Books Books for summer days
For summer reading, heres a handful of books that have
caught the fancy of eight reviewers. They open with talking and conclude with
walking. Fiction and nonfiction.
REVIEWED by PAMELA
SCHAEFFER
Television, movies, long hours
working at a computer. Increasingly, thats life. Decreasingly, it seems,
we talk.
I mused over the waning of good conversation in my life as I rode
the train recently between Kansas City and St. Louis. On the 3:35 Amtrak out of
Kansas Citys Union Station, people read. They work on computers. They pay
bills. They sleep. Except for an occasional exchange with the conductor,
ordering a snack in the club car or chatting on a mobile phone, hardly anyone
talks. At least not to strangers.
On this particular ride, my musing was prompted by the little book
opened across my lap: Theodore Zeldins Conversation: How Talk Can
Change Our Lives. The book began as a series of talks broadcast on the BBC,
published in book form in Great Britain, and here by Hidden Spring/Paulist
Press.
Zeldin, a fellow and former dean of St. Antonys College,
Oxford, would have us reflect on how we might enrich our lives with more
conversation. Announcements occasionally interrupted my reading to warn that
the train had been inexplicably delayed. Grumbling became audible -- the
closest Amtrak riders normally come to engaging in general conversation.
I returned to Zeldin. In the early years of the new century, he
loftily hopes to become part of a new conversation: a conversation about what
kind of human beings we want to be.
I hope the new century will be more adventurous, he
writes hopefully. What is missing from the world is a sense of direction,
because we are overwhelmed by the conflicts which surround us, as though we are
marching through a jungle which never ends. I should like some of us to start
conversations to dispel that darkness, using them to create equality, to give
ourselves courage, to open ourselves to strangers and, most practically, to
remake our working world, so that we are no longer isolated by our jargon or
our professional boredom.
We cannot reproduce the Renaissance; history cannot be made
to repeat itself; but we can create something akin to it, to suit ourselves. I
call this the New Conversation.
It was a measure both of the failure and the success of
Zeldins little book that I closed it, gratefully. Though Id found
it annoyingly preachy, it obviously struck some chord. Having determined that
salvation from my journeys growing tedium required chumming up with some
strangers, I headed for the club car in search of someone to talk to.
There I hooked up with a family from Brazil who had piqued my
interest earlier. I had noticed them in the station as we boarded, then later,
on a trip to the club car, had been impressed by an animated conversation
father and son were having, apparently about passing sights. Now I learned that
the son is an exchange student at a high school in the Midwest, and his parents
had come for a visit. We talked a bit about where theyd been -- skiing in
Colorado -- and what they planned to do in St. Louis, a city on which I am
something of an expert.
I also met a woman who works by day as a lawyer in Kansas City and
by night as a reporter covering community affairs for a small newspaper. We
talked about what the fields of law and journalism have in common, and what
they dont. (Law pays a lot better, for one thing.)
The conversations werent particularly deep or exhilarating,
but they broke our isolation and entertained us through what turned out to be
mounting hours of delay. Our talk may not have dispelled the darkness Zeldin
referred to, but it did suffice to dispel a measure of the frustration. Though
we didnt get around to discussing what kind of human beings we want to
be, we perhaps hinted at an openness that wouldnt be such a bad
start.
If I remember nothing else, then, about Zeldins book,
Ill try to keep his subtitle in mind: How talk can change our lives.
Ive promised myself that in those overwhelming days Ill
look for opportunities to give it a chance. If deep conversation isnt
always an option (unlike Zeldin, Im not a fellow at Oxford), at least I
may make some spaces for a quick chat.
The train, by the way, was four hours late. Thats the basis
for a conversation I intend to initiate -- with AMTRAK.
Pamela Schaeffer is NCRs managing editor.
REVIEWED by SUE BIRNIE
The evolving story in Barbara
Kingsolvers bulky, 500-plus pages, The Poisonwood Bible (Harper
Collins) is constantly fresh and engrossing. Although American missionary
Nathan Price and his wife Orleanna arrive in the 1950s Belgian Congo with high
hopes, their mission quickly meets obstacles: culture shock, endless rain,
strange food, different spiritual beliefs and village politics. Meanwhile,
their four young daughters struggle with both their new surroundings and the
aches of growing up, each with varying degrees of success.
This, Kingsolvers tribute to Africa, moves with lush
descriptions of the jungle and drips with equatorial heat. While essentially a
story about family, loyalty and faith, Congos escape from colonialism
creates an underlying tension that mimics the desires for freedom within the
Price family itself.
