "below,'' often erupting in brilliant flourishes of penetrating insight and touching expression...
...Somehow the books slipped by me until now...
...What thinks is a brain in a human being who is part of a system that includes an environment...
...by Julia Blackburn, is an account of Napoleon's last six years of exiled life on a remote island told so perfectly that it reads like a beautifully written novel...
...Dennis Doyle DENNIS DOYLE teaches in the religious studies department at the University of Dayton...
...Nicolo reveals both his ignorance and an awakening consciousness...
...Another contrast to the horrors of war is the richness of the family life and the culture in which Alessandro grew up, a life that fostered and celebrated the loving, intelligent, adventurous, accomplished young man Alessandro became before he was immersed in the war...
...It boldly continues blazing its beauty even as we destroy ourselves...
...Someone once said of Flannery O'Connor that any crank could write a letter to her and get an answer...
...A worthy companion piece is the report done by White House correspondents Michael Duffy and Dan Goodgame, who have covered the Bush administration from the beginning...
...They reaffirm what it means to be a storyteller...
...A must-read...
...by Brian Swimme and Thomas Berry...
...Dionne, Jr...
...Meanwhile the Rev...
...Paul Elie PAULEL1E, a frequent Commonweal contributor, also writes for the New Republic and Lingua Franca...
...The Rev...
...This novel describes a generation of the Garcia family who settle in New York after fleeing the Dominican Republic...
...by Terry McMillan is this writer's third interesting novel, about four black, middle-class women, who are survivors, and the men to whom they are attached...
...In She Who Is: The Mystery of God in Feminist Theological Discourse (Crossroad, $24.95,316 pp...
...As a storyteller or mythmaker, he articulates and therefore helps maintain and perpetuate the native culture...
...Nonetheless—or perhaps because of this—he has inspired a wonderful biography by James M. O'Toole, Militant and Triumphant: William Henry O 'Connell and the Catholic Church in Boston, 1859-1944 (Notre Dame, $38.95, 320 pp...
...In it she writes of her particular calling, writing, but her words are broad-reaching...
...is an extraordinary short novel that seems suspended in time and space, even as we follow an order of nuns through their daily life, always aware of the time of day, the succession of feast days, the seasons, the landscape and the physical attributes of their surroundings, their clothing, their bodies...
...His book, published last spring, which I reviewed in Commonweal [June 5], is an exquisitely insightful attempt to chart the social and economic divide between blacks and whites...
...Then in July my conspicuous consumption of books, at the rate of about one a day, began...
...My next choice, Inner Peace, World Peace, Essays on Buddhism and Nonviolence, edited by Kenneth Kraft (S.U.N.Y., $12.95,156 pp...
...Many will begin the book, as I did, believing that their political opinions make them a party of one...
...So appallingly thin were the books, and so self-indulgent and selfimportant were the authors, that I was forced to turn for sustenance to something I knew would nourish me...
...I have been drawn, instead, to Rushdie's book reviews, most of them short pieces that he wrote before perilous celebrity overtook him...
...should I weaken, it is where I will rest...
...that our church as mother can learn valuable lessons from women's mothering experiences...
...Whether the subject is race, abortion, or the family, Dionne lucidly articulates why we are so dissatisfied with current political offerings...
...The first part of the year I was writing, and so I read almost nothing...
...And, until Chain Reaction, no book has explored that influence so wisely, insightfully, and honestly...
...The book tells the story of their first two years, describing their observing, helping, and finally just being with the people...
...I read reviews when they were first published and recall thinking each time, "This sounds like a must-read...
...Pro-Life Feminism (edited by Gail Grenier Sweet, Life Cycle Books, $9.95, 234 pp...
...Among the flora and fauna Janovy describes, the human animal is central...
...by Bill and Patty Coleman...
...Nevertheless, when John Janovy arrives, he finds a wild, extraordinary, sunstruck Eden...
...Not only is it especially literate, but it realistically treats the difficulties of living with less after years of pursuing an expensive lifestyle...
...One person's back yard is another's wilderness...
