Book reviews from feeney

"I was drawn to this little book for children aged 5 to 8 by its subtitle, A STORY EXPLAINING IDIOMS FOR CHILDREN WITH ASPERGER SYNDROME AND OTHER COMMUNICATION DIFFICULTIES. For I live in Black Mountain, NC, and an old hotel here is being converted to a boarding school for children mildly affected by Asperger Syndrome. Some town residents have expressed alarm over having such children among us. When I read the book, however, (and it did not take more than twenty minutes to do so), I was disappointed. There was nothing specifically about Asperger Syndrome except two phrases on the back cover saying that the book was pitched to such children and others "who tend to be literal thinkers" and who struggle "to understand non-literal expressions." *** My next problem was with the author's apparently specifically UK usage of the word, "idiom." To me idioms are often confined to specific groups or represent specialized scientific or scholarly usages. The author describes "it's raining cats and dogs" as an idiom, when I would call it a metaphor. There are dozens of examples of non-literal language throughout the book: especially in its illustrated story of a normal boy hearing for the first time expressions like "bang one's head against the wall" and a hint that other children in his (Sam's) class of nine might exemplify the metaphor although not understanding at all such non-literal language. *** Setting these quibbles aside, readers may perhaps be led to believe that all or nearly all children probably have more difficulty interpreting a metaphor applied to real life the first time they hear it than tracks with my experience as father of two and grandfather of eight. Nonetheless, the author, occupational therapist Aileen Stalker, proposes a good little method for parents and others to help baffled children come to terms with non-literal language. First, the child should, I gather, repeat out loud the new jargon, e. g. Mrs Roma "would give the shirt off her back if she thought we needed it." Next, she should imagine Mrs Roma doing just that, even if the child does not need a shirt. Third, mother should laugh and say that this means that Mrs Roma "is a very KIND and THOUGHTFUL person who would do anything she could to help us." Fourth, the child should be encouraged to continue discussing the non-literal phrase with parents and imagine with them other classroom or playground situations and persons to whom he/she can apply the metaphor. *** It would be helpful to have read a hint of how much more effort than perfectly normal Sam children with Asperger Syndrome need to make and what techniques have been proven helpful with them. *** Many metaphors or idioms are explained. In the story of Sam they are colorfully illustrated. They are also laid out in an alphabetical glossary called "More Idioms." The best people to review this attractive little book may, I fear, be parents of children with communications difficulties. Not being such a parent, I am at a loss how to say anything useful beyond what I have already written. -OOO-"

"Dan Buettner's THE BLUE ZONES is sub-titled LESSONS FOR LIVING LONGER FROM THE PEOPLE WHO'VE LIVED THE LONGEST. With support extending over years from NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC magazine, Buettner assembled star teams of linguists, anthropologists, medical doctors, reporters, psychologists and others. They visited and interviewed hundreds of people 90 years and older residing in pinpointed areas in four countries: Italy/Sardinia, Okinawa/Japan, Loma Linda/California/USA and Costa Rica. *** After hearing in October 1999 a scientific paper describing the high percentage of centenarians in the Ogliastra district of Sardinia, skeptical Belgian demographer Dr Michel Poulain took action (26 ff). Beginning in 2000 Poulain made ten visits to Sardinia. When he found an area with phenomenally high numbers of age-validated 100-year olds, Poulain circled it with blue ink on a map. Hence, the now universally accepted name "Blue Zone" for centenarian-dense locales. *** Dan Buettner is a rare popularizer. Many, perhaps most, popularizers of scientific theories and expeditions simply describe or summarize the work of others. Buettner does plenty of that. In addition, remarkably he has himself done, inspired and led an enormous amount of interviewing of the aged in various parts of the world. He has raised funds and public awareness of the existence of at least four Blue Zones and probably inspired a younger generation as well as a now heavily supportive AARP to probe why in certain areas so many people live to 90 and beyond before becoming seriously diminished in their ability to work, relate to others and be content. Buettner also flagged his rich web site http://www.bluezones.com. *** The book is a quick, easy read. It concludes with nine generalizations from the life styles of the four geographic areas studied. Readers are invited, for example, to adapt what they like from insights of the Seventh Day Adventists clustered in Loma Linda, California. Ditto from Okinawan gardeners, pious Costa Ricans and Sardinian shepherds. A diet rich in nuts is recommended, with kind words as well for Sardinian red wine, Cannonau, rich in flavonoids good for your heart. *** If I have one complaint about THE BLUE ONES, it is a serious one. In a book focused on tiny, not well known areas in four widely scattered parts of the globe, there are NO MAPS! The author teaches us readers demographics, health, psychology, how to interview. He scatters black and white photos and sidebars throughout his text. But Dan Buettner does not bother to show us precisely where thousands of the centenarians interviewed reside and are busy on their stationary bikes, receiving friends in the afternoon, confessing their sins or playing with their great, great grandchildren in houses shared by their 75 year old children. A friendly hint at no charge to editors of the next edition of a pretty good book! -OOO- "

"Do you have major scoliosis (curvature of the spine)? Do you intend to keep it under control? *** If so, you resemble co-author Annette Wellings. At age 37, Ms Wellings's scoliosis began hunching her more and paining her more. For she next ten years she experimented with the gentler exercises among those associated with yoga and Pilates. Results: her body looks more normal. One shoulder is no longer higher than the other. Back pain went away, except when Annette played hooky from her exercises. *** Multi-talented Annette Wellings (teaching Pilates is only one of many things she does) teamed up with Alan Herdman who had introduced Pilates to the UK four decades ago. In collaboration they wrote CURVES, TWISTS AND BENDS: A PRACTICAL GUIDE TO PILATES FOR SCOLIOSIS. That text describes in considerable detail the many forms scoliosis takes. It then describes and illustrates some 34 gentle exercises that can hold scoliosis at bay. Throughout, emphasis is on stretching neck and spine and building up muscles on sides of the body notably weakened by spinal curvature. *** CURVES, TWISTS AND BENDS goes beyond mere exercise, however. It also discusses the impact of a curved spine on the sufferer's psyche. It ends with tips on dieting, sleeping, sitting, carrying ("Never use a bag that hangs from your shoulder"), standing, dressing (wear loose fitting clothing, layer them,), selecting shoes ("Forget about very high heels and stilettos") and pulls all this advice together by outlining a structured health care plan for you to tailor for yourself (no two scolioses are remotely the same). The book also includes a short glossary of terms of art such as abductors, kyphoscoliosis, pelvic floor and stenosis. *** I do not suffer from scoliosis, though I know people who do. I have not studied Pilates, though I was familiar with a quarter or more of the 34 exercises described. Good posture and spine lengthening are part of tai chi, with which I am familiar. *** This short, quick-developing book taught me much about two important subjects: scoliosis and Pilates. Not every move in Pilates is safe for scoliosis sufferers, notably flattening the spine to excess while lying on the floor. This book has strengthened my intention to learn more of Pilates and to watch out for early signs of scoliosis among my grandchildren and other youngsters. From a half dozen case studies presented in CURVES, TWISTS AND BENDS I gather that many youngsters are physical dynamos until their early teens when suddenly things start going wrong (or at least they first notice them) with their spines. There has to be early, systematic medical testing to assure the strongest possible spines and supporting muscles. Passive, fatalistic acceptance is not the way to manage scoliosis. Pilates can make a big difference. -OOO- "

