Summer Reading: Back to the hills with Ernest Hemingway, to London with Samuel Pepys, the Sudan with John McPhee, and much more.
McWilliams, Susan
Susan NcWilliams Susan McWilliams, a recent graduate of Amherst College, works as a consultant in New York City. T he turn of the millennium, if nothing else, serves as a marker for social...
...translated from the Swedish by Joan Tate, two families drift toward tomorrow from their neighboring summer cottages...
...Leach argues that America's brilliance has always rested on one equilibrium: the "centrifugal" desire to move on (to the Gold Rush, to the highways) balancing the "centripetal" urge to root (in a profession, in a hometown...
...Cimino and Lattin examine these and other facets of the nation's changing religious sense, offering predictions that do not, in fact, sound so unfamiliar...
...And, as always, foreign voices, speaking of foreign places, can tell us something about our own homestead...
...New types of religious organizations will emerge in the form of megachurches on one end and "grassroots" spiritual gatherings on the other...
...The intricate intersection of the lives here paces the intersection of cultures, of a relaxing past and a restless future...
...Cimino and Lattin's book, although at times too self-conscious by including main ideas in bold print and a companion CD-ROM, presents an engaging overview of where, when, and how Americans believe today, and what Commonweal 2 7 June 18,1999 that implies for the coming years...
...In Monika Fagerholm's Wonderful Women by the Sea (New Press, $15.95, 330 pp...
...Others will make sense of reason and revelation by mixing them in an "experiential spirituality" reminiscent of Thoreau, devoting themselves to nature and personal reflection...
...This cosmopolitan notion, disdaining provinciality and localism, has obscured more permanent human needs for community, boundaries, home, a resting place...
...Businessmen and the vanguard of economic globalization, indifferent to location, have displaced local, regional, and even broader identities...
...They seek the divine as they search for bargain wardrobes, using eclectic bits and pieces to furnish a personal spiritual style...
...According to polls, 95 percent of Americans believe in God...
...resounds like nothing else...
...Perhaps William Leach did not intend to write a call to arms, but Country of Exiles (Pantheon, $24,273 pp...
...While it trumpets present-day miracles of the marketplace, conventional wisdom holds that Americans are turning from God to Gucci, from church on Sundays to weekends at the mall...
...they just believe in private...
...With a stunning ability to find meaning in the everyday, Fagerholm manages the complicated emotional relationships of a small community over the course of ten years...
...Most impressive are the children, Thomas and Renee, through whose eyes Fagerholm watches a turbulent decade drench the most untouchable shores...
...As Tupperware mothers make way for space children, and humans ascend to the moon, even beautiful women imagine more promised lands than Eden...
...In the last three decades, however, that scale has tipped and thrown the country dangerously out of kilter...
...Baby boomers and Gen X-ers, searching for community, will rediscover traditional faith...
...Rampant consumerism has indeed weighed on religion but not dissolved it, as Richard Cimino and Don Lattin explore in Shopping for Faith (Jossey-Bass, $25, 240 pp...
...Focusing his inquiry in three telling arenas—transportation, gambling and tourism, and the research university—Leach warns that in losing our sense of place we are losing the things that bind us together...
...Meanwhile, the nation convinces itself that America, instead of being both an idea and a place, can be simply an idea...
...Some will stay, some will go, some will come back, and some will be left behind...
...The scenario is further distorted by the demands of swift change: Every member of every family, pressed in a dwindling sanctuary, fights to come to terms with the encroaching outside world...
...T he turn of the millennium, if nothing else, serves as a marker for social reflection, a time to examine how far we have come, where we are, and where we might be going...
...With that, we stand to lose ourselves...
...Angels depart, and the shine of the beach dulls...
...Angels come to the summer paradise, carrying the future in a Chevrolet Chevelle...
Vol. 126 • June 1999 • No. 12