...Bateson's epistemology, as antipodal to Descartes's as is Berry's, is a powerful stimulant in his stress on the "Sacred Unity''—in diversity—of the biosphere...
...Don Wycliff DON WYCLIFF is editorial page editor of the Chicago Tribune...
...I can't remember...
...Books are "tangible proof that storytelling can be something more than entertainment ....Something primordial, something the very existence of a people may depend on...
...for that long, those shores have been someone's back yard...
...His latest book is Saving Graces: Sojourns of a Back Yard Biologist (Little, Brown, $17.95, 138 pp...
...The feeling of the book is French, like Bernanos or Mauriac...
...Bateson would have applauded...
...24: 4 December 1992 Chet Raymo CHET RAYMO, professor of physics at Stonehill College in Massachusetts, is a science columnist for the Boston Globe and author of several books on science...
...Adrian M. Hofstetter, O.P.'s, admirable New Biology: Barbara McClintock and an Emerging Holistic Science (Anima Publishers, $4.75, 18 pp...
...I found Masao Abe's A Study ofDogen, His Philosophy and Religion (S.U.N.Y, $12.95, 251 pp...
...Rather than grafting on magic, he finds it by burrowing deep within the ordinary...
...Mariette in Ecstasy by Ron Hansen (Harper Perennial, $10,179 pp...
...Johnson committed the nation and the Democratic party to that undertaking immediately upon taking office after John Kennedy's assassination...
...What he gives us is "a sort of cosmology, an example of one way to see the universe...
...This emerges as well in Salman Rushdie's essay collection Imaginary Homelands (Penguin, $12.50, 439 pp...
...but it happens...
...We all know the life I mean...
...In these essays Rushdie can be seen gradually developing his own aesthetic, while never losing sight of the books under review...
...Had Edwin O'Connor known but half the story of the good cardinal that this biography reveals, his Last Hurrah would still be required reading as a cautionary tale in every rectory...
...The Vermillion Sea (Houghton Mifflin, $19.95,226 pp...
...Why did we collect them...
...He creates a new world, one that has more reality and sense to it than the author's own Peru, where he ran unsuccessfully for president just a few years ago...
...She was not the conventional detached observer: "When I look at a cell, I get down into that cell and look around," she said...
...equally thought-provoking...
...I dream of the war more than I dream of the present or of my youth...
...Alessandro seeks to educate the boy...
...His argument is that Americans are trapped in a "politics of false choices...
...I think The Disappearing Act and Mama (both in paper from Washington Square Press) are even better, but the three establish McMillan as a genuine fictional voice...
...Her husband, also a writer, was killed at the end of the war and this tragedy permeates these essays and gives Ginzburg's writing an aura of wisdom...
...Sivaraksa also shows that it is not religion's impact on culture but cultural and political distortions of religious teaching that throughout history have provoked hatred, persecutions, and massacres...
...It feeds itself and it grows within us...
...in Sound and Fury: The Washington Punditocracy and the Collapse of American Politics (HarperCollins, $23,352 pp...
...The fate of the earth therefore is our own...
...Eleanor Roosevelt, Volume I, 18851933 (Viking, $27.50, 587 pp...
...Sally Cunneen succeeds in speaking from heart to heart...
...Among his more recent books are The Zen of Seeing/Drawing as Meditation (Vintage) andTo Be Human against All Odds (Asian Humanities Press...
...Whether one is interested in Latin American history, General Simon Bolivar himself, or just the magical, lyrical writing of Marquez, this book is a treat...
...For those who find Carl Sagan and Stephen Hawking to be spiritually truncated and yet seek a more updated version of science than that offered by Teilhard de Chardin, Swimme and Berry are worth a try...
...The result is a jargon-free, graceful overview of a varied, though distinctive, technique, interwoven with penetrating analyses of particular actors and their styles...
...Within a square mile of land surrounding his pond, Thoreau discovered universal truths...
...In the early thirties Gebser perceived the first stirrings of a new mode of consciousness that, without decreasing or ignoring preceding stages, integrates these into an "Integral Structure of Consciousness...