"Immediately after publishing his best known work, THE LAST OF THE MOHICANS, James Fenimore Cooper and family set sail for Europe. The year was 1826. Cooper was 36. He would spend over seven years abroad and write several novels and five travel books. The travel books covered France, England, Italy, the Rhineland, Switzerland and England. He wrote them years afterward in fairly short order, drawing on notes made at the time. *** To me his ENGLAND travel book is a bit disappointing. He treats at fair length his several meetings with Sir Walter Scott and family -- a favorite subject of mine. But he does not sketch them in a way that makes them leap off the pages into your imagination. Fenimore Cooper had selected, deliberately, five or six months, the better part of one "social season" to live in and near London. He is invited out almost every day to balls, breakfasts, lunches and dinners. If he ever reciprocated an invitation, I do not recall his mentioning it. *** His self-appointed mission appears to be to explain the USA to its parent country and to help Americans see what England is really like -- warts and all. Cooper feels that post-colonial America remains abjectly and in most areas indefensibly deferential to the UK. For their part the aristocratic Whigs he is most in contact with know very little of America and are content to deal in stereotypes. *** The monied classes have taken over both houses of Parliament and therefore Britain itself. A couple of thousand men run the kingdom. Cooper lived in London not long before the great Reform Act of 1832. He foresaw the need for either constitutional change or revolt from beneath. But for the moment the landed gentry and the higher nobility ran England and Empire pretty much as they chose. And it was not a pretty sight. *** All in all a book that would profit greatly by being abbreviated by a skilful editor. -OOO- "

"The Title, WHY WE LOVE DOGS, EAT PIGS AND WEAR COWS is catchy and designed, I think, simply to make people pick up the book and thumb through it. If they get that far, they will probably continue. The title may mask a bit the sub-title, AN INTRODUCTION TO CARNISM. Let's focus on the real priorities here and just call the book CARNISM for short. *** In CARNISM Dr Joy argues that the word "vegetarians" increasingly refers to people who cut back on or stop completely eating meat for reasons other than mere taste or personal health. True blue vegetarians oppose eating meat on ethical grounds derived from their empathy with the animals and fish offered to be eaten. She has coined the words "carnism" and "carnists" to parallel the ethics (or lack thereof) underlying voluntary eating of meat by modern adult humans. Most of us are "carnists." *** Normally, we do not eat animals or fish while they are still alive. Nor do we eat road kill. In the case of chickens, turkeys, pigs, sheep, goats, cattle, etc. someone (usually a giant corporation or its suppliers) first breeds them, raises them in captivity, slaughters them and markets them to us. We don't see this happening and that is a good thing. Why? People who do see secretly taken photos of how violent and cruel is what goes on at chicken farms or slaughterhouses, are sickened. Many vow never to taste another morsel of fin or turf. And it is very rare that feed lots or slaughterhouses take either the public or reporters on a tour of their facilities. *** At work to keep us carnists forever, Melanie Joys argues, are powerful psychological and social (sometimes even religious) forces designed to place a veil between us and animals as beings in their own right, living individuals with feelings, with a certain intelligence and even the capacity to become pets and to be given names. Paradoxically, when we sit at table, we may simultaneously pet our beloved dog named Peanut while ourselves eating parts of an anonymous slaughtered bull or baby calf. Since we identify with and love Peanut, we may generously and affectionately reward him with some scraps of our meal. *** Studies show, we are told, that it is very hard to imagine ourselves eating a pet, someone else's as well as our own. Why then is is so easy to eat hundreds of pounds of fish and animals a year? The book explores the mechanisms we use to distance ourselves from the way animals are raised and slaughtered. What is invisible has a way of becoming non-existent in our minds. That pig we are licking our lips over is never thought of as a once sentient being with interests of its own. *** Carnists will remain carnists, it is argued in AN INTRODUCTION TO CARNISM, only so long as they prevent themselves from learning the facts about how much violence and suffering animals and fish go through before they are served up to us as food. Once carnists notice the facts, however, they tend to eat less and less meat and may even become vegetarians -- a good thing, in the author's opinion. Newly aware carnists are urged to take three steps: (1) eat less meat and fish, (2) support an advocacy group for animals of their own choosing, e.g. PETA and (3) continue to learn about carnism and share what they learn with others. Dr Joy names a few recommended animal advocate organizations, offers a short list of readings and provides a large bibliography, including scholarly articles. *** The material is clearly written, set before the reader in very short, concretely presented sections, replete with mental experiments and recorded anecdotes of emotional reactions of people working in slaughterhouses. WHY WE LOVE DOGS, EAT PIGS AND WEAR COWS is indeed the INTRODUCTION TO CARNISM that it promises to be. In my view, this little book is well worth reading and discussing in book clubs and otherwise. -OOO-"