As Kingsolver splits the narrative among the five Price women,
each chapter presents readers with a different point of view. No two characters
endure Africa and Nathans autocratic ministry the same way. Seductive and
haunting. Like Africa, perhaps.
Sue Birnie lives in Victoria, British Columbia.
REVIEWED by TERESA
MALCOLM
It started with a postcard at a yard
sale: an image of Our Lady of Fatima. Beverly Donofrio bought it.
Before long, images of Mary began to overrun her house. Donofrio,
who in her rebellious teens had rejected Catholicism and despised Mary
especially for being woman as ever-loving wimp, did not realize
then that she had summoned Mary to soften her hardened heart. I made a
shrine of my house, Donofrio said, and knowing a good opportunity
when she sees one, the Blessed Mother came in.
Donofrios book, Looking for Mary (or, the Blessed Mother
and Me) (Viking Compass) is an engaging memoir of her journey back to
faith, led by Mary. Donofrio recounts a pilgrimage to Medjugorje with 49
zealous Catholics. She had already made a radio documentary on U.S.
Marian apparition sites, but then she was an outsider, dropping in for a
one-shot deal. On the Medjugorje pilgrimage, she says, Im a
member, one of the tribe, and theres no getting around it: The
tribes weird. So what does that make me?
She went to Medjugorje because I want Mary to mother me and
teach me mother things, like how to love. We learn of the regrets that
brought her there. In particular, she seeks forgiveness for her failures as a
mother: She is estranged from her grown son, born when she was a teenager and
damaged, she says, by her immaturity and selfishness.
She offers her story with doses of humor, about herself and her
compatriots on pilgrimage. She doesnt quite embrace orthodoxy. She begins
to attend Mass regularly, and she tries to be more open to Jesus, but her main
focus remains on what she sees as the feminine face of God in Mary.
Looking for Mary is both entertaining and
thought-provoking, often moving me to tears with Donofrios confessional
story of forgiveness, faith, mystery and miracles. Read it, and Mary may sneak
into your heart, too.
Teresa Malcolm is NCRs opinion editor.
REVIEWED by JOHN L. ALLEN
JR.
Ray Flynns novel The
Accidental Pope (St. Martins Press), co-written with Robin Moore of
French Connection fame, is a quirky, if entertaining, addition to the
papal potboiler genre.
The novel opens with a conclave after the death of John Paul II.
Without betraying too much of what is already a fairly thin plot, the new pope
is a breath of fresh air, but his tell-it-like-it-is style wins few friends
among stuffy Vatican powerbrokers.
Flynn then has his pope fall victim to a conspiracy involving the
Orthodox church and Africa that is, frankly, bizarre. By this time, however,
the pope has forever left his imprint.
Flynn is a former U.S. ambassador to the Vatican, and one would
expect such a novel to be peppered with insider references -- which it is,
assuming the insider hails from the United States. In the Vatican according to
Flynn, only American reporters ever break any stories, and only
English-speaking prelates make anything happen. The new pope takes as his
secretary the rector of the North American College, and Flynn barely bothers
disguising the real-life occupant of that job, Msgr. Timothy Dolan.
The other hero of the book is the populist, plainspoken U.S.
ambassador to the Holy See, bedeviled by small-minded State Department
bureaucrats. They are forever trying to hobble the ambassador, mostly by
spreading malicious gossip about his drinking habits. This ex-post-facto
settling of scores is understandable, but wears thin quickly.
Still, the plot of The Accidental Pope is just wacky enough
that it keeps the reader turning pages, and every now and then one wishes the
Holy See would be more open to some of Flynns earnest American common
sense.
John L. Allen Jr. is NCRs Vatican
correspondent.
REVIEWED by THERESA
SANDERS
Fast-talking dames wage battle with
words. Their slower-speaking sisters, however, sometimes have to resort to
other means of making themselves heard. Like murder.
Such is the premise of Valentines Day: Women Against Men,
Stories of Revenge (Duckworth, London). The book is a collection of 19
stories by modern women writers including Agatha Christie, Alice Munro, Joyce
Carol Oates and Carol Shields.
The occasions for revenge in the stories range from simple
inattention on a husbands part to infidelity to, in a few cases, physical
abuse. The acts of revenge undertaken by the women scorned include smothering,
stabbing and poisoning, though not all the stories are quite so grim. One woman
merely fantasizes about feeding her husband to a man-eating hippopotamus, and
anothers worst crime is to serve her husband cat-food sandwiches
carefully garnished with watercress. (Why is it that so many of the stories
involve food? It seems that even at their most murderous, women are still
confined to the kitchen.)