...Had he not already been following the same path for several years, Bill Clinton might almost be thought to have been using the Edsalls' book as a kind of manual in his successful presidential race, a guide to how a Democratic candidate could defuse the race issue and win the presidency...
...Father Meissner, both a Jesuit and a practicing psychoanalyst, lucidly recounts the extraordinary life of Ignatius against the turbulent ecclesiastical and social background of the sixteenth century, and then he interprets the psychodynamics of that life by a "look within," attempting to uncover the complex interplay of human motivation and religious experience...
...For the most part my reading tastes reflect my boorish conversational habits...
...Boys round Tims Creek use to do it all the time to impress folk, pretending they were in the wild wild West...
...The waters of Walden Pond were deep enough to hold all of human history, and the view from the door of his cabin encompassed the distant stars...
...Despite indications that this year's presidential election signals a change in the alignments that have been created over the past quarter century by the race issue, the Edsalls' analysis remains current and largely valid...
...Although she speaks from deeply within the context of a movement, she qualifies her positions carefully enough to transcend her ideology and to offer a discussion of God that should be enlightening and inspiriting for all readers no matter what their prior persuasions...
...It represents an attempt by leading figures within the ecological movement to re-envision the story of the cosmos and human history in a fully integrated fashion...
...seems to be all weight and no lightness, another overlong pop-music study that, in presenting songs as texts and fashion as a subversive activity, leaves itself devoid of any writerly style or music...
...Their greatest gift is the depth of their love for the people whom they encounter...
...rose from thickets and trees, and hovered like black sunlight," moonlight is "the color of pearl, with grays, silver, and gold all beaming from it in a flash...
...Like Vargas Llosa, the Yugoslavian (now Serbian) poet and novelist Milorad Pavic may be considered a magical realist...
...He tells Nicolo a secret he's never revealed to anyone...
...The descriptions of Raphael's portrait of Bindo Altoviti in the Alte Pinakothek in Munich and of Giorgione' s La Tempesta in the Accademia in Venice not only make you want to rush off to see them...
...give books to my family and to my friends for Christmas, books that I search for in the same way my grandmother searches for pieces for her quilts...
...All these writers have crossed the lines of nationality and tradition...
...He had long, it seemed, had something against me: back in 1966 I had written an article on him in which I suggested that he had been touched by the Jansenist heresy...
...These are books that have drawn me in and that have nourished and comforted me...
...Structures of Consciousness by Georg Feuerstein (Integral Publishing, $14.95) is a provocative, brilliantly written introduction to the world of Jean Gebser, who is still relatively unknown in this country...
...In an imperfect analogy, he likens corporate abuse of the environment to public meddling with a woman's reproductive system...
...Watch for it...
...Also, they do have some success in mounting a challenge to the current division of the natural sciences, the human sciences, and the humanities by using the same metaphor of emerging creativity to drive their explanations throughout...
...This novel is set for publication by Viking in summer 1993...
...Now they are well worn and sit on my night table, and I hope they will be cherished on the bookshelves of my friends...
...Their quest leads them to a new appreciation not only of Scripture but of popular religiosity and traditional liturgical spirituality...
...To an extent that leaves this black man somewhat uncomfortable, however, Hacker seems to suggest that bridging the racial gap and bringing blacks to full equality depend mostly on white understanding and good will...
...I recommend also Walker Percy's Signposts in a Strange Land (Noonday, $15,428 pp...
...But if blacks must wait for whites to save them, then salvation, I fear, will never come...
...It's not too likely it'll rear up like that with a cultivator attached to the back...
...Breakers are "held high in the wind and...
...Helprin's nature is not neutral...
...He talks about art, nature, sex...
...concludes my list...
...George W. Hunt GEORGE w. HUNT, S.J., is editor-in-chief of America magazine...
...Frederick Frnnck FREDERICK FRANCK has written extensively on Buddhism...
...A brilliant start to the recounting of the life of the great first lady, until she enters the White House...
