Critics' choices for Christmas
Lethbridge, Lucy
Lucy Lethbridge Lucy Lethbridge is literary adviser of the London Tablet. It's not often that you come across a book that you know you will keep close by you always, a friend and guide for...
...The other life I enjoyed is longer and also about a traveler, though of a different style...
...Csoma, born a peasant in a Transylvanian village, made it his life's work to trace the mysterious origins of the Hungarian people to Central Asia and Tibet...
...It's not often that you come across a book that you know you will keep close by you always, a friend and guide for life...
...As Fox demonstrates, Csoma's "heaven," his destination, was always a metaphorical rather than a real place...
...It was a remarkable time to be in Egypt, when ancient splendors lay buried under centuries of sand and many of the antiquities Salt collected now form the basis of the British Museum collection...
...pride is "the sin of the solipsist...
...Sloth, for example, often masquerades as workaholicism— spiritual inactivity hiding behind feverish rushing about...
...But you couldn't get a more intelligent guide than the Reverend McCoy (Catholic chaplain at Cambridge University), and his book is full of surprises...
...Just the thing to pep up flagging conversation in the interval...
...Henry Salt: Artist, Traveller, Diplomat, Egyptologist by Deborah Manley and Peta Ree (Libri, $24.95,304 pp...
...It is true that Home Comforts smacks of neurosis: I generally take the English view (this book is extremely rude about English standards of hygiene so I am on the defensive here) that a few germs are good for building up healthy immunity, but Mendelson's dirt-zapping energy is awesome...
...Divided into four parts, "Common Questions," "The Ten Commandments," "The Seven Deadly Sins," and "The Virtuous Life," McCoy's essay is clear but not didactic—and although he tackles difficult theological subjects (never talking down) one feels immeasurably expanded by what he has to say...
...I'm afraid I am a dipper, flicking through the pictures, checking the index for scandalous bits, looking to see what happens at the end...
...It hasn't exactly changed my life but it has certainly enhanced it...
...an exhaustive volume of excellent tips on the kinds of domestic skills lost to my generation, such as darning or pickling fruit...
...I don't suppose I will ever get down to either darning or pickling, but it is comforting to know that Mendelson is at hand should I want to...
...And then he takes faith and hope, and quotes Augustine—"love and do what you will"—because behind everything else in this wise book, the theme is "human flourishing...
...is the perfect guide...
...He fetched up in Cairo under the rule of Pasha Mehmet Ali who had chased the Mamlukes from the city they had ruled for five centuries...
...Housekeeping is an unfashionable activity, so I felt a pang of contemporary guilt at enjoying quite so much Cheryl Mendelson's Home Comforts (Scribner, $35,884 pp...
...is the story of the British consul general in Cairo in the early nineteenth century...
...Isolated, single-minded, and frugal to the point of self-indulgence, Csoma was sustained only by a voracious desire to add to the store of his knowledge...
...If, like me, you are someone who rarely goes to the opera, hugely enjoys it when you get there, but feels a sneaking suspicion that you don't quite get what if s all about, then Robert Thicknesse's Opera Notes (HarperCollins, $13.95, 192 pp...
...This is the best kind of biography— the authors feel an intense sympathy for their subject and his times...
...He never made it to Lhasa, Tibet's forbidden capital, but getting there wasn't the point...
...Salt is modest, self-deprecating, and courageous—unjustly outshone by the more colorful characters who swept across the horizon of his time...
...This year, however, I immensely enjoyed two lives and read them through...
...Commonweal 25 December 7,2001...
...Alban McCoy's An Intelligent Person's Guide to Catholicism (Continuum, $24.95,136 pp...
...Trained as a painter, Salt was an indolent youth and seems to have fallen into his adventures by accident: invited to voyage with Lord Valentia to Abyssinia (Ethiopia) he became a friend of a bloodthirsty warlord, the Ras of Tigre...
...On these matters, I would rather put my trust in Father McCoy, but with The Intelligent Person's Guide to Catholicism at one end of the bookshelf and Home Comforts at the other I feel set up for life...
...And I no longer have to fidget around in the gloom, angling the program into a beam of light to find out what's going on...
...In his thirties, he walked from Hungary to the Himalayas, mastering seventeen languages on the way and disciplining mind and body to the limit, living off little more than boiled rice and tea, and walking everywhere when he wasn't poring over texts from the vast library of Tibetan literature...
...The title (and slim size) suggests that this is a brisk, consolidating run through familiar themes...
...Biographies generally sit reproachfully on my bookshelf...
...Take, for example, the seven deadly sins and the theological virtues: He examines each in turn (pride, sloth, envy, and avarice he calls the "cold-hearted respectable sins," and gluttony and lust, the "warmhearted disreputable" ones) and shakes them up, makes them vivid, modern, and (to use a term I suspect he would dislike) "relevant...
...She even tackles the furniture of the mind, dispensing advice on what kind of books a household might fruitfully give space to...
...Thicknesse, the Times (of London) opera critic, has produced a slim volume containing a brisk run-through of 190 operas, including a plot summary, a neat paragraph on music and words, and some interesting background facts too...
...gluttony is a virtue distorted...
...At every turn he challenges complacency and makes ancient wisdom fresh, exciting—and reassuring, too...
...Finally, I'd like to put in a mention for a book which has already proved invaluable...
...Csoma is quite simply an extraordinary figure...
...is, for me, just that...
...The Commonweal 24 December 7,2001 first, by Edward Fox, has the virtue of being an elegantly written but very slender ninety-five pages, one of a series of bite-size lives launched this year by Short Books...
...Fox tells the fascinating story of Alexander Csoma de Koros (1784-1842): The Hungarian Who Walked to Heaven (Short Books, $8.95...
Vol. 128 • December 2001 • No. 21
