Books in Brief

The Displaced Person’s Almanac, by John Pairman Brown (Beacon, $3.50). Last year in Lebanon but not in the U.S. a book appeared that Thoreau would have admired and Emerson have