...With his somewhat cranky conservatism, he restores my healthy suspicions of the overly trendy...
...Swain takes as his epigraph a line from Colette: "The more the wonders of the visible world become inaccessible, the more intensely do its curiosities affect us...
...But Franzen's rangy intellect is held in check by his artistry—his unerring plotting, his eye for end-of-the-century manners, his inviting prose—and Stites's rousing stump speech against abortion is one that should prompt readers on all sides of the issue to a renewed examination of their views...
...He also sees punk culture and music (such as the Sex Pistols' harshly ironic single "God Save the Queen," released during Elizabeth's jubilee celebration) as the culmination of 1968-style radical politics, when in retrospect punk seems not so much an end as a beginning: pop culture's first definitive break with the '60s promises of unlimited plenitude and progress...
...it is certainly convincing...
...Ginzburg died this past year and this volume is an apt memorial, for you sense she wrote it for her children and for those of us who share her story...
...Vineburg traces the complicated origins of the Method in the Group Theater, its development in the work of its second-generation (Montgomery Clift, Marlon Brando, James Dean, et al...
...And in too many respects that divide is deeper and wider than ever...
...What follows is a selection from that gormandizing: The Emperor's Last Stand: A Journey to St...
...This first-rate work, about an Irish-Catholic family in Brooklyn and Long Island, introduced me to this young and most talented novelist, and sent me back to reading two of her excellent earlier books, A Bigamist's Daughter and That Night (both available in paperback from Harper Perennial...
...However, in the past six months I have read one excellent novel—in manuscript...
...Johnson's mastery of and feel for the classical sources is impressive...
...The novel is panoramic, its story winding through generations of characters both real and allegorical...
...Alessandro says...
...Respectful of scientific fact and sensitive to human meaning, nature writers, like jugglers, keep universals and particulars in the air at the same time...
...Feminists maintaining a prolife stance have long been banned from the major women's groups, and only recently are becoming a distinctive voice in the prolife movement and on the national scene...
...Answering the question: Does the brain think...
...instead it is an inventive and humorous view of the lives of Emma and William Hamilton, and of course Lord Nelson...
...It provides context and contrast to events as overwhelming and vicious as war...
...My vision of the evolving cosmos has been adjusted and considerably enlarged by The Universe Story: From the Primordial Flaring Forth to the Ecozoic Era— A Celebration of the Unfolding of the Cosmos (Harper, $22, 255 pp...
...is an anthology of essays on nonviolence, equally relevant to Christians and Buddhists...
...His book shows us what life is (as only a biologist can), and makes us glad to be alive...
...My favorite essay is titled "My Vocation...
...It is the rare person today who will bend to pick up a penny...
...Cardinal William Henry O'Connell of Boston, who reigned (not too strong a word) over the Athens of America for thirty-seven years, would not be deemed a saint by the most charitable standards...
...is a best seller that stands in supermarket racks amid the tabloids like a nugget of gold in a trash heap...
...Natalia Ginzburg's collection of essays The Little Virtues (Little, Brown, $7.95,110 pp...
...At first glance Jon Savage's England's Dreaming: Anarchy, Sex Pistols, Punk Commonweal Rock, and Beyond (Si...
...It is a vocation which...feeds on terrible things, it swallows the best and worst in our lives and our evil feelings flow in its blood just as much as our benevolent feelings...
...A thoughtful, intelligent book...
...Sliding shamelessly down the slippery slope of rereading, I basked in the works of Dickens, Henry James, Hawthorne, and James Joyce, to name only a few of the dead white European (and American) males who helped me through the year...
...Franzen has cited the influence of first novels such as Wise Blood and Midnight's Children, whose authors "seemed to have learned not to sound like kids anymore...
...An original, intelligent, and witty view by a literary critic of the experience of dying of cancer, a treatment of the subject of being sick like no other I have ever read...
...She ends her rich, wise, and gentle observations on the church with a wonderfully poetic vision of Old Mother Church meditating on her children's "interpreting the religious story anew...to preserve life...