"WYANDOTTE may well be the easiest of Fenimore Cooper's 32 novels for a 21st Century American to relate to and enjoy without extensive notes and commentaries. *** Published 43 years before Stevenson's STRANGE CASE OF DR JEKYLL AND MR HYDE, Cooper's WYANDOTTE, among many other things, probes the two personalities of a rogue, alcohol-prone Tuscarora Indian Chief. In his noble moments the Indian is Wyandotte, a perceptive, brilliant, compassionate man. When brooding, however, over the wrongs done to him by retired British Army Captain Hugh Willoughby, the savage is, because Willoughby sees him this way, simply an inferior, a semi-civiized, English-speaking Indian called Saucy Nick or Old Nick. *** Most of the novel's action takes place in central New York in the pivotal spring, summer and autumn of 1776. In and around Boston have occurred or are occurring the battles of Lexington, Concord and Bunker Hill. Among the family and friends of retired Captain Willoughby and the Hutted Knoll colony he had formed ten years earlier -- with Old Nick's then indpispensable help -- political loyalty rapidly becomes the paramount issue. Shall we maintain our traditional loyalty to the British Crown or don the tempting new loyalty to the Continental Congress? In 1776 Captain Willoughby's son is a major in the British army. Willoughby's son-in-law is a Continental Colonel. The Captain himself is suddenly by inheritance made an English baronet, Sir Hugh. To whom shall the family, its black slaves, old retainers and manorial dependents be loyal? *** As Wyandotte, the Tuscarora Indian unselfishly risks his life to save from scalping Willoughby's wife and two daughters (one by blood, one by adoption). And he also, for love of the Captain's adopted daugher Maud, Wyandotte rescues Robert, the adoptive brother whom Maud loves, the only son of Captain Willoughby. Young Bob is a captive among a marauding band of Mohawks and renegade whites disguised as Indians. They are besieging allegedly Royalist Willoughby's colony, "the Hutted Knoll," with an eye to confiscating it for themselves as patriotic Americans.*** But hours earlier, in his split personality as Nick, the Indian had stabbed to the heart the husband and father of the three women whom as Wyandotte he loved. This Nick did to avenge old beatings given him when on service with the captain's regiment of the British army. In a moment of unguarded arrogance, Willoughby had just made the mistake of threatening to beat the Tuscarora Chief once again if he withheld information about Willoughby's captive son, Bob. Wyandotte/Nick, a Jekyll/Hyde before Robert Louis Stevenson's creation, is summed up in a remark made 19 years later during a visit back to his old New York home by the murdered Captain's rescued son, now a British Lieutenant General: "He never forgot a favor, or forgave an injury." This is the novel's concluding sentence. *** This is a grand tale, hard to put down once you pick it up. -OOO-"

"James Fenimore Cooper (1789 - 1851) was America's first great novelist. In the 1820s and later he experimented with writing after the fashion of currently marketable British and Irish writers, including especially Sir Walter Scott. One of Cooper's models was Englishwoman Mrs Amelia Anderson Opie (1769-1853) a sometime Unitarian, later Quaker and occasional radical. Mrs Opie aimed to make her readers cry and wrote increasingly about correct moral behavior in young women. *** In apparent imitation of Mrs Opie, Fenimore Cooper, in TALES FOR FIFTEEN, published two yarns (think of them as very long short stories or very short novellas) "Imagination" and "Heart." Cooper remained concerned for the proper upbringing of girls; and occasional moralizing about their temptations and responses appeared in his five LEATHERSTOCKING novels and others. *** The "fifteen" in TALES FOR FIFTEEN refers to 15-year old girls. Cooper's narrative "voice" was that of a fictitious "Jane Morgan." In effect, in both tales an experienced, worldly-wise older woman tells stories of late teen-age girls, with her cautionary advice. *** In his Preface to these stories, Cooper wrote: "They are intended for the perusal of young women, at that tender age when the feelings of their nature begin to act on them most insidiously, and when their minds are least prepared by reason and experience to contend with their passions." Both tales are set in or near Manhattan shortly after the War of 1812. *** "Imagination' is about two teen-age girls Julia Warren and Anna Miller. For financial reasons, Anna's father moves her and a dozen other members of his family 200 miles from Manhattan to the Genesee frontier area of New York State. Julia is devastated and weeps for the absence of her soul-mate. Anna, in a series of letters, works on orphaned Julia to persuade Julia's aunt, Miss Emmerson (with whom she lives) to invite Anna back from the wilds to winter in gay, lively Manhattan. Anna writes Julia how she sings by day and by night Julia's praise to a handsome young man who plans to come to the big city to woo Julia. Julia's imagination runs amuck magnifying the virtues of her absent girl friend and painting an ideal picture of the young Lochinvar she thinks is coming to make her his own. Meanwhile Aunt Emmerson, a simple woman, pours kindly but cold water on Julia's over-heated imagination in attempts to make her notice Anna's selfish, manipulative flaws and to see and appreciate the quiet, ordinary virtues of friends and relatives of Julia who are close at hand. *** "Heart" is about Manhattan's young Charlotte Henley and her quiet love for sickly friend George Morton. The town is abuzz with the current manhunt by all the eligible belles to wed a young bachelor, immensely rich, handsome polished Seymour Delafield. Charlotte's best girl friend duly makes her own play for Seymour, but Seymour falls madly in love with Miss Henley. Whom will Charlotte choose: rich, robust Seymour or self-sacrificing, desperately ill George? What was Cooper up to in these two short stories for teens? TALES FOR FIFTEEN more closely resembles the American novelist's first novel of English manners, PRECAUTION, than his later novels of wilderness and the high seas. Shortly after "Imagination" and "Heart" Cooper published LIONEL LINCOLN, a tale of revolutionary Boston in 1775-1776, heavily laced with Gothic mysteries. His English models for stories of youthful romances abounded in Gothic elements such as kidnappings and seductions. These motifs do not, however, appear in TALES FOR FIFTEEN. Young readers of "Imagination" and "Heart" would very likely have wept, heaved bosoms, sighed and dreamt idealistically of their own future husbands. Yet in fictional but realistic, plausible circumstances, real, literate, middle-class and upper-class teens would have faced with Cooper: wealth versus relative poverty, health versus sickness, an adored girl friend out for her own selfish purposes and on and on. Enjoy these undemanding, pleasant, real feeling yarns of teen-age romance in New York just after the annoying War of 1812. -OOO-"

