Critics' choices for Christmas Traveling widely, reading closely (even eccentrically), and judging perspicaciously, our panel of Christmas critics has put together a list of titles that includes everything from an obedient Lassie to God's brilliantly wayward "biographer" And then there's the poetry and the theology Please share the good words
Swick, Thomas
Thomas Swick Thomas Swick is the travel editor of the Sun-Sentinel in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, and the author of the travel memoir Unquiet Days: At Home in Poland (Ticknor & Fields). I may be the...
...Lear's whimsical drawings-more familiar today than his paintings-decorate each chapter head, and his beguiling nonsense verse is threaded throughout...
...It has taken me a good while to understand this, but it turns out that the only information I am seriously interested in is that about the human heart, and this I cannot find any easy way to access...
...But there are exceptions...
...W. Norton, $25,317 pp...
...Luckily I travel, frequently to places with bookstores...
...P. Putnam's Sons, $27.50,509 pp...
...Theroux, by contrast, seems like travel-lite...
...But they are essays of such wit and sure intelligence that they benefit from both rereading and assemblage as a whole...
...partly because I have become accustomed to the more thematic, less skittering books of Jonathan Raban and Colin Thubron...
...The book ends-no doubt fittingly-with what must be one of the saddest last sentences in the history of biography: "None of his English friends except Dr...
...I may be the only contributor to this round-up who lives in a city without a bookstore...
...Which means that when Borders opens later this year, next door to the mall, I can enjoy the event without any of the nagging guilt that people elsewhere have about the threatened extinction of their beloved independents...
...Most of the essays in With My Trousers Rolled, by Joseph Epstein (W...
...Adding to the book's charms are the author's refreshingly unacademic sympathies...
...Hassall and his wife could come to his funeral...
...Another book with dual rewards was City Life: Urban Expectations in a New World, by Witold Rybcynski (Scribner, $23,235 pp...
...This spring I spotted Edward Lear: A Biography by Peter Levi (Scribner, $30,331 pp...
...Levi, who has enormous respect for Lear as a painter, also portrays him as a doughty traveler, following him around the more rugged parts of southern Italy, the Levant, and India...
...inspired Rybczynski to take a look at the city throughout history...
...A simple question from a friend who had just returned from Paris-"Why aren't our cities like that...
...In a recent issue of the Scholar-to give you a preview perhaps of next year's favorite books-Epstein weighed in on the computer age with one of the most sensible statements I have heard on it yet: With the information revolution closing in, I ask myself whether it isn't possible to live deeper down, at some more genuine, less superficial level of life than that promised by an endless flow of still more and then yet again even more information...
...Known primarily for his science fiction, Lem is no less adept at recalling the past-in this case prewar Lvov-and making it sound as alien and quirky as any fantasized future...
...And in the newsroom I sit next to the book editor, a location that keeps me alert to, for the most part, the large numbers of books I would never wish to read...
...He admits that malls have killed many downtowns, but he understands that they are the physical expression of a popular yearning and, in many cases, the result of civic failure...
...I was a little disappointed with The Pillars of Hercules: A Grand Tour of the Mediterranean, by Paul Theroux (G...
...Among their virtues, he writes, is the fact that "they are more like what public streets used to be before police indifference and overzealous protectors of individual rights effectively ensured that any behavior, no matter how antisocial, is tolerated...
...Yet Lem possesses the memoirist's gift of telling a selfishly personal story and giving it a universal resonance, so that the pleasure for the reader is twofold: the discovery of a previously unimaginable life and the reassurance of a human commonality...
...Whimsy of a more philosophical nature pervades the engaging memoir by the Polish writer Stanislaw Lem: Highcastle: A Remembrance (Harcourt Brace & Co., $22,146 pp...
...He also, in that paragraph, does what very few writers manage to do: He holds a mirror up to your own, heretofore unarticulated feelings...
...In a relatively brief space he delves far and wide, and the result is like the best textbooks you remember from college: a learned study that is a joy to read...
...It was a few days after I had booked a room at the Edward Lear Hotel in London...
...His dream-like, childhood explorations into both the material and metaphysical worlds acquaint us with a truly original mind...
...were familiar to me from the American Scholar, where Epstein presides as Aristides...
...But he is never a dull companion-still the master of the withering phrase-and his ability to meet, and endear himself to, the most disparate characters is a gift as enviable as that of writing...
...I don't count B. Dalton and Waldenbooks up at the mall...
...Lear's endurance appears even more impressive when you learn-as many of his friends never did-that throughout his life he suffered epileptic seizures...
...The subjects are hardly new-vanity, music, cats, decline-but the voice is always fresh and so engaging that it makes you want to hear it expound on an ever increasing number of topics...
...How pleasant to know Mr...
...Lear," I thought, "who has written such volumes of stuff...
Vol. 122 • December 1995 • No. 21