...I have read a number of books of this genre, like Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance or Do What You Love, the Money Will Follow...
...etween writing books, I embark on a gluttonous binge of reading them...
...The finest close-up account of the film industry that I have ever read is by Julie Salamon, film critic for the Wall Street Journal, and it is temptingly and appropriately titled The Devil's Candy (Houghton Mifflin, $24, 434 pp...
...The question is whether Clinton managed only to defuse the issue—or whether he disarmed it...
...Beyond that it is a lovely, dense tapestry of eighteenth-century aristocratic life lived in the shadow of Mount Vesuvius...
...In the spirit of Christmas, I will refrain from naming most of the recently published books I read in 1992...
...by Anatole Broyard...
...Henry David Thoreau established the pattern for America...
...But the book that convinced me that the nineties can produce something great is Mark Helprin's A Soldier of the Great War (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, $24.95,792 pp...
...Borrowing categories from Italo Calvino, for example, he writes that the episodes in Julian Barnes's History of the Word in 101/2 Chapters (among them "a woodworm's-eye view of the Ark story") "possess in abundance the high literary virtue of lightness, [but] they fail to acquire, by cumulation, the necessary weight: it being the paradox of literature that you need the pair of them on the voyage, weight and lightness, and, as with lovers and animals, you can't afford to leave half the couple off your ark...
...In every sense, a readable, credible, wellresearched work, which brings to life the complex, admirable woman Eleanor Roosevelt was...
...Hacker has a wonderful faculty for seeing in statistics things that others overlook...
...they are a perfect antidote to up-to-date schlock...
...John, in a style known as "magical realism...
...I am late discovering Mitchell's books...
...They confirm our recognition of art as something that connects human beings with eternityIf these few little quotations haven't made you want to read this wonderful book, it's probably not for you...
...She provides theological grounding for speaking of God in exclusively feminine metaphors, at least for a temporary transitional period until talk of God can be truly coequal...
...A more down-to-earth book that has changed the way I think is Whispers of Revelation: Discovering the Spirit of the Poor (Twenty-Third Publications, $9.95, 209 pp...
...The latter is the subject of Sr...
...Devil's candy, indeed...
...Several much-praised novels and books of essays were sent me for review...
...He comes to Baja as an emissary from a world of university scientists consumed by their search for solutions to problems of practical, thus economic, interest...
...It was on a recent trip to the dry-cleaner—part of an endless round of dropping off and picking up the clothes I love to buy and wear—that I got my most recent craving to toss it all and live the simple life...
...If the reader is forced to become part of Pavic's novel, he will be content to eavesdrop on Julia Alvarez's How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents (Plume, $9, 290 pp...
...We have surrounded ourselves with an impermeable membrane of asphalt, television images, and hurry...
...If before attending a party I learn that talk of religion and politics will be verboten, I wonder how I am supposed to have any fun...
...one might have expected to spend from then till now getting through them: but they are brisk and wholly charming...
...On a square mile of land not far from Walden Pond, John Hanson Mitchell achieves the same thing in a pair of books recently republished as a handsome set: Ceremonial Time: Fifteen Thousand Years on One Square Mile (Houghton Mifflin, $10.95, 222 pp...
...Gebser (1905-1973) distinguished four stages or what he called structures of consciousness, from the "Archaic" via the "Magical" and "Mythic" to the mental structure which in the West flowered during the Renaissance, culminating in that cogito that gradually hypertrophied into the inflated ego's megalomania and science's claims to omniscience and omnipotence...
...I was wrong...
...A British journalist, he sees the late-'70s rise of scruffy, enraged bands such as the Sex Pistols, the Clash, and Generation X as a serious affair, equal parts class rebellion and postmodern media put-on...
...Waiting to Exhale (Viking, $22,409 pp...
...Anyone who grows misty-eyed with romantic nostalgia over the good old, pre-Vatican II days of the American church is fated to have his/her Commonweal 4 December 1992:21 eyes blink open with surprise on reading this book...