"Between THE PILOT and THE LAST OF THE MOHICANS, James Fenimore Cooper issued his fifth novel, LIONEL LINCOLN (1825). Its deliberately evocative, antiquarian subtitle: THE LEAGUER OF BOSTON (leaguer means siege) locates this historical novel's period in time: April 1775 - March 1776. After 4,000 British troops were repulsed from Lexington and Concord during a search for colonialsts' weapon, the survivors fell back on Boston and the protecting guns of the Royal Navy. Month after month for nearly a year the rebel noose tightened. Despite a costly victory at Bunker Hill, the British, first under General Gage, then under General Howe, remained generally passive as the new Continental Army under George Washington cut off supplies and the Redcoats began to suffer hunger and smallpox. *** Into this pre-revolutionary cauldron sails a 25 year old British major to join his regiment -- Lionel Lincoln, Oxford educated, member of Parliament. He will end his life an Earl in ancestral England. But he had been born in Boston to a cadet branch of a noble English family and will view both the skirmishes at Lexington and Concord and the ensuing siege of Boston from competing English and American viewpoints. With the rest of the British land and naval forces, he is evacuated from Boston in March 1776. In the meanwhile Lionel Lincoln is given no important command by the generals but is told to spend his time making useful friends for the Crown among the colonials: both loyalists and rebels. *** Major Lincoln reconnects with Mrs. Priscilla Lechmere, the young officer's great-aunt, resident in Boston, and almost immediately falls in love with her beautiful teen age granddaughter Cecil Dynevor. A close military friend of Lionel's from boyhood and days at Oxford, Captain Peter Polwarth, is already in love with Agnes Danforth, a great-niece of Mrs Lechmere living under her roof. Polwarth is a dedicated epicure and fills the tale with humor relating to keeping his ample belly well supplied with first-rate food. By novel's end he has lost a leg in combat and hass proposed marriage 50 times to ardent rebel, Agnes Danforth. *** The novel soon gains a distinctly Gothic feeling with the introduction of an apparently ancient man (he turns out to be 30 years younger than he makes out) known simply as Ralph with whom Lionel Lincoln had become acquainted on the voyage from England to Boston. Ralph is passionately against British tyranny and for colonial rights. Both Lionel and Ralph are in the frequent company of Job Pray, a childlike man of 27 whose mind youthful illness had greatly weakened. Lionel Lincoln shows himself to be rashly impulsive and to fear that a hereditary tendency toward madness (his baronet father languishes in an insane asylum in England) may someday touch even himself. *** This is a true historical novel on the model of Sir Walter Scott's trend-setting WAVERLEY: people large and small are caught up in a turning point in history as the process begins of expelling Britain from 13 of its North American colonies. A commercial flop, LIONEL LINCOLN is nonetheless appreciated as opening an important new creative stage in the author's growth -- being the fifth of 32 novels Cooper wrote. The author was experimenting, evolving. He did serious on the ground inspection of Boston and imagined his characters back into an earlier period. The streets and buildings themselves of that city are made important players in the siege and the romances. *** Cooper also created memorable scenes of battle, bombardments, siege, hunger and illness. Why and how men change their political allegiances is the overriding theme. The tacked on Gothic dimension of LIONEL LINCOLN is generally held to have been a mistake. Lincoln and his relatives and a couple of Boston acquaintances are slowly revealed to have previously unknown family ties among themselves. Working out those ties moves several characters to do strange things. Madness, a chilling wedding scene, graveyards, omens, frightening shadows cast on a chapel ceiling: all this and more is pure Gothic fiction. But Gothic writing was still in its hey day, wildly demanded by readers, and in the early 1820s Cooper desperately needed to make money. *** Mighty Britain and its quarrels with Scotland, Ireland and North America were themes being explored in contemporary literature by Walter Scott, Fenimore Cooper and others. Cooper was busily creating America's first serious fiction to find readers world wide. LIONEL LINCOLN, for all its faults, is a fascinating read and has many aspects of a good detective yarn. -OOO-"

"Pioneering American novelist James Fenimore Cooper lived from 1789 until 1851. In THE EARLY YEARS, Professor Wayne Franklin ends his biography when 36 year old Cooper boards a ship in 1826 to travel for the better part of a decade in Europe with his wife and five children. By 1826 James Cooper's best known novel THE LAST OF THE MOHICANS was in print. These and earlier works started his reputation at home and abroad. *** Author Franklin roots his narrative in documents, some not available until the 1990s. But he is not afraid to speculate. If, for instance, he knows that Cooper was in one city at the beginning of his honeymoon and knows when he arrives at Cooperstown but not by what overland route, he will guess and then use his guess as a starting point for describing landscapes more familiar to Cooper's bride Susan than to James himself. *** JAMES FENIMORE COOPER: THE EARLY YEARS is filled with often fascinating excursuses into the lives and times of seemingly every relative, schoolmate, naval officer colleague and acquaintance James Cooper (he added Fenimore later) ever had. Thus we see the impact that President Thomas Jefferson's embargo on trade with Britain had on the economy of New York State. We investigate the tenacious hold of dueling on officers of the young American navy. We learn how chance meetings with Indians or time spent in still Dutch-feeling Albany furnish materials for novels and Cooper's pioneering history of the U. S. Navy. *** The book has helpful contemporary black and white illustrations, lavish notes and an excellent bibliography. Wanting are maps of colonial and early American New York. All in all a book indispensable to lovers of James Fenimore Cooper and early American history. -OOO-"

"I see THE NOTICER as an intelligent, sunny child's introduction to Socrates, especially the shorter dialogs by Plato such as MENO. Like Socrates, author Andy Andrews's hero, "Jones," wanders around a restricted area (Orange Beach, Alabama to Socrates's Athens) asking people questions and drawing "correct" answers from them. Unlike Socrates, however, Jones is in season and out of season congenial, non-confrontational, bland, corny. Jones's message is always upbeat, sunny of the "I think I can, I think I can" variety. *** Decade after decades this man who never seems to age wanders under Orange Beach's great pier, sits on benches near the canal and dispenses homely, folksy, generally unsolicited advice. "Make people feel good to be around you. If you make a mistake, apologize. If, on the other hand, you make an avoidably bad choice you had better show real contrition and make amends, in some cases even make restitution." *** And so it goes. Saccharin. Often corny. Always congenial. Rarely deep. Usually practical. Motherhood and apple pie. Who dares argue against Jones? Oh, I amost forgot: local Hispanics, sometimes rich, often illegals, call Jones Garcia. Want to find out why? -OOO-"

"In early September 2001 American magazine writer Katherine Russell Rich arrived in India to immerse herself for an academic year in the Hindi language. Aged 45, Ms Rich (Kathy to her friends) could no longer make sense of her life in English, so she planned to borrow someone else's language and breathe life back into herself. This she did for the next year in and around the city of Udaipur in arid Rajasthan well north of Bombay. *** Until she was six years old, Ms Rich was hearing-impaired. As an adult she had twice survived cancer and written a book about it, THE RED DEVIL:TO HELL WITH CANCER -- AND BACK. She had been unhappily married. Everything was piling up: cancer, being fired from the eighth magazine she worked for, and other blockages of her life force. Kathy concluded she had decided that she could neither fight nor could she flee from them. Her only option for the past several years had been "playing dead." *** In September 2001 Kathy hoped, and her hope was fulfilled, that if she went to India, a country as alien to her past as any country could be, she would wake up from her self-imposed playing dead and find something new to live for. *** Indeed she found her own second-language learning fascinating. And in volunteering Fridays as a school in Udaipur for children born deaf, Kathy discovered yet another new world. In that non-hearing world, teachers taught young boys Hindi-related signing while the boys taught themselves a language unintelligible to their teachers. *** Katherine Russell Rich kept a diary. And upon her return to the USA in 2002 she systematically read heavy texts and interviewed linguists and neurologists to bring herself abreast of the fast developing worlds of linguistics: spoken, written and signed languages. This later research inspired Kathy in 2006 to return to Udaipur to perform a notably clumsy experiment to test whether her deaf students had indeed created a new language of their own. There was evidence from Nicaragua exciting the linguists and neurologists and Kathy had been provided the wherewithal to replicate Nicaragua. Scientifically she failed. But at the human level a deaf sign language teacher confirmed, "the children have a whole other language one even we do not understand." These are the final words of DREAMING IN HINDI. *** Perhaps the author tries to pack too many different ideas into too few pages: personal reminiscences, an exercise in spiritual autobiography, watching herself learn Hindi in school, in host family and on trips, theorizing about speaking, gesturing, signing and writing, about psychology, observing local reactions to the 9/11 attacks in the US, seeing a surge in Hindu hatred of Muslims and rising terrorism -- to name only the most obvious themes developed. There are many nuggets of insight and some passages of great poetic beauty in this book. But the narrative framework (or lack thereof) is hard to figure out and might, I fear, be off-putting for many readers. -OOO- "

