News and Reviews Books

This review is for anyone wanting to understand the importance of scholarly theologians in the formation of Christian thought and practice. Meyendorff is an important historic figure.

An insightful objective observation of the nuances of judicial disposition. The book is an impressive work. Only surpassed by the author

I love this for planning my weeks. When I've read the book they've excerpted, I feel smart. And when I haven't and it looks good, I am reminded! Good amount of space for each day, but not so much that I feel like a wasteoid when I leave them blank.

The Gay Rights Movement edited by Vincent Samar is an essential, must-read book. Samar has collected the most important and often controversial NY Times articles on gay issues in this century. Samar's intelligent selection shows the evolution of an entire culture. In terms of human rights, we give a lot for granted. Reading Samar's book reminds us that nothing is a given. Highly recommended in particular for young readers.

Harvey Swados is a major talent who seems to have been largely forgotten after his untimely death in 1972. In these longish short stories, Swados demonstrates a mastery of story-telling with great psychological insight into his characters who come from all sorts of backgrounds. A writer with a Jewish background, he is certainly one of the few white writers to write convincingly from the perspective of African-Americans.

This work is one of the 'wild' Roth writings, linguistically brilliant and unrestrained .

This is a wonderful book. As I have worked at developing a charter school in my area to create a less oppressive atmosphere for my children's learning, this book has helped me crystalize my thinking about learning in school. It advocates an organic, realistic, and less patriarchal approach to being a teacher in a public school. It accurately describes the pitfalls of trying something different and more humane in teaching, while recognizing the difficulties inherent in changing the educational system. A true, MUST READ for teachers, parents, school board members, administrators, and students.

Yardley was, and probably still is, a book reviewer and columnist for the WASHINGTON POST. He was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism in 1981. OUT OF STEP is made up of a selection of over sixty of the weekly columns Yardley wrote between 1981 and 1989. Although most of these segments relate to then current events, Yardley carefully chose ones dealing with "larger issues that transcend topicality." To paraphrase an old adage," The proof of that is in the reading." Although the events and/or people who inspired the columns may be long forgotten, the conclusions drawn by Yardley are pertinent and durable.

I don't think that a better way could be found to whet the reader's appetite for the tasty tidbits found in this book than to discuss and quote from a few select columns.

April 18, 1983: "Books That Comfort"

Yardley takes as his starting point a letter to the editor from a reader who complained that GRAPES OF WRATH was required reading in her daughter's Northern Virginia High School. Her argument was that her daughter's love of reading was being destroyed by being forced to read such a dreary, depressing book as GRAPES OF WRATH and that it would be more appropriate to choose only books that uplift the spirit and gladden life. After a discussion in which he mentions a number of valid reasons for reading GRAPES OF WRATH including its social impact, Yardley comments that the letter writewr's criteria for selecting books would eliminate almost all of the world's great literature. For examples he mentions Shakespeare's Tragedies, most of Dickens' novels, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, The Greek Classics and on and on ad infinitum and would limit a student's exposure to reading to POLLYANNA, REBECCA OF SUNNYBROOK FARM, and PARSON WEEM'S LIFE OF GEORGE WASHINGTON,

He concludes with, "A child raised on nothing except good news and 'comforting ideas' will become an adult almost certainly incapable of meeting life on its own tough terms."

July 4, 1988: "The Age of Psychology"

In this column, Yardley takes on both the "expert witness" brand of hired courtroom psychologists and the media psychologists who dispense advice on a moments notice. Calling much of this type of instant analysis "psychobabble," he goes on to state that, "Were there no psychobabble and no psychologists to spout it, Phil Donahue and Oprah Winfrey would go out of business overnight." He also comments that television newscasts would probably have to shut down if they were deprived of their five-second spots of instant in-depth analysis that "tells it like it is."

The real pity of this is, he states, that in our exposure to psychobabble we lose sight of the good that a competent psychoanalyst can do, in an appropriate environment, for troubled individuals and families.

These are but two of the sixty plus subjects that Yardley addresses. Each one is interesting, intelligent, and highly readable Yardley frequently risks being "out of step," not out of contrariness, but out of belief. all in all, this book belongs on every reader's must list.

This collection of Cobb's essays is another book in the NYRB series which I did not want to finish reading. These essays are about more than Paris or Normandy or even Europe; here is a record left by an Englishman who passionately loved a place, a bi-cultural historian and writer who grew his soul between the rare archived records of France and the living streets he loved.

Richard Cobb has shown me that writing a memoir of place is a sensory experience. His essays are so rich in textured intimacy that I feel "le Cobb" is living still. One can find him strolling down an avenue observing every alteration of the weather, every change in the pavement, in the passersby, their clothing and language. I imagine Cobb still sitting in his favorite haunt, the late night and early morning caf?, sipping the 4:00 a.m. calvados, or apple brandy, as he watches the barges come up the river. From his youth, to his late travels, Cobb had found that one cannot write history without knowing the living. Le Cobb called himself a "prisoner of habit" (301), and this, I believe, is the key to the depth of detail in his writing. He frequented the same places, the same towns, kept in touch with the same French and Belgian friends. But there is also something exquisitely lonely about Cobb, the solitary observer, that appeals to the wounded romantic in every traveler.

I'm concerned that the general reader will not pick up this book; the density of language in Paris and Elsewhere appears to be for the intimate specialist only. But the essays are about desire for a place, about human interaction in that space, how people create each other's lives, and the anger and grief one feels when a beloved city or village is altered forever--phenomena and feelings which anyone can apply to anyplace in the world. I highly recommend this book for people involved in city planning, the New Urbanists, any reader wondering why the French no longer wear berets, or any reader looking for a context or background as to how or why the recent riots and rebellions occurred across France in the past year.

Cobb loved France enough to criticize the French particularly in the decades from the Baron Haussman in the mid 19th-century to Georges Pompidou in the 1970s when so much destruction was visited upon Paris in the name of `architecture.' Cobb shows that Brussels and Paris sustained more damage after World War II than before: "The damage which has been inflicted on these two cities is not, then, the result of enemy--or Allied--action" (200). In Paris distinctive neighborhoods were destroyed by the French themselves with no concern for how people's lives were being altered or the monoculture being created. Well, Monsieur Cobb, this vandalism to intimate dwellings, social settings, tiny restaurants, private gardens, the homes and boulevards of experience, is now a global condition. Thank you so much, Professor Cobb, for such beautiful writing on such a bittersweet topic.

There are innumerable, many incoherent collections of Chekhov's short fiction: such is the bane of an author being in the public domain. What makes this collection superior is that Edmund Wilson, the greatest critic of the 20th Century, assembled it, and there is at last a logic applied to its assemblage beyond the crude dictates of chronology.

Wilson realized that Chekhov seems spotty if not incomprehensible when his short caricatures and romances are interleaved with brooding tales of peasant lives. Think of a Twain compilation where "The Man Who Corrupted Hadleyburg" and "Punch Brothers Punch" are sandwiched together.

So Wilson's collection takes the best of Chekhov's "social" tales of his last decade, stories that focus on groups of Russians, whether it be the bourgeois, the peasants, the workers, or the decaying aristocracy. In these stories, Chekhov is on Tolstoyean grounds, and holds his own remarkably.

However, this strategy means sacrifice: the beautiful, sparkling "Lady with the Dog" would not sit well in this grim company, so it is excluded.