...The tiny miracles that once seemed to occur unbidden in our back yards are no longer valued...
...Thinkers such as Teilhard de Chardin, Bateson, Berry, Bohm, Sheldrake, and Barbara McClintock represent the avant garde of this consciousness...
...It is a record of childlike wonder, anticipation, and discovery...
...Jimmy Carter's victory in 1976, after the Republicans had all but committed suicide as a party, was the exception to the rule...
...y choices may show that Descartes Inc...
...by E.J...
...His subject is "that undiscovered country of the nearby, the secret world that lurks beyond the night windows and at the fringe of cultivated back yards...
...Saul has become a "habladore," a storyteller, for the indigenous people...
...is indispensable for understanding the self-hatred and the false selves children are forced to develop by suppressing their authenticity and autonomy in order to conform with their peers and to bribe authoritarian figures, such as parents and teachers, into accepting, "loving" them...
...They could not be more welcome at a time when it seems there is little new under the sun that can be said about our nation's abortion problem...
...is the account of his journey...
...Roger Swain is a writer who picks up nature's pennies and reminds us why they were once so important...
...After seventy-five years and some fifty books, Burgess shows no loss of vitality...
...They serve as a reminder that once upon a time he was just another middling British writer, holding forth on this and that with more intelligence and enthusiasm than was required of him...
...In the different voices of the Garcia women, the novel examines tradition and the painful repercussions of leaving home...
...Alvarez describes the struggles of four daughters and their mother in their attempts to rediscover their values as they are haunted by memories of the country and family they've left behind...
...ature writing at its best springs the gap between the "two cultures...
...The Democratic party's embrace of civil rights—to be more specific, of the cause of redress, advancement, and equality for black Americans—led to an historic alteration of the political landscape not just of the South, but of the entire nation...
...The Democrats have been paying the political costs ever since, through their persistent inability to win the presidency...
...Shrewd though he was, Johnson didn't know the half of it...
...Ginzburg spent much of the Second World War in forced residence in a small town that is immortalized in her essay "Winter in the Abruzzi...
...As does everything in Helprin's work, the war takes place in a natural world of majestic beauty where "the light of stars collided and crossed," "mysterious and beguiling songbirds...
...In the process they raised for me a thousand stimulating questions...
...The result is a modest, sensible yet insightful reading that is never less than fascinating and endlessly informative...
...he poet W.H...
...Its author is Peter Quinn, and it is an historical novel, titled Poor Banished Children of Eve, that interlaces the stories of several fascinating characters and reaches its climax in the events of the 1863 draft riots in New York City during our Civil War...
...Savage generally holds in check the pretensions implied by the book's subtitle, however, adroitly walking the line between amateur semiotics and pop-music hagiography...
...Most people who read this book will feel sure they thought of its thesis first, so intuitive are Dionne's ideas...
...Forster lifts himself out of the action of the novels from time to time to offer the reader his sharp observations and philosophical comments on the human experience...
...As is usually the case, the novels are richer and more entertaining than the films and in addition they're thought-provoking...
...Like the nineteenth-century naturalist John Burroughs, Mitchell is content to let the turning earth bring everything by his door...
...curled and revolved in contradictory fonts of air and rocking parabolas of foam...
...by Blanche Wiesen Cook...
...Like his first book, The Twenty-seventh City (1988), it is what Saul Bellow has called a "large-audience novel"—an artful, thoughtful, social, capacious book that bridges the gap between a popular thriller and a literary masterwork...
...by Alice McDermott...
...I don't know how accurate this intimate portrait is...
...another must, impresses by an intelligence du coeur free from all feminist chauvinism, yet far from the "silent woman idealized in the church...
...Her can'tput-it-down story of human repentance and divine grace that intermingle with and yet transcend the conventionally religious should not be missed...
...In "Clarence and the Dead," he presents a talking pig and a boy who, his mother having died giving birth to him, grows up able to speak to the dead (they mainly gossip...
...It is no secret that our country tends still to rate mothering somewhere below achieving a lucrative career and somewhere above unemployment...