"Aside from Chaucer's CANTERBURY TALES, Thornton Wilder's THE BRIDGE OF SAN LUIS REY may have been the first tale to ask one of literature's most enduring questions: what were a bunch of ostensibly unrelated people all doing at the same place on the same catastrophic day? In Wilder's case, the event was the collapse of the grandest, highest pedestrian rope bridge in all South America. In the case of Professor John Pipkin's first novel, WOODBURNER, the occasion that unites diverse people in Concord Woods, Massachusetts is a fire inadvertently started on a dry windy day by a hungry man wanting to make fish chowder for himself during a river outing. That historically attested fire burner was none other than Henry David Thoreau. And when all was over, this future preacher of environmentalism had burned 300 woodland acres. His life intersects those of a half dozen other real and imaginary characters. All their lives are transformed by the experience of fighting and philosophizing about the fire. In another few months Thoreau will retire to a cabin on Walden Pond, an area untouched by but close to the great fire. "He will keep the injured woods company until they revive. And, if they will have him, he will become their steward." -OOO-"

"THE OAK OPENINGS by Fenimore Cooper is an astonishingly convincing tale of a fictional religious conversion to evangelical Christianity. A mysterious 50 year old Indian Chief named Scalping Peter, a man of no tribe, crusades for 20 years, with Tecumseh and other Indian nationalists, to indulge in ethnic cleansing before the word was coined. *** It is 1812 in the oak openings (also known as oak savannas) of western Michigan. Peter has called a meeting of tribes to throw all the whites in Canada and the USA back into the great salt sea (Atlantic Ocean). His hatred of whites is pathological. Whenever he can, he murders them, even infants, and takes their scalps. But a teenage white woman slowly softens his heart. He begins to think of her as a daughter. Yet she and five other whites are in his power and the assembled chiefs want to kill them all. Two they do kill: a soldier and a Methodist minister who speaks their languages and whose message to them is that they are the ten lost tribes of Israel. Indians do not want to be Jews. They reject his message but before they kill him have him explain the Christian doctrine of loving your enemies. This he does till the very moment of his tomahawking. Reverend "Amen" forgives his murderers and prays for them to God. *** Beholding the missionary's courage, Scalping Peter has a conversion to at least a starting point of Christianity. He then uses his wits against great odds to save four whites, and is wiling to love his worst enemies white or red -- even Cherokees! *** Nearly 40 years after novel's beginning an American author interviews Scalping Peter and those Americans he rescued and sees how one Indian's hatred of the whites for stealing Indian hunting grounds has been transformed. The tragedy to the Indians is seen to have been the permissive will of God -- the Manitou, the Great Spirit. These European robbers brought to the Indians the gospel of the Manitou's only Son. A fair trade. *** In addition to religious conversion, THE OAK OPENINGS tells of a hair-raising 700 mile canoe escape by four whites and two Indians from the pro-British red men seeking their lives. We learn of the art of finding the hives of wild bees and various tricks white and red men play on one another. Something for every reader. But you must from time to time suspend your disbelief. -OOO-"

"HIRING YOUR FIRST EMPLOYEE by Attorney Fred S. Steingold lives up to its sub-title: A STEP-BY-STEP GUIDE. The author takes a sole proprietor from making up his mind whether he really needs his first employee and the calculations of pros and cons through the latter's first day on the job. To anyone who has hired employees whether just for himself or for a larger oganization, this book offers a fine review of familiar turf. An old manager might read Steingold to see if his own insisted upon practices are there: such as an accurate job description, honest performance evaluations, recognizing good work. Yes, they are, along with many, many more good hiring practices and caveats. This straight from the shoulder, clearly written and illustrated manual has the feel of a first rate check-list that a pilot and co-pilot attentively go through while preparing for takeoff. Following all of Fred Steingold's recommendations does not assure success in hiring, but not following them makes a first-time employer more likely to face law suits, profit losses and general grief. *** Some readers might complain that a whole psychic dimension is missing: looking into the potential employee's soul to divine his or her soul's makeup, into intangibles like loyalty, trustworthiness, devotion. Well, the book is a check list, not an encyclopedia. What occurs to me by way of broader context is that there is some theoretical moral risk in ever hiring anybody at all. I wonder if Immanuel Kant specifically brought up hiring a helper as an example of immorally treating a fellow human not as an end but as a means to your own end? Hiring someone to disappear into the maw of a faceless giant like the Bank of America or the Pentagon might mask that moral risk. But hiring someone for a day by day face-to-face collaboration -- the subject of HIRING YOUR FIRST EMPLOYEE: what is that if not downgrading a person with equal human dignity to being just a means to your end? Candidates would remain your social equal were you to select them to join your Lodge or Rotary Club. But to be your salesmen? Your receptionist? -OOO- "

"Call it the White Island, or Kyleakin, Lighthouse Island or. in Highland Gaelic, Eilean Bhan. By any name, it is the subject of Sir John Lister-Kaye's first book, THE WHITE ISLAND (1973). It is an 8 1/2 acre speck of the Inner Hebrides. In September 2008, 20 American Elderhostelers, including my wife and myself, crossed the 500 meter Skye Bridge from the Scottish mainland at Kyle of Lochalsh to the large and much sung island of Skye whither Bonnie Prince Charlie and Flora MacDonald fled after the 1746 Battle of Culloden. The White Island now holds up a column of that bridge. *** There was no bridge in March 1968 when young John Lister-Kaye first set foot on the White Island. He had accepted an invitation from renowned naturalist and author (RING OF BRIGHT WATER) Gavin Maxwell to collaborate on a book on British wildlife and to build on Eilean Bhan a zoo of Scottish and other wild animals. Sadly, Maxwell succumbed to cancer within a year and both projects were abandoned. Today the White Island is a Government bird and animal sanctuary. Sir John, now the Eighth Baronet Lister-Kaye, went on to pioneering wildlife and educational work of his own near Loch Ness. *** THE WHITE ISLAND is a very good first book by a man who has since produced many more, including a novel, ONE FOR SORROW. Read it as an early chapter in British wildlife conservation. Read it for Teko, its world famous tame otter and a fascinating array of other creatures both tame and wild, including Owl, a pet gannet, basking sharks, petrels, herrings and whales. THE WHITE ISLAND also brings to three-dimensional reality legendary Gavin Maxwell, a handful of Scots and others at work to build the zoo and tend the animals, the racing tides of The Straits of King Hakan of Norway, howling gales and the island's still standing lighthouse built by a grandfather of Robert Louis Stevenson. The book fills its modest ecological niche very nicely. -OOO- "

