Critics' choices for Christmas

Commonweal, Dec 4, 1992 by Doris Grumbach, George W. Hunt, Don Wycliff, Molly Finn, Chet Raymo, Helen Alvare, Paul Elie, Dennis Doyle, Jessica Bayne, Frederick Franck

DORIS GRUMBACH, a novelist, essayisL and longtime contributor to Commonweal, is the authormost recently of Coming into the End Zone (W. W. Norton & Company).

Between writing books, I embark on a gluttonous binge of reading them. The first part of the year I was writing, and so I read almost nothing. Then in July my conspicuous consumption of books, at the rate of about one a day, began. What follows is a selection from that gormandizing: The Emperor's Last Stand: A Journey to St. Helena (Pantheon, $22, 277 pp.) by Julia Blackburn, is an account of Napoleon' s last six years of exiled life on a remote island told so perfectly that it reads like a beautifully written novel.

At Weddings and Wakes (Farrar, Straus, Giroux, $19, 213 pp.)by Alice McDermott. This first-rate work, about an Irish-Catholic family in Brooklyn and Long Island, introduced me to this young and most talented novelist, and sent me back to reading two of her excellent earlier books, A Bigamist's Daughter and That Night (both available in paperback from Harper Perennial).

Intoxicated by My Illness (Clarkson/Potter, $18, 134 pp .) by Anatole Broyard. An original, intelligent, and witty view by a literary critic of the experience of dying of cancer, a treatment of the subject of being sick like no other I have ever read.

Volcano Lover (Farfar. Straus, Giroux, $22, 419 pp.). Called in the subtitle "A Romance," by the extremely talented critic and novelist Susan Sontag, it is anything but; instead it is an inventive and humorous view of the lives of Emma and William Hamilton, and of course Lord Nelson. Beyond that it is a lovely, dense tapestry of eighteenth-century aristocratic life lived in the shadow of Mount Vesuvius.

Eleanor Roosevelt, Volume 1, 18851933 (Viking, $27.50, 587 pp.), by Blanche Wiesen Cook. A brilliant start to the recounting of the life of the great first lady, until she enters the White House. In every sense, a readable, credible, wellresearched work, which brings to life the complex, admirable woman Eleanor Roosevelt was.

Waiting to Exhale (Viking, $22,409 pp.) by Terry McMillan is this writer's third interesting novel, about four black, middle-class women, who are survivors, and the men to whom they are attached. I think The Disappearing Act and Mama (both in paper from Washington Square Press) are even better, but the three establish McMillan as a genuine fictional voice.

GEORGE W. HUNT, S.J., is editor-in-chief of America magazine.

The poet W.H. Auden once said that "Pleasure is by no means an infallible, critical guide--but it is the least fallible." So, it is in this Audenesque spirit that I recommend the following random selection of recently released books.

To my mind, the book-of-the-year in Catholic biography is William W. Meissner's psychobiography of the founder of the Jesuit order, Ignatius of Loyola: The Psychology of a Saint (Yale, $35,480 pp.). Father Meissner, both a Jesuit and a practicing psychoanalyst, lucidly recounts the extraordinary life of Ignatius against the turbulent ecclesiastical and social background of the sixteenth century, and then he interprets the psychodynamics of that life by a "look within," attempting to uncover the complex interplay of human motivation and religious experience. The result is a modest, sensible yet insightful reading that is never less than fascinating and endlessly informative. A must-read.

Cardinal William Henry O'Connell of Boston, who reigned (not too strong a word) over the Athens of America for thirty-seven years, would not be deemed a saint by the most charitable standards. Nonetheless-or perhaps because of this--he has inspired a wonderful biography by James M. O'Toole, Militant and Triumphant: William Henry 0 'Connell and the Catholic Church in Boston, 1859-1944 (Notre Dame, $38.95, 320 pp.). Anyone who grows misty-eyed with romantic nostalgia over the good old, pre-Vatican II days of the American church is fated to have his/her eyes blink open with surprise on reading this book. Had Edwin O'Connor known but half the story of the good cardinal that this biography reveals, his Last Hurrah would still be required reading as a cautionary tale in every rectory.

The rather depressing 1992 presidential campaign demanded personal restoratives, and I discovered one in Eric Alterman's dissection of our political media-celebrities (George Will, Henry Kissinger, John McLaughlin, Pat Buchanan, et al.) in Sound and Fury: The Washington Punditocracy and the Collapse of American Politics (HarperCollins, $23,352 pp.). Alterman's argument is a bit too apocalyptic for my taste, but his concerns are well-placed, and his analyses and anecdotes are often very witty and incisive. A worthy companion piece is the report done by White House correspondents Michael Dully and Dan Goodgame, who have covered the Bush administration from the beginning. Their title and subtitle encapsulate the narrative and thematic thrust of their report, Marching in Place: The Status Quo Presidency of George Bush (Simon and Schuster, $23,316 pp.).