Summer Reading
Murtaugh, Daniel M.
things." Norris's newest book, Amazing Grace: A Vocabulary of Faith (Riverhead, $24.95,384 pp.) takes those same simple things and uses them to make concrete theological terms such as...
...Norris has also published an edition of The Psalms (Riverhead Books, $12.95, 400 pp...
...The writer is executive director of New Ways Ministry...
...retain their jobs...
...Her chapter on revelation is less than a page, and mostly describes a conversation with a little boy who lives on a ranch about a dream he had after his dog died...
...has been widely praised, and I need not add much to what has been said already...
...Many writers cite New Ways Ministry when reporting on the sensitive issue of Catholic perspectives on lesbian/gay issues, and (astonishingly...
...An easy sort of joke would link Kafka to the supermarket tabloids and produce headlines like "Bureaucrat Wakes up as Roach...
...DIMITRI CAVALLI Bronx, N.Y...
...Prayer is "ordinary experience lived with gratitude and wonder, a wonder that makes us know the smallness of oneself in an enormous and various universe," Norris writes...
...Likewise, when you suggest that Social Security be means-tested in some way, you fail to note that the system is already means-tested since lower-income beneficiaries receive more proportionally than do upper-income beneficiaries...
...For some strange reason, these volumes have been mostly ignored...
...Racist colonialism credited this to inherent ethnic and cultural superiority...
...Besides the appalling misery of his childhood in Limerick and the terrible luck that gave him a drunken wastrel for a father, the book's most striking quality is the sharpness with which it recaptures the language of childhood...
...They make their most daring affirmations over long-distance telephone...
...We're quotable...
...But you certainly do not need to buy Norris's book to read the psalms this summer...
...The voices that first spoke them, the places where we first heard them, even the smells that attended them all stick to their semantic core...
...We believe it is a fair usage of the term...
...I look around and note the same types of characters that Powers captured so well...
...Though the title seems to promise otherwise, these three stories are told from the viewpoint of men, and they share with Independence Day a concern with the responsibilities entailed by close relationships...
...Diamond is a professor of physiology at UCLA, and the book's cumulative force and clarity of design show the hand of a brilliant lecturer...
...Frank McCourt's memoir Angela's Ashes (Scribner, $25, 364 pp...
...I can assure him, however, that it is unlikely his removal was caused by his "quoting from New Ways Ministry in a gay-rights story...
...They embrace, press faces together, only to sense the boundary of skin that separates them...
...In a chapter on prayer as mystery, she describes how Psalm 122 came into her mind as she wearily trudged from one terminal to another at O'Hare Airport...
...Their relative scarcity makes each carry more meaning, like a musical theme...
...Still safe & social Re: your editorial, "Keeping Security Social" [June 5...
...The editorial used the term bankruptcy in the sense that, absent changes in the system, Social Security will at some point not be taking in enough money to meet its financial obligations to beneficiaries...
...We commend you for your concern about this very vital program...
...We would read every page with amusement...
...The book's most humbling lesson is that the white European crushed the original inhabitants of the Americas and Australia not with wit or force of arms, but with the germs that he first inhaled from the cattle and pigs he lived (even slept) with for ten millennia and then exhaled into the faces of natives who had never developed immunities...
...Estrangements define all these characters...
...In the process they use women badly, thoughtlessly, with dreadful consequences...
...Of course, these 1998 characters are exceptions to the general run of those who (sometimes) wear the Roman collar today...
...The middle story, "Jealousy," is the most mysterious and is still unfolding in my mind...
...Not exactly light reading, but perhaps something to settle down with after returning from the shore...
...Also, higher-income beneficiaries pay taxes on their Social Security income, whereas lower-income beneficiaries do not...
...The expected hilarity gives way to surprising dimensions of longing, a funhousemirror elucidation of the urge that draws us to the tabloids in the first place...
...Here, the character who makes bad use of another person is a woman, and we see her through the eyes of the book's only firstperson narrator, her seventeen-year-old nephew...
...I see the hustling priests, the venal priests, the selfcentered priests, the priests whose only higher thoughts are triggered by the stock market and the sports pages...
...Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel (Norton, $27.50, 480 pp...
...As they are joined by reinforcements, as they share out their weight of meaning, their semantic range narrows to the denotations that we carry beyond the family, the playground, and the neighborhood...
...for which she writes an introductory "commentary...
...But Mr...
...Even if payroll taxes are not raised or benefits cut significantly, there is no way that Social Security will go bankrupt in 2029 (or rather 2032, as the latest estimate puts it...
...Although for the most part you state the facts about Social Security accurately, you are way off base when you predict that barring changes in the system it "will go bankrupt" by 2029...
...In the first and last of the stories, American men, facing the onset of middle age and a gathering conviction of their own mediocrity, seek in Paris some effortless translation into something, distinguished and new...
...REV...
...From the editors: An article reviewing this and related topics will appear in a forthcoming issue of Commonweal...
...Words first come to us wrapped in a penumbra of unshared connotation...
...We used the term "means testing" to suggest that the mechanism could be stronger...
...The editors reply: We would not seriously dispute either of the Pfiesters' points...
...At close quarters, in a metaphor that works its way through all three stories, something is lost in translation...
