Critics' choices for Christmas
Kavanagh, Peter
BOOKS Critics' choices for Christmas Peter Kavanagh Peter Kavanagh is senior producer with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation's radio current-affairs programs "This Morning" and "The Sunday...
...Hers is a quiet guide to steeling the spirit while seeking the calm...
...It requires time...
...During a dark and gloomy autumn, J.R.R...
...Today it can be read as a classic assessment of a fateful struggle between good and evil...
...Weibe's latest and fifteenth novel, Sweeter Than All the World (Knopf Canada, $34.95 Can., 436 pp...
...Set in World War n, Peace Shall Destroy Many has just been republished (Knopf Vintage Canada, $18.95 Can...
...Doyle, the reluctant master of the detective story, demonstrates here the power of the genre...
...Because it is so rich in learned lore, the series has always been susceptible to layered reading...
...We can decide how to live...
...The novel, a coming-of-age story of a man wrestling with a long midlife crisis, is steeped in Mennonite lore and history...
...Collins, often criticized for his "accessibility," demonstrates in poem after poem the role poetry has long played as balm...
...Tolkien's Lord of the Rings trilogy and precursor novel, The Hobbit (Houghton Mifflin, boxed set, $45,1,800 pp...
...Or it can be simply enjoyed as a rollicking good read...
...The temper of our times often makes our reading choices for us...
...Reading anything these days is complicated...
...He travels the world seeking out the stories of his ancestors as they moved throughout Europe looking for a safe place to be "defenseless Christians...
...It's the mysterious choices that speak loudly of who we are and what we need...
...Or might it be possible to learn to be softer, more open, more compassionate...
...A wall of new books, and the eye and mind are drawn in directions both obvious and mysterious...
...In North America this fall, reading has become a refuge, a solace, a form of mental and spiritual defense, as well as a pleasure...
...In this collection he teaches me that the great pleasures come from quiet, ordinary moments: Commonweal 21 December 7,2001 from music, our dogs, simple days...
...Her meditative prose quietly argues that, demanding as the emotions can be, they do not shape us inevitably...
...It's the hundredth anniversary of the serialized publication of Arthur Conan Doyle's The Hound of the Baskervilles (Signet, $4.95,256 pp...
...Poetry, as Collins says, teaches us about ourselves...
...But reading is a vital part of what makes many of us who we are...
...could be renamed Hobbit for Our Time...
...Sherlock Holmes's dedication to reason, above all else, entrances the mind and strengthens the spirit...
...A menacing atmosphere, one of Doyle's most excellently drawn, is oddly enough an antidote to today's climate of vague and precise terrors...
...The range of interest, the play of language, and the laughter, quiet the mind...
...These perennial favorites are dominating the bookstores in advance of the release of the big-screen adaptation...
...Paradoxically, because reading changes us, and change has proven to be one of the few constants, hanging on to who we are can often be centered in the turning of pages...
...returns to the same themes: how to respond to evil, why evil happens, what choices good people have...
...He embarks on a journey to find the means to be good...
...Those are the questions posed by Buddhist nun Pema Chodron in The Places That Scare You: A Guide to Fearlessness in Difficult Times (Shambhala, $21.95,144 pp...
...Must difficult times make us harder, more resentful, and afraid...
...is the newest collection by the new American Poet Laureate...
...Billy Collins's Sailing Alone Around the Room: New and Selected Poetry (Random House, $21.95,172 pp...
...The comfort quotient is entirely derived from familiar tropes and the inevitable rebalancing of the social order...
...Born in the United States, Chodron resides at Gampo Abbey in Cape Breton, Canada...
...The moor evolves from geological hazard into a metaphor for dark thoughts and evil deeds...
...This classic meditation on the forces of darkness and the struggle to contain them makes the heart glad and the nerves tingle...
...It has been interpreted as a commentary on Nazism and World War II, a treatise on environmental degradation, and an extended reflection on modernity...
...And, as with everything else, the question lurks: Is this the best use of time when time seems too short and too precious...
...Rudy Wiebe is a Canadian Mennonite whose first novel nearly forty years ago dealt with the question of pacifism in the face of an implacable enemy...
...BOOKS Critics' choices for Christmas Peter Kavanagh Peter Kavanagh is senior producer with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation's radio current-affairs programs "This Morning" and "The Sunday Edition...
...Commonweal 22 December 7,2001...
...The novel tells the story of Adam Wiebe, a modern man faced with a life rich in material goods and desperately short on moral ones...
Vol. 128 • December 2001 • No. 21
