Critics' choices for Christmas
Murphy, Cullen
Cullen Murphy Cullen Murphy is the managing editor of the Atlantic Monthly. His most recent book is The Word According to Eve: Women and the Bible in Ancient Times and Our Own (Houghton...
...He employed teams of copyists...
...His most recent book is The Word According to Eve: Women and the Bible in Ancient Times and Our Own (Houghton Mifflin...
...But the picaresque exuberance is grounded in deftly wrought characters and a narrative that possesses a profoundly moral core...
...Commonweal 27 December 3,1999...
...A.N...
...How, for that matter, does Garry Wills...
...Oh, that I had...
...But, of course, the subject isn't McPhee...
...Wills has written a crisp narrative essay on Augustine—as you'd expect, more an intellectual portrait than a curriculum vitae...
...He paced about as he dictated, a reflection of the mental restlessness and energy conveyed in the very rhythms of his prose...
...One passage from Wills on Augustine inevitably brings Wills himself to mind: "Augustine dictated to relays of stenographers, often late into the night...
...Months went by, and then also out of the blue came a British paperback copy of the book, sent by the author...
...Wills's range (during the past year I've read long pieces by him on Lincoln's rhetoric...
...one reason to read it is for an early sample of McPhee's clean, crystalline style...
...Wilson had the good fortune to publish God's Funeral (W.W...
...He produces a new book at least once a year, and something brilliant for the New York Review of Books at least once a month, and then Commonweal 26 December 3,1999 seems to turn up every few days in various other venues...
...The famous complaint of the free-lance writer is that he's so busy writing, he doesn't have any time for his "writing...
...The debates over belief and its implications as our own century draws to a close sharply echo the nineteenth-century debates that Wilson chronicles in this collection of mini-profiles (of Carlyle, Mill, Darwin, Arnold, Hardy, Eliot, William James, and the Modernists, among others...
...his 1965 profile of Bill Bradley, then still a student at Princeton and the dominant figure in college basketball...
...Oh, that I had faith...
...That basket is about an inch-and-a-half too low...
...How, one wonders, did Augustine ever find time to read...
...the Sundance Film Festival...
...Somehow, unexpectedly, these past few autumn months have brought an eclectic handful of books to hand, and provided a few stray days to enjoy them...
...Out of the blue one morning came a note from an Atlantic Monthly reader recommending Larry Baker's The Flamingo Rising (Alfred A. Knopf, $24,309 pp...
...on Robert E. Lee...
...Then there were nothing too hard or heavy for me...
...His sermons, several a week, were taken down by his own or others' shorthand writers...
...He is at great pains to revise the popular view of Augustine as "an ex-debauchee obsessed with sex" and to emphasize the dynamic character of Augustine's thought...
...The mise en scene is preposterous: The plot involves a complex feud between the outlandish family that owns The Flamingo, a drive-in movie theater on the Florida coast, and the more straitlaced family that owns the funeral home across the street...
...The book is one in a series of brief Penguin Lives, edited by James Atlas, the idea being that the full Leon Edel treatment shouldn't be the only extant biographical model...
...A few days ago I finished Garry Wills's short study, Saint Augustine (Lipper/ Viking, $19.95,152 pp...
...as "the most under-recognized book of 1997...
...Originally a New Yorker profile, the book consumes no more than a couple of hours...
...I closed The Flamingo Rising with a sense both of satisfaction and gratitude, and bewilderment about what to read next...
...Wilson's own journey from Anglicanism to agnosticism—not mentioned in this book, though Wilson has written about it elsewhere—adds a further layer of resonance...
...The double coverage was unnerving, so I gave in, and ended up reading through the night...
...You want to know something...
...Some other projected Penguin Lives: Edna O'Brien on James Joyce...
...One memorable story: John Stuart Mill, after borrowing the only manuscript copy of Thomas Carlyle's The French Revolution, calls on Carlyle later to confess that the whole thing had accidentally been burned...
...Typical issue: Invasion of the Body Snatchers comes to town...
...From the vantage point of the mid-1960s, Bill Bradley's classmates seem to take it for granted that Bradley will become president, or at the very least governor of Missouri...
...just as the state of Kansas was preparing to raise new hurdles against the teaching of evolution in public schools...
...and the new Venetian opera house) and his stamina remain a source of astonishment...
...His letters were sent off in many copies...
...Norton, $25, 385 pp...
...the Starr Report...
...Bradley says finally...
...In some seasons, he preached daily...
...The title of the book refers to Bradley's finely calibrated instinct for the spatial geometry of basketball...
...McPhee describes watching Bradley practice on an unfamiliar court—at the Lawrenceville School—and seeing him miss one practice shot after another...
...Bobbie Ann Mason on Elvis Presley...
...McPhee goes on: "Some weeks later, I went back to Lawrenceville with a steel tape, borrowed a stepladder, and measured the height of the basket...
...Strip the story down and there's nothing new here—the nineteenth-century contest between religion and reason is by now a musty scrim on the stage of civilization—but Wilson is a deft miniaturist, capturing some of the emotional character that has long since drained out of familiar arguments and personalities...
...He went to work, and wrote the volume again...
...As I placed The Flamingo Rising on the shelf at home reserved for an idiosyncratic "private stock" of books, I noticed a slim, hardbound volume that had been sitting there for years, and decided to reread it: John McPhee's A Sense of Where You Are (reissued in paperback by Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $12, 226 pp...
...Carlyle wrote in his diary that night...
...Finally, I would like to second a book recommended by William Pritchard...
...As a magazine editor, I have a parallel complaint: I'm often so busy reading that I don't have any time for "reading"—reading for pure pleasure, that is...
...It was nine feet ten and seven-eighths inches above the floor, or one and one-eighth inches too low...
...Roy Blount, Jr...
Vol. 126 • December 1999 • No. 21
