Books Briefly
Books Briefly The remarkable St. Francis The Francis Book, compiled and edited by Roy M. Gasnick (Macmillan. 211 pp. $19.95 hardcover. $12.95 paperback). In 1982 it will be 800 years since...
...Subtitled "Access to Tools," it is essentially a guide to more detailed guides available, filled with quotations, sidebar anecdotes, and brisk editorial comment...
...The original Catalog (1968) went through several revisions and sold more than a million and a half copies...
...While this collection of letters does not represent Colette at her best, it does convey the intensity of her interests and her devotion to her work and friends...
...In 1982 it will be 800 years since Giovanni Bernardone was born to a merchant's family in a small town in Umbria...
...An entertaining and informative potpourri...
...This one is better designed, more professional, with an enormous range of subject matter...
...This magnificent compilation of classic texts and classic illustrations celebrates the marvelously mysterious founder of the Order of Mendicant Friars—"the scruffy little Umbrian figure," as Joseph Roddy wrote in The Hippie Saint, one of the 150 texts in the book, "a bearded, barefoot, slightly prankish, and largely unfathomable man, but a man the world now in torment finds more alluring every day...
...Energy alternatives Atom's Eve: Ending the Nuclear Age, edited by Mark Reader with Ronald A. Hardert and Gerald L. Moulton (McGraw-Hill...
...The emphasis is on personal power to "do it yourself," on the "power of individuals to conduct their own education, find their own inspiration, shape their own environment, and share the adventure with whoever is interested...
...Personal power The Next Whole Earth Catalog, edited by Steward Brand (Random House...
...The contributors include Amory B. Lovins, John Gofman, Barry Commoner, Andrew Cockburn, Edward Abbey, and Denis Hayes...
...288 pp...
...She had a sensuous appreciation of animals, food, flowers, colors, and scents, and was gifted, as her husband Maurice Goudeket noted, with the "power of creating the marvelous with everyday objects...
...The Francis Book can stand being owned, and ever again revisited, by every Protestant, Jew, Muslim, Buddhist—and Catholic...
...214 pp...
...Each section is followed by an "action guide" listing related bibliography, audiovi-suals, and action groups...
...Your way of living without owning anything," the Bishop of Assisi said to Francis, "seems to me very harsh and difficult...
...The town was Assisi, and the child, rechristened Francis, comes down to us, through these eight centuries, as the most universally remarkable of all human beings...
...12.50 paperback...
...Creating the marvelous' Letters from Colette, selected and translated by Roger Phelps (Farrar, Straus & Giroux...
...A readable, non-technical collection...
...In his article, "Getting Sane," Reader points to an alternative energy future: "One study after the next suggests that the world will not come down around our heads if we stopped splitting atoms and substituted a determined program of energy conservation, energy efficiency, and quick conversion to renewable sources, chief among them the sun...
...Even these sketchy letters, often dashed off in haste, reflect the French writer's sensitivity to the unusual in the ordinary...
...Despite arthritis, neuritis, and frequent bouts of grippe, she continued her prolific writing well into her seventies and never lost her insistence on quality in spite of demanding deadlines...
...In a letter to a young writer she had befriended, she wrote that "nothing can equal the savor of that which has been seen, and truly seen...
...608 pp...
...Computers, solar energy, underground architecture, environmental politics, soft technology: they are all here...
...My lord," Francis answered, "if we possessed property, we should neec" arms to defend it...
...In an eloquent anthology, Reader and two associates guide readers through an overview of nuclear accidents, health hazards, economics, politics, sabotage, and war...
...5.95...
Vol. 45 • March 1981 • No. 3