"David Liss's 2008 historical novel THE WHISKEY REBELS weaves together three events in the early American Republic. These are the chartering of the first Bank of the United States in 1791, the financial panic of 1792 and the Whiskey Rebellion of 1794. Widowed Joan Maycott, who wishes to write the first great American novel, believes that by persuading Congress to impose an excise tax on the making of whiskey, Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton is responsible for the violent death near Pittsburgh of her whiskey distilling husband, Andrew. Step by step the handsome, brilliant Joan wins allies and builds a network of whiskey boys to do her bidding with an eye to toppling Hamilton and making themselves rich. *** The second major fictional player in THE WHISKEY REBELS is Ethan Saunders, a onetime star in George Washington's Revolutionary War spy network. Ten years earlier, just before Yorktown, Saunders was asked by Colonel Alexander Hamilton to resign from the Continental army under suspicion of selling minor secrets to the British (a charge eventually proven false). From initial hater of Hamilton, Saunders slowly comes to admire and defend him. This puts him on a collision course with the conspirators around Mrs Maycott, though it is years before they discover each other and she tries to make him a pawn in her schemes to ruin Hamilton. *** I will not spill many more words on a book far too long and tedious. The historical underpinnings are too undramatic and technical (6% bonds, 4% bonds, the usual greed and fear of stock markets, political jockeying by Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson, etc., etc.) to justify the ungainly, rambling narrative structure. As a morality tale THE WHISKEY REBELS is not without attraction. Its thesis is that civilization is a very thin veneer. Transport well read, Christian men and women to a frontier wilderness (in this case the environs of Pittsburgh) and they will become nasty, unkempt, murderous and self-absorbed. David Liss provides some good local color in the lovingly recreated taverns of late 18th Century Philadelphia and New York. Otherwise, forget this book. -OOO- "

"M. C. Beaton is one of several pen names of Marion Chesney. Beaton has so far produced 24 HAMISH MACBETH novels. DEATH OF A CHARMING MAN is the tenth in the series. *** In all three of the 24 HAMISH MACBETH mysteries which I have read the same formula occurs. I call it "the evil outsider." A really perverse man or woman intrudes himself/herself into a small town or even smaller group of reasonably normal people. Soon (if not before the outsider dealt himself in) the outsider knows key weaknesses of the group. He plays on those weaknesses, arousing strong hatred among several or all of the people he has infiltrated -- enough so as to motivate a murder. *** The Charming Man of this detective story is stunningly gorgeous Peter Hynd, an affluent young Englishman. With no explanation that anyone believes, Hynd moves to the tiny, depressingly grey northwest Scotland fishing village of Drim. He sets to work refurbishing a house he has bought and the local women head for him like hummingbirds toward red flowers. They flood the small beauty parlor. They revive exercise classes at the community center. They shed pounds. Peter encourages them and enrages their husbands. *** Sergeant Hamish Macbeth, based in nearby Lochdubh, feels in his thumbs that "something wicked this way comes." He warns Peter Hynd that Highlanders are proud, vengeful people and that he is asking for big trouble. Hynd laughs off the warning. But not long after, Peter Hynd disappears. By all accounts he was seen by a lawyer, a banker and a real estate broker just before he presumably left town -- to arrange sale of his still uncompleted house. *** Hamish Macbeth's police higher ups see nothing to be alarmed about. But Hamish goes on vacation, trains down from Inverness to London and environs and begins to understand what made Peter Hynd tick. In the end Macbeth unravels what happened to this English Adonis, in an ending full of surprises. -OOO-"

"SONG OF THE ROLLING EARTH: A HIGHLAND ODYSSEY is the story of the founding of Aigas Field Centre (see http://www.aigas.co.uk) west of Inverness in northeastern Scotland. Aigas was the first residential centre created in Scotland to do informal education of both children and adults in the natural history of the Scottish Highlands and Islands. When Sir John Lister-Kaye, the eighth baronet of that ilk, completed this book in 2003, his Aigas Field Centre was then 25 years old. It still flourishes in late 2008. Indeed my wife and I and 18 other American Elderhostelers spent 2 1/2 weeks there in September- October 2008 tasting of its innovative environmental riches. *** Aigas is an established hotel, residential restaurant, classroom and base from which to make excursions by bus, train and ferry to Skye and Orkney, to the Culloden battlefield where Bonnie Prince Charlie and his irregular highlanders were smashed by a Hanoverian regular army and to habitats of golden eagles, otters, loons and turkey-sized grouse called capercaillies. House of Aigas is also the home of Sir John Lister-Kaye and his family. In his second-storey study Sir John writes and edits the many books he has produced about Scotland's Highlands and islands, their ever threatened animals and plants, their enduring, adaptable people and their troubled natural history. *** SONG OF THE ROLLING EARTH is part autobiography, part special pleading for "restoration ecology" and all poetry. *** From his earliest years John Lister-Kaye, scion of a Yorkshire English family whose wealth was based on coal, was fascinated by nature: worms, birds and butterflies. He came to detest the destruction of marshes and forests that the industrial revolution had wrought upon all parts of the United Kingdom. Even gorgeous Scotland, long romanticized by Sir Walter Scott and others as one stunning Loch Lomond after another, had in fact been systematically ravished ever since the end of the last Ice Age. First the hunter-gatherers used fire to clear the forests and plied their primitive weapons to exterminate the woolly mammoth and the sabre-toothed tiger. Agriculture next drove back the wild habitats. Urban man polluted land and streams. Species of plants (tobacco, potatoes) and animals (Hereford cattle) were transplanted without thought from one country to another, imports always competing with, often exterminating natives. *** But in April 1996 Sir John took hope from a talk given in Edinburgh by Sir Martin Holdgate: man can now (and indeed must) heal what his ancestors have done to the Scottish Highlands and elsewhere. The technique is "restoration ecology," consciously cutting back on pollutants and generally preserving what little bio-diversity we have left. *** This is the mission of Aigas Field Centre: to show on the sprawling mixed landscape premises both on foot and in lectures and through excursions farther afield how heather has replaced forests and how far too many deer ceaselessly trample or eat trees when they try to re-establish themselves. Long gone from the highlands are wolves, beavers and bear. The second arrow in Aigas's educational quiver is to show students how they can make a difference. Some locally extinct species are now being cautiously re-introduced from neighboring Norway. All this is lyrically laid out in SONG OF THE ROLLING EARTH, a phrase borrowed from Walt Whitman. -OOO-"