For those troubled by the iniquity of these characters acts
of retribution, editor Alice Thomas Ellis, who provides the works
introduction, agrees that we should hearken more attentively to the
injunction of the Lord, Vengeance is mine. Still, she
continues. reading about it can be, to our fallen human nature, not only
salutary but sometimes deplorably satisfying.
Theresa Sanders is an associate professor of theology at
Georgetown University.
REVIEWED by [STEPHEN
SCHLOESSER]
The late Jesuit
philosopher/historian Michel de Certeau spoke of the mystical as
a reaction against the appropriation of truth by the clerics,
favoring the illuminations of the illiterate, the experience of women,
the wisdom of fools, the silence of the child.
Ruth Harris, in Lourdes: Body and Spirit in the Secular Age
(Penguin USA), has lovingly retold the story of Lourdes as a mystical eruption
in which women and children played pivotal roles as usurping visionaries.
The new clerics of positivistic science in the late
19th century placed womens bodies on the front lines of an anti-clerical
struggle. Did trances and visions come from unseen metaphysical causes? Or were
they merely -- as the hysteria diagnosis implied -- surface
manifestations of neurological impulses?
Harris situates Lourdes within this larger historical context of a
culture war between religion, science and medicine. A sophisticated story told
in accessible and engaging prose (and with numerous illustrations), Lourdes
will open the eyes of both believers and skeptics to the complex dimensions
of what was at stake in late 19th-century religious struggles. Although set
within political battles waged at high institutional levels and the emergent
scientific establishment, Harris keeps her story focused on one fixed
point: the essential image of a young, poverty-stricken and sickly girl
kneeling in ecstasy in a muddy grotto. An unlikely yet formidable icon of
resistance, Bernadettes irreducible wonder stood over and against the
arriviste clerics appropriation of truth.
Jesuit Fr. Stephen Schloesser is an assistant professor of
modern European history at Boston College and of church history at the Weston
Jesuit School of Theology in Cambridge, Mass.
REVIEWED by [MONI
MCINTRYRE]
For the Hmong people of Laos,
the spirit catches you and you fall down describes what Westerners
call epilepsy. Anne Fadiman, in The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down: A
Hmong Child, Her American Doctors, and the Collision of Two Cultures
(Noonday) creatively and comprehensively unfolds the story of a Hmong
familys nightmare. They are attempting to care for their daughter who
lives with this special condition, while well-meaning physicians and other
health care professionals struggle valiantly to provide the best care possible
for this little girl. Multiple examples of insurmountable obstacles to
communication lace the book and leave the reader to wonder if tragedy could
have been avoided.
An important contribution to our shrinking world, this book honors
the Hmong people and people of non-dominant cultures everywhere by sensitively
depicting the failure of good will to overcome some of the barriers erected by
dominant cultural systems and assumptions. Author Anne Fadiman not only tells a
good story, but she also provides a historical and contemporary picture of life
for the Hmong both in Laos and in Merced, Calif.
Complete with a brief readers guide at the end, this book
would be helpful for those who sincerely desire to explore the problems and
possibilities of living and working within a culturally diverse setting. Health
care workers especially would be well served by reading this book.
The Rev. Moni McIntyre teaches at Duquesne University in
Pittsburgh.
REVIEWED by TOM
BEAUDOIN
Despite having a gun thrust into my
spine at dusk by an adolescent wanting my wallet, nearly tripping off a curb
into an oncoming speeding truck, and enduring the indignity of being splashed
by cars plowing proudly through muddy puddles, I adore walking.
If you, too, are the sort of person who would rather amble, ramble
or gambol than drive, ride or fly, your book has arrived. Rebecca Solnits
Wanderlust (Viking) is a book about walking with an elegant, leisurely
pace all its own. What, she wonders, does walking mean as a cultural activity?
Why do we pace, meander, stroll, or march in order to ponder, to talk (to
ourselves or others), to protest, to pray, to enjoy nature, or simply to get
out of the house?
Solnit rediscovers Rousseau and Wordsworth at the origins of
meaningful modern walking. And she finds not one meaning, but many, in tracing
what putting one foot in front of the other has meant for philosophizing and
pilgrimage, civil rights and sexual liberation, faith and feminism.
Readers with an eye toward the sacramental character of daily life
will find this book especially tantalizing. Solnits phenomenology of
walking occasionally seems like an anonymous religious language. Due to its
patient, learned style, I would like to describe further how this is the most
refreshing book Ive read in several years. But instead, Im going
outside to think with my feet.
Tom Beaudoin is the author of Virtual Faith: the Irreverent
Spiritual Quest of Generation X (Jossey-Bass).
National Catholic Reporter, June 15, 2001
[corrected 07/27/2001]
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