Books in Brief

Dr. Johnson, His Life in Letters, selected and edited by David Littlejohn (Prentice-Hall, $5.95). Littlejohn, like everyone else it seems, is writing a book on Johnson; and he apparently found it easy to mark favorites while studying the letters—thus, on the way to one book, producing another. It is a volume far easier to assemble than justify. Johnson addicts will want to ramble in the whole collection; others will find the key paragraphs of the correspondence cited in standard introductions to Johnson, the books by Joseph Wood Krutch and Walter Jackson Bate. Except for the rare letter that gives away the mystery of his self-imprisonment while awaiting the onset of madness, Johnson’s letters are the least revealing part of his literary output. He was lazy, busy, a great talker, one who wrote for pay. These factors conspire to give us very little of his life in his letters. G. wills

The Flight from Woman, by Karl Stern (Farrar, $4.95). To be a Christian in our time, Unamuno showed us, is to be quixotic, for in a world governed by technology and the scientific view, where freedom is taken to mean action, there is hardly any place for the man who quietly nods his assent. In this admirable study of sexual polarity, Dr. Stern confronts the Christian’s utterly submissive Yes (“Thy Will be done”) with psychoanalysis and phenomenology; Christianity is enriched in the confrontation. If this Yes of complete assent is, for most, becoming more difficult, it is because we are fleeing from woman, from the charisma of womanhood at Mariology’s roots, and from that intuitive or poetic wisdom called sophia. Our highest allegiance today is bestowed on the restless male spirit of penetration and analysis that epitomizes, not so much reason as rationality. Equate knowledge solely with the masculine and you’ll end by objectifying humanity; objects—need one point out?—can be manipulated. Dr. Stern makes his case with a close examination of the lives and careers of Descartes, Goethe, Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, Tolstoy, and Sartre. Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler, as phallic woman, is also considered. The result is a compact volume, highly readable and absorbing, that deserves wider circulation than it will probably have.

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Dr. Johnson, His Life in Letters, selected and edited by David Littlejohn (Prentice-Hall, $5.95). Littlejohn, like everyone else it seems, is writing a book on Johnson; and he apparently found it easy to mark favorites while studying the letters—thus, on the way to one book, producing another. It is a volume far easier to assemble than justify. Johnson addicts will want to ramble in the whole collection; others will find the key paragraphs of the correspondence cited in standard introductions to Johnson, the books by Joseph Wood Krutch and Walter Jackson Bate. Except for the rare letter that gives away the mystery of his self-imprisonment while awaiting the onset of madness, Johnson’s letters are the least revealing part of his literary output. He was lazy, busy, a great talker, one who wrote for pay. These factors conspire to give us very little of his life in his letters. G. wills

The Flight from Woman, by Karl Stern (Farrar, $4.95). To be a Christian in our time, Unamuno showed us, is to be quixotic, for in a world governed by technology and the scientific view, where freedom is taken to mean action, there is hardly any place for the man who quietly nods his assent. In this admirable study of sexual polarity, Dr. Stern confronts the Christian’s utterly submissive Yes (“Thy Will be done”) with psychoanalysis and phenomenology; Christianity is enriched in the confrontation. If this Yes of complete assent is, for most, becoming more difficult, it is because we are fleeing from woman, from the charisma of womanhood at Mariology’s roots, and from that intuitive or poetic wisdom called sophia. Our highest allegiance today is bestowed on the restless male spirit of penetration and analysis that epitomizes, not so much reason as rationality. Equate knowledge solely with the masculine and you’ll end by objectifying humanity; objects—need one point out?—can be manipulated. Dr. Stern makes his case with a close examination of the lives and careers of Descartes, Goethe, Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, Tolstoy, and Sartre. Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler, as phallic woman, is also considered. The result is a compact volume, highly readable and absorbing, that deserves wider circulation than it will probably have.