Summer reading: From garbage to witchcraft to Moby-Dick's progeny, our critics recommend books for nourishment, instruction & edification.
DeBERNARDO, FRANCIS
Summer reading Francis DeBernardo Francis DeBernardo is the executive director of New Ways Ministry. My father, a retired New York City sanitation department foreman, often waxes...
...Lamott's experiences and reflections are far from traditional...
...In his latest collection of autobiographical essays, Me Talk Pretty One Day (Little Brown, $14.95,288 pp...
...Her conversion changes her perspective, but not all her behaviors and attitudes...
...But we also learn how Jeremy Bentham, Charles Dickens, Baron von Liebig, Thomas Edison, and Louis Napoleon influenced sanitation policy...
...In Miller's book, we see the expected cast of colorful New York characters: Robert Moses, Fiorello LaGuardia, Boss Tweed, Jimmy Walker...
...She should be canonized as the patron saint of people who struggle with faith...
...She does not write as a spiritual master...
...This is a book for anyone whose spiritual journey has not followed a textbook model...
...My father, a retired New York City sanitation department foreman, often waxes philo sophical about his former career 'It is the securest job in the world," he observes...
...By examining a mundane phenomenon, Miller gives an entertaining and enlightening history not only of New York City, but of national and international events...
...Benjamin Miller, a former director of policy planning for New York City's Department of Sanitation, dons the hat of social historian to tell the sprawling tale of the various and disparate interests—health care, greed, agriculture, recreation, urban planning, political ambition, environmental concerns, and technological development—that have shaped New York's sanitation policy...
...His best chapters focus on extended trips to France where he tries to learn the language...
...Commonweal 25 June 15,2001...
...A gay former furniture mover, house cleaner, and writing teacher, Sedaris has viewed our culture from the underside, and it isn't pretty...
...Which is just about everyone...
...She is a recovering bulimic, alcoholic, and cocaine addict, and a single mom who found Christianity through the experience of worshiping with an African American Presbyterian congregation in California...
...In her most recent and most explicitly religious nonfiction work, Traveling Mercies: Some Reflections on Faith (Anchor, $13,275 pp...
...Turning to garbage on another level, the spiritual, there is no better writer than Anne Lamott...
...As long as there are human beings, there will always be garbage...
...She finds religious significance in examining the cellulite on her thighs while waiting for a bus at the beach...
...Augustine of Hippo, I'm sure, would agree...
...Some of her writings will shock readers expecting a more moderate view of spirituality (her exclamation at the moment of conversion would not be allowed on prime time), but her profound and unusual insights refresh the gospel message of unconditional love...
...Instead she tells stories of fear, jealousy, pettiness, anger, attachment, overprotection, loss, and lust which is where most of us fight our spiritual battles...
...In Fat of the Land: Garbage in New York—The Last Two Hundred Years (Four Walls Eight Windows, $18, 414 pp...
...Commonweal 24 June 15,2001 No genre is better suited for the garbage of social and cultural life than satire...
...Sedaris targets the Internet, nouvelle cuisine, speech therapy for boys who lisp, performance artists, crossword puzzles, television, Christmas family newsletters, and ungracious houseguests...
...Lamott writes about the joy of the gospel life in the midst of the insanity and garbage that humans are wont to create...
...Or that what we throw away as unproductive and worthless actually later lives as agriculture, as bedrock for recreation facilities and urban infrastructure, and as the subject of fiercely contested business and financial transactions...
...This friendly veneer barely masks a wit that is wickedly biting and sharp, and, like all good satire, curative...
...Imagine a voice that is a mixture of Francois Rabelais, Erma Bombeck, Therese of Iisieux, Jerry Seinfeld, and Lily Tomlin...
...In one such chapter, "Jesus Shaves," Sedaris describes his language class's attempt to explain Easter to a fellow student, a Moroccan-born Muslim...
...And no one else today is writing satire as good as that of David Sedaris...
...She does not offer methods or concepts...
...He made his mark as the author of the Santaland Diaries (Dramatists Play Service, $5.95), a journal of working as an elf one season in Macy's Christmas extravaganza...
...Though his recounting of it is hilarious...
...For example, it may be dismaying, though not surprising, to find that what we now take for granted as a democratic institution had its origins not in good government, but because of concern by power elites that the wealthy were beginning to die in a cholera epidemic that had already taken the lives of so many of New York's poor...
...Sedaris dryly explains that the problem was vocabulary: "Simple nouns such as cross and resurrection were beyond our grasp, let alone such complicated reflexive phrases as 'to give of yourself your only begotten son.'" Sedaris is a satirist in the great tradition of Juvenal, Erasmus, Swift, and Twain...
...The only prayer advice she gives is her favorite morning prayer—"Whatever"—and her favorite evening prayer—"Oh, well...
...Like the best of them, he is not simply a finger-pointer, but often turns his observant eye toward his own curious behavior...
...Currently a National Public Radio commentator and a regular contributor to Ira Glass's "This American Life," Sedaris has honed his writing skills in an oral medium which makes for a breezy and easy conversational tone to his writing...
...If summer is the time for "trashy" reading—lighter books that travel well to the park, the beach, campsites, or whatever place you are relaxing and asked not to litter—then I recommend three books that examine our required lot in life of dealing with the garbage we produce, whether actual, spiritual, or cultural...
...While Sedaris wants to believe he and the others are speaking fluently, he [mercilessly] translates their garbled French: "He call his self Jesus and the he be die one day on two...morsels of...lumber....He die one day and then he go above of my head to live with your father...
...In three nonfiction works and five novels, this California native brings to light the poignant minutiae of everyday life where both God and despair rush in...
...Lamott writes not from a peaceful center, but from the muck of real encounters...
Vol. 128 • June 2001 • No. 12