"While my wife and I were among 20 American Elderhostelers at Aigas Field Studies Centre near Inverness, Scotland in September 2008, we bought two books by the establishment's founder, Sir John Lister Kaye. I enjoyed them so much that I have sent off for three more. *** THE SEEING EYE: NOTES OF A HIGHLAND NATURALIST (1980) tells Sir John's personal experiences in Scotland from 1969 - 1979 and his efforts to open up the "Highland wilderness to the world at large" (FOREWORD). THE SEEING EYE tells of Lister-Kaye's slow but steady coming to awareness of the centuries-long process of humans blindly desolating the thinly peopled Scottish Highlands. From having diverse animal and plant populations at the end of the last Ice Age resembling today's Norway and Sweden, Scotland was relentlessly ground by man into a "green desert." Gone were its wolves and beavers, many bird species and huge ancient forests of Scots pines. *** THE SEEING EYE tells of Sir John's crusade first to show this latter-day tragedy to a world looking in other directions and then to do something concrete to fix it. -OOO-"

"I read this book for Scottish Highlands atmospherics in September 2008. My wife and I were among 20 American Elderhostelers on a 2 1/2 week natiure study and history visit to the Aigas Field Centre (see http://www.aigas.co.uk/) near Inverness. At the end of long days looking for divers (loons), whales, iron age forts and the like, M.C. Beaton's DEATH OF A GOSSIP (1985, 2008) was a fun, relaxing way to unwind and unkink tired leg muscles. *** The novel's literary genre "detective story" is not much more than a frame for glimpses of Northwestern Scotland (Sutherland), its hills, a sea loch and assorted characters. Eight people: men, women, one boy, have signed on for a few days at a fly casting fishing school run by John and Heather Cartwright. One of them, Lady Jane Winters, seems to know everything bad in the lives of all the rest. There is none who does not come to hate her. So when she is found murdered, they are all suspects. *** Hamish Macbeth, thirty-something, ungainly not entirely honest constable of the village of Lochdubh is quickly shoved aside in the investigations by higher ups, Detective Chief Inspector Blair, who heads nearby Strathbane CD and his sidekicks Detectives Jimmy Anderson and Harry McNab. *** In the end, as you will soon come to expect, the case is cracked by the ostensibly bumbling Hamish Macbeth. The local rich man's daughter, young Priscilla Halliburton-Smythe, is Hamish's beloved and chief component of the principal sub-plot. But does she see in him anything more than an old friend she has grown up with? Stay tuned: she will reappear in other novels in this series. *** Constable Macbeth is a poor man's Sherlock Holmes, with maddening, brilliant flashes of insight weakly grounded in facts and fleshed out by informal syllogisms hard for me, at least to follow. He has, however, fourth cousins scattered all over the world and is able to phone them, especially those in the press, for background on the victim and those suspected of murdering her. *** I liked the book enough to order dvds via netflix.com showing the British TV series, Hamish Macbeth. Several British nature lovers who were at Aigas Centre along with our American elderhostelers assured me that the TV series is a hoot. And some kind ladies whom my wife and I dropped in upon at a Senior Center in nearby Beuly showered smiles upon us and told us all about the real town in Sutherland on which fictional Lochdubh is based. *** Bottom line: good, informative, amusing reading before bed, on trains, planes or buses. You can learn a bit as well about the art of fly fishing. -OOO-"

"There are more reasons than one to read Pete Ritzer's SEVEN OX SEVEN. *** First, to find out what the title means. Hint: Christians should forgive their enemies seventy times seven times. *** Next, for a good yarn about Texas families in search of tick-free locations in the Panhandle to fatten up beeves in winter for the railhead in Dodge City, Kansas. *** Third, for huge dollops of geology, weather, gadgetry and cameo appearances of real figures from the post-civil war west like cattleman Charles Goodnight and Dodge City's most famous dentist, Doc Holliday. *** Obstacles to reading include excursions into Catholic theology. The book at times feels like a prelude to the Second Vatican Council (1962 - 1965). The written style is stiking, more resembling 19th century historical novelists than Wouk or Michener. Curious resemblance to psalm texts, with one sentence being echoed by the following over and over, mainly through frequent repetition of individual words. *** All in all a good read: apparently more fact than fiction. -OOO-"

"There are a lot of readers out there to whom Professor Chet Raymo's WHEN GOD IS GONE EVERYTHING IS HOLY will bring totally fresh information. Even for greying old me there was something new: I had never heard of "memes." Let me share with you Raymo's take: "Genes shape our bodies and some behaviors. Memes -- a coinage of the biologist Richard Dawkins -- are self-replicating units of culture, ideas or concepts passed from one individual to another through writing, speech, ritual, and imitation. Memes can be as trivial as jump-rope rhymes, or as profound as a full-blown theology" (p. 90). The younger you are or the less familiar either with organized religion or with empirical science, the more novelties you will find in WHEN GOD IS GONE. *** The book is about ongoing conflicts between religious faith and methodical experimental science. Raymo embeds a couple of hundred borrowings from thinkers on both sides of the faith/science divide inside his personal biopic. Now 71, Chet Raymo is a cradle Catholic, educated at Notre Dame and then teaching for decades at two Catholic colleges. Some years ago he could not handle the cognitive dissonance that came from trying to think both as an orthodox Catholic and as a teacher of science. He opted to cut out that discord by reducing his inherited supernatural, highly organized religion into an underlying natural religion, also called religious naturalism. He stopped believing that Jesus rose from the dead, that God is a person with something resembling will and intellect. He is almost nauseated by the thought of miracles and the supernatural. *** Yet he remains culturally Roman Catholic, a "smells and bells" lover of ritual, music and fleshy delights. Catholicism has too much magic, even paganism built into it for his taste. Yet he loves many Catholic writers, notably the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins and Nobel prize winning novelist Sigrid Undset. Chet Raymo gives beautifully crafted reasons for his journey into almost rapturous scientific agnosticism, also called Catholic agnosticism. Some readers will accept some, maybe most of his arguments. Others will find that they do not hold water. -OOO-"

