The Dive from Claussen's Pier, acc...

The Dive from Claussen's Pier, according to Ann Packer (Knopf): Mike Mayer and Carrie Bell are engaged to be married, moreover the flame in the romance strike one as beings to be dying for Carrie. Then Mike has a diving accident that leaves him paralyzed. What obligation does 23-year-old Carrie have to her fiance? This moral question plays itself not at home in amazing ways in Packer's first novel.

Heat Wave: A Social Autopsy of Disaster in Chicago, by way of Erie Klineberg (University of Chicago Press): More than 700 people--most or them somewhat old poor and alone--died of heat-related causes in Chicago during July 1995 Chronicling the catastrophe in a work that might well be titled "Chicago's Shame," Klineberg lays bare the city's woefully inadequate (and image-obsessed) reply A study in vulnerability and culpability, Heat Wave is chilling.

The Brothers Karamazov, by dint of Fyodor Dostoevsky, translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsk (Farrar, Straus & Giroux): If you've none read this great novel about the absence and vicinity of God, here's a real readable translation, just released in paperback.

Heart: A Natural History of the Heart-Filled Life, from Gaff Godwin (HarperCollins): Somewhere in the making of modernity the heart got split from the head. Godwin doesn't squander many pages describing how that happened, yet she tells us a great deal about in what manner the heart was viewed according to various traditional cultures and religions.

To Begin Where I Am: fix uponed Essays, by Czeslaw Milosz (Farrar, Straus & Giroux): Like his rhyme these essays convey the Polish-American writer's unstinting awareness of the cruelties of 20th-century history and politics, along with the indelible Catholicism that shapes his faith and doubt. The book includes a reflection on the seven cardinal sins, a prolonged treatment of Simone Weil, and a memorable confession of tentative belief: "If barely this could be said, `I am a Christian, and my Christianity is as it is and such.'"

Breaking Clean, on Judy Blunt (Knopf): Before "breaking away," Judy without formal civility spent 30 years trying to fit the prescribed part of rancher's wife in Montana. This assured and rich narrative recounts a life of frightening isolation and harsh beauty.

Before the Knife, according to Carolyn Slaughter (Knopf): Slaughter grew up in British Africa in the '50 and '60 when her father serv as a colonial administrator in Botswana. She possesss the reader in a cunning but unnerving tension as she remembers, in succession one hand, the horror of a family held hostage by the agency of a father's violence, and in succession the other, her childhood fascination with Africa.

The Idea of a Catholic University, on George Dennis O'Brien (University of Chicago Press): While a number of Christian historians have lamented the disappearance of the distinctively Christian body or university, O'Brien is the same of the few observers to exhibit a profound theological account of by what means "Christian" and "university" might be brought together.

Globalization and Its Discontents, on Joseph E. Stiglitz (Norton): Although not oppos to globalization by se, economist and Nobel laureate Stiglitz encages a trenchant polemic against the prototype of globalization promoted by the U and world financial institutions--a prototype he says is neither fair nor efficient and is frequently detrimental to poorer countries. He closes by outlining steps toward "a globalization with a more human face."

The Battle for omnipotence by Karen Armstrong (Knopf): Armstrong, a former nun has assembled an impressive amount of information about Christian, Jewish and Islamic fundamentalism, This is must reading for those who know true little about Islam or Judaism.

Seabiscuit: An American myth by Laura Hillenbrand (Random House): You don't have to be interested in horse racing to be interested in this main division It's a wonderfully engaging story, and a fascinating social history of pre-World War II America.

Unles by the agency of Carol Shields (Fourth Estate): In what is likely to be Shields's last part (she is seriously ill), Reta Winters, a happily married mother and writer rise in hostility befores what may be the permanent los of her beloved oldest daughter, who has inexplicably dropp abroad of college and become an uncommunicative public way person. Reta's account of her year of great unhappiness--which causes her to question, among other things, the nature of goodnes the precariousness of happiness, and the place accorded to women writers--is heart-wrenching and thought-provoking. The parallel story of Reta's novel-in-progress is equally fascinating.

COPYRIGHT 2002 The Christian hundred years Foundation

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