...For some reason—perhaps an overreverence for style and subtlety—it now takes me ten times as long to read good fiction as it does nonfiction...
...First, let me recommend Why Americans Hate Politics (Simon & Schuster, $ 12,444 pp...
...Helprin's portrayal of the brutality and futility of war is made more poignant by the presence of this picture of civilized life, as it is by Alessandro's constant preoccupation with art...
...Elizabeth Johnson has produced a scholarly work on a crucial topic written so well as to make it accessible to a popular audience...
...as though my attention might compensate for general public neglect...
...As for me, I can hardly wait to reread it...
...In ourfin de siecle affluence, we can afford Hollywood special effects and virtual realities...
...he merges puns, proverbs, allegory, and history...
...Like Mitchell and Swain, Janovy brings the knowledge of a scientist and the sensitivity of a poet to the description of one charmed place...
...On the subject of politics not as usual, I would recommend Gabriel Garcia Marquez's The General in His Labyrinth (translated by Edith Grossman, Penguin, $12, 285 pp...
...As Louis and Renee try to prove her theory, Franzen makes connections—elaborate, but never laborious—between seismic "strong motion" and strong emotions, between the earth's inward changing and Renee's...
...The fine and interesting films that have been made from E. M. Forster's novels took me back to the books themselves...
...It would have been enough for Johnson to deepen my growing appreciation of feminist perspectives...
...So is the story, full of ambiguities, of Mariette's short postulancy—her life in the convent, her life of prayer, her experience of Christ's stigmata, her trial, and her departure from the convent...
...Through a fantastic accident, Alessandro Giuliani, a seventy-four-year-old professor of aesthetics, finds himself walking through the Italian countryside with Nicolo, an illiterate and very innocent factory worker to whom he relates the story of his life, focusing especially on its central event, the Great War, in which he served as a soldier in the Italian army...
...His The Church Emerging from Vatican II: A Popular Approach to Contemporary Catholicism is published by Twenty-Third Publications...
...But Simple Living (Viking, $21,272 pp...
...In the process, various layers of attitudes and presuppositions are stripped away...
...Bateson, a biologist celebrated for his anthropological field work with Margaret Mead, became a key figure in cybernetics and systems theory...
...The author of the novel, A Visitation of Spirits (1989), Kenan has been called "our 'black' Marquez," and he clearly has learned from Marquez' s magic realism...
...Percy, a distinguished novelist, diagnoses the modern malaise as a lack of appreciation of the transcendent...
...22: 4 December 1992 Commonweal Nolly Finn MOLLY FINN, a frequent Commonweal contributor, lives in New York City...
...and of its contemporary practitioners (Paul Newman, Jack Nicholson, Gene Hackman, etc...
...she has gone further and deepened my apprehension of the mystery of who God is, and for that I am grateful...
...Accents may be lost as the women make their way in America, but the rhythms of childhood Commonweal and Dominican life still cling to the hearts of these women...
...is in serious trouble...
...I recalled that remark earlier this year as I read Anthony Burgess's two volumes of memoirs, where he recounts a life in which he seems to have been willing to take up almost any project proposed to him—reviews, scripts, teaching, orchestral scores, hack travel writing, the odd polemical joust with the Vatican—while writing his many novels...
...Just as well, because back-to-back they make a particularly pleasurable read...
...Yet Percy is himself something of a prophet, as well as one of the most important American Catholic intellectuals of the twentieth century...
...thus he misses the exquisitely vague, low, mixed motives of punk in America...
...Somehow, these things have become inaccessible...
...Even so, Savage has written a good book when he could very easily—and very punkishly—have written a bad one...
...I did, though, sincerely feel challenged by their "change or die'' ecological millenarianism (or should I say 28: 4 December 1992 "billenarianism...
...Their title and subtitle encapsulate the narrative and thematic thrust of their report, Marching in Place: The Status Quo Presidency of George Bush (Simon and Schuster, $23, 316 pp...
...His My Days with Albert Schweitzer will be published in 1993 by Lyons & Burford...
...And I defy anyone reading it to resist the ghoulish impulse to rent the video as a confirming accompaniment...
...Vargas Llosa blends folk tale with herbalism, Kafka with the Gospel of St...
...It's more in Commonweal touch with the seasons, filled with dinners other than "Budget Gourmets," and it includes time to make your bed in the morning...
...They discover anew, through the eyes of the poor, the meaning of Christmas and Easter...
...Or I read them on the subway—some are spotted by spilled coffee...
...It is the essential condition to which I always return and refer...
...resident Lyndon Johnson, after signing the Civil Rights Act of 1964, is said to have remarked, "Well, I just gave the South to the Republicans for the next forty years...
...is a collection of essays that has been around for seven years but is, I believe, just coming into its own...
...Personal transitions have marked the past few years, and I have found that my Christmas books seem to mark both global and personal transformations...
...This is lamentable, because the novel is as engrossing and accomplished, and as public in its concerns, as any I have read lately...
...like Pagnol's films or New England songwriter Bill Morrissey's records, these memoirs leave an indelible impression of the artist who has fashioned them...
...Bateson answered, "No...
...This work is so close to the cutting edge that I recommend you wear gloves when turning the pages...
...the wonderful things of the world are nothing more than a frame for a spirit, like fire and light, that is the endless roiling of love and grace....beauty cannot be expressed or explained in a theory or an idea,...it moves by its own law,...it is God's way of comforting his broken children...
...Thomas Berry's splendid paper The Ecozoic Era (The Riverdale Center of Religious Research, $5) describes the earth, far from being a Cartesian machine, as a radically interdependent living system, vulnerable to irreversible damage and of which we humans are derivative parts...
...Now a ole John Deere tractor," he writes, in just one exemplary passage, "if you play the clutch and the gas and the brake just right, will rear up its front part just like a horse...
...Thus I realized with some personal surprise that the books that most touched me over the past year were all, well, not exactly trendy, but what I might call "prophetic...
...by Frank Levering and Wanda Urbanska is one of the best...
...In the title story, Kenan surrounds a mock oral history with a comically pedantic commentary...
...My memory of the novels was dim and the films so vivid I'd almost convinced myself that the movies were probably better than the books...
...The story of that great shift is the subject of Chain Reaction: The Impact of Race, Rights, and Taxes on American Politics, by Thomas Edsall, with Mary D. Edsall (Norton, $10.95, 258 pp...
...This is unlike any other novel I have ever read...
...It confronts the reader, asks her to complete crosswords and even to fill in the denouement of the story...
...The narrative concerns a Serbian architect who searches for his father who was lost on Mount Athos during World War II...
...iving in Washington is having its effect on me...
...Alessandro tells him he is grateful that "your vitality bled into me and rattled awake the part of my soul that was going to sleep...
...This brave couple in their fifties uprooted themselves from Connecticut and moved to Cuernavaca, Mexico, to do what their subtitle suggests...
...Dogen, the thirteenth-century founder of Soto Zen, is now regarded as the most powerful and original figure in Japanese religious thought...
...He speaks of his approaching death...
...I am not without reservations about what at times seems to be simply their personifying of natural forces, about their squeezing out extensive mythical mileage from disputed theories, and about their almost glib attitude concerning how easy it will be to reintegrate the religious traditions of the world within their story of the cosmos...
...What he learns is a lesson that must be relearned in every generation: "that the essence of civilization Commonweal is not the multiplication of wants but the elimination of need...
...Called in the subtitle "A Romance,'' by the extremely talented critic and novelist Susan Sontag, it is anything but...
...Intoxicated by My Illness (Clarkson/Potter, $ 18,134 pp...
...Its complicated plot hangs on the romance between a postcollegiate young man named Louis Holland and Renee Seitchek, a Harvard seismologist who has a conspiracy theory that attributes seismic tremors in greater Boston to illegal chemical dumping...
...People have lived on the shores of the Gulf of California in Baja California for ten thousand years (at least...
Vol. 119 • December 1992 • No. 21