"THE WALLS OF CARTAGENA is an historical novelette in the genre created by Sir Walter Scott. Its great world-historical backdrop is the American empire of Spain, especially its silver-producing Caribbean Basin. The dirty, hot port city of Cartagena in today's Colombia is the hub of Spain's trade in slaves imported, then bred to work silver mines and sugar plantations. In the late 1630s a Jesuit priest, Father Pedro, based on the historical Saint Peter Claver, works in Cartagena to save the souls and relieve the suffering of slaves, lepers and the dying, doing much as Mother Teresa would later do in Calcutta. Into this world a boy child is born to a dying mother on a newly arrived Portuguese slave ship quarantined in Cartagena harbor. He is rescued by Father Pedro and another slave, and kindly raised by a rich lady who teaches him to speak, read and write four European languages. On his own this little linguistic genius, based on a real character, also learns seven African tongues. He is baptized Amadeo de Angola but is called Calepino after a more famous European genius who mastered eleven languages. THE WALLS OF CARTAGENA is a first-person narrative by 13-year old Calepino. It is a spiritual "boy's adventure tale." Imagine Andy Hardy becoming a saint by losing his selfishness and learning to tend lepers. We touch the world of the Spanish Inquisition as it investigates the orthodoxy of a converted Jew who doctors the colony's lepers. We see a saint turn a blind eye to a little plot by Calepino to spirit an enslaved mother and son out of Cartagena to a village of runaway slaves in the interior. This he does with the help of a blind old leper, once a pirate, who then mobilizes his old chums to capture a ship belonging to the evil Spaniard on the man who had abused his slaves. A simple tale. It lays out true history as background for the coming of age spiritually of a gifted slave boy. THE WALLS OF CARTAGENA is fast-paced, with 36 unpretentious drawings, is aimed at children from eight to twelve, but can hold an adult, too. -OOO-"

"For Roman Catholics, the Second Vatican Ecumenical Council (1962-3) launched a new era in moral practice, liturgical services and rethinking of old theological positions, including previously sacrosanct "dogmas." The theologian author Father Avery Dulles, S. J., son of Eisenhower's Secretary of State, was furiously busy from the mid 50s throughout the 70s wrapping his thoughts around evolving, indeed accelerating Catholic theological thinking. In 1968 he summed up his work to that point with REVELATION AND THE QUEST FOR UNITY, as the separated Christian churches worked back gingerly back into sync with one another. Between 1968 and 70 Dulles took for his focus faith, teaching authority and dogma. He published twelve articles on these three interrelated themes. He pulled them all together for this book, THE SURVIVAL OF DOGMA -- 1971, updated 1982. Catholics nowadays don't just believe the same things in different ways from the way their forefathers did 452, 1517 or even 1870. They sometimes believe the opposite or nearly the opposite of what their ancestors did. But that is not the Catholic stereotype! Catholics never change, their critics allege. Once upon a time charging interest on money loaned constituted the sin of usury. That's why in the European Middle Ages only Jews were doing it legally. Once the dogma EXTRA ECCLESIAM NULLA SALUS -- NO SALVATION OUTSIDE THE (CATHOLIC) CHURCH was enforced by kings and executioners. Now, it is quietly shelved! Dulles urges preachers not to mention in in their sermons. It might confuse the faithful. The shifts in theology, according to Dulles, were not incremental steps within a previously defined box. They were qualitative shifts, quantum leaps. When the Jewish Christians confronted Greek learning, they rethought the Gospel and put it in Greek categories. Later that happened when Arabic learning came West. Since the Reformation, Luther, Calvin et al. are getting their due from Catholics, no longer grudgingly either. Usually, a belief changed first. Only later did theologians scramble to catch up in words, through the process of "reconceptualization." That these shifts actually happened Dulles makes clear. And they had to happen or Christianity itself would have been shelved. The mechanics of HOW the leaps occurred he does not make clear. One day people just stopped thinking that way. Why? Perhaps the subject of a later book by an aging Cardinal Avery Dulles."

"Journalist John Deedy's 1978 SEVEN AMERICAN CATHOLICS is about six men and one woman. Of the men four are clergymen, one a politician and one a philanthropic doctor. The woman is pacifist Dorothy Day (must I give more than her name to identify her?) Deedy says that all have quickly faded from memory, and yet each gave much to their times. If there is a constant to these seven lives, besides being American Catholics, they all had bigger reputations in life than after death. Indeed some were fading long before death. Doctor Tom Dooley, when he died of melanoma in 1961 at age 34 had been ranked among the seventh best known men in the world -- far more renowned, for instance than John F. Kennedy before he ran for President. Tom Dooley is a candidate for canonization as a saint. In less than five years his MEDICO volunteer organization built seven hospitals in Asia. He was a showman, allied with the CIA. After his death biographic investigations launched by the cause for his canonization uncovered sexual addictions that shut down that initiative. Dorothy Day and her Catholic Worker Organization were in the business of caring for the poorest of the poor even before Mother Teresa of Calcutta. And with more powerful ideas behind her, too. She made it possible for committed volunteers to spend months or a few years helping her then move on with a clear conscience. The one politician among the seven Catholics was Governor Alfred E. ("Al") Smith of New York. When he ran for President in 1928, we was the first Roman Catholic to be the candidate of a major political party. He gave Catholics hope for continued upward mobility in the face of Protestant dislike. He also developed a passionate dislike for his successor as Governor, Franklin D. Roosevelt which made his last 15 years a pathetic rejection of all his earlier progressive political values. Cardinal William Henry O'Connell of Boston lived like a Renaissance prince and inspired awe among his mainly poor Irish-American flock as well as affecting Boston Brahmins. He outlived his influence by a couple of decades. Much the same was true of O'Connell's one-time auxiliary bishop, the future Cardinal of New York, Francis Joseph Spellman. When his patron Pius XII died, Spellman's clout was gone. But he brought John Courtney Murray, S. J. out of oblivion as adviser to the Second Vatican Council (1962-3). There Spellman and Murray brought Catholicism up to date on secular concepts associated with religious liberty. John Courtney Murray was a quiet man and courtly theologian. He pushed his ideas successfully and over decades in only two arenas: church-state and religious freedom. But he transformed Catholic thinking in both areas. Who remembers him today? Murray's hot-tempered Jesuit colleague Leonard Edward Feeney worked as hard to keep Rome a comfortable century or two behind the 20th Century as Murray did the opposite. Feeney for 7 1/2 years thundered every Sunday in Boston Common to generally hostile crowds that "there is no salvation outside the Catholic Church" and that Archbishop Richard Cushing was a heretic for teaching that Jews and Protestants had a shot at heaven. Feeney had a great gift for mimicry and treasured the brown derby which his hero Al Smith had given him. And there they are. This is a pleasant, informative smooth as syrup read. If you did not know much of these seven American Catholics before, you will learn a few new things. They contributed strongly to their parts of our world. They had their fame. And now it fades. -OOO-"