...Norris does not provide brilliant new insights about the psalms, but the handsome layout of the book makes it easy to imagine reading them all, perhaps one each day...
...Whether further means testing would threaten the support of wealthier Americans for Social Security is a fair question, but we tend to think greater progressivity in the tax system is warranted...
...Rainier, Md...
...takes those same simple things and uses them to make concrete theological terms such as Incarnation, eschatology, revelation, and evangelism...
...Richard Ford's collection of three novellas, Women with Men (Knopf, $23, 272 pp...
...Feuerherd does have the habit, annoying to some, of quoting us accurately...
...Powers's priests still around If I read him correctly, J. V. Long's essay, "Clerical Characters" [May 8] on J. F. Powers's stories and novels purports to say, with Jesse Jackson, that 1993 was the twenty-fifth anniversary of everything--"everything" for Long being the clerical life, the lifestyle of today's priests, which he sees as being totally, comprehensively different from those collared laborers in the pre-Vatican II vineyard...
...Sometimes, it seems, his qualities of journalistic excellence and fair-mindedness can be liabilities...
...My current favorite (which I quote from my New Revised Standard Version) is Psalm 131: "O Lord, my heart is not lifted up,/my eyes are not raised too high;/I do not occupy myself with things/too great and too marvelous for me./But I have calmed and quieted my soul, like a weaned child with its mother...
...Jewish Hostages in Rome: Vatican Protests'--Jewish Chronicle (London), October 29, 1943...
...FRANCIS DeBERNARDO Mt...
...They are, to speak plainly, firstclass jerks, and yet Ford steadily avoids irony in his treatment of them and makes us take them seriously...
...CORRESPONDENCI (Continued from page 4) Poland'--Jewish Advocate (Boston), January 26, 1940...
...As for the "secret" Vatican archives, they were opened by Pope Paul VI in 1964...
...In a book of related short stories, Tabloid Dreams (Holt, $12, 288 pp...
...Social Security will go on past this time and will be able to pay out 75 percent of current benefits just from its FICA tax income...
...addresses the riddle of European world conquest, particularly since 1492...
...Daniel M. Murtaugh Daniel M. Murtaugh is associate professor of English and director of writing programs at Florida Atlantic University...
...JAMES & CATHERINE PF1ESTER Falls Church, Va...
...Food production (supplanting hunting and gathering) was the first specialization, and it made possible all the others, including complex technology, bureaucracy, and armies...
...Second, the editorial explicitly noted that Social Security already has a "redistributive mechanism...
...These heroes don't differ from the ones who peopled Powers's pages...
...Laval Spurns Pope 25,000 Jews in France Arrested for Deportation"--Canadian Jewish Chronicle, September 4, 1942...
...Moreover, these unique advantages arose in the one great land mass whose longer axis was East-West rather than North-South, favoring their easy proliferation through a substantially uniform Mediterranean climate...
...CHARLES GALLAGHER Chicago, Ill...
...McCourt recaptures the lost, musical density of childhood language, and it redeems the sadness of his story...
...Powers could still write engagingly of the ones I know, telling it as it is for this small band of brothers, these happy few...
...I do not agree...
...We hope these corrections can be made, because on the whole the editorial is well-written and well-thoughtout...
...ca ~ recommend two books of short fiction, a memoir, and a study of the biological determinants of history...
...Liberated in these cut-rate fantasies, our desires and fears achieve unearthly clarity and intensity, but not fulfillment...
...Diamond argues instead that the civilizations that originated in the "fertile crescent" of Southwest Asia, where the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers join, were simply dealt Commonweal 2 8 June 19,1998 a winning hand of domesticable crop and animal species that led to food production...
...So sorry to hear of Peter Feuerherd's ouster from the National Catholic Register ["The Orthodoxy Police," May 22...
...This is clearest in two stories (the first and last) about ghosts from the Titanic and one about JFK secretly visiting the auction of Jackie O's property at Sotheby's...
...The King James translation, used here, renders the psalms in their most poetic English form...
...To do more in the way of means testing would put the support of higher-income persons for the program at risk...
...Commonweal 2 9 June 19,1998...
...In the midst of days when I occupy myself with things that can seem quite mundane, I gain perspective and calm when I read this psalm...
...confirmed for me the impression made by his wonderful 1995 novel Independence Day...
...This is hardly bankruptcy...
...my soul is like the weaned child that is with me./O Israel, hope in the Lord from this time on and forevermore...
...Robert Olen Butler plays this joke backward, starting with (probably) invented screamers as titles--for example, "Woman Uses Glass Eye to Spy on Philandering Husband," "Jealous Husband Returns in Form of Parrot," and "Boy Born with Tattoo of Elvis'--and then burrowing into the first-person sensibilities that inhabit these fantasies...
...This was silence...
...Volumes VI, VIII, IX, and X detail the Vatican's unrivaled efforts on behalf of the victims of war, especially the Jews...
...A team of four Jesuit scholars produced eleven massive volumes of Actes et documents du Saint-Si~ge relatifs ?l la Seconde Guerre Mondiale, which can be found at the New York Public Library and in Catholic university and college libraries...
Vol. 125 • June 1998 • No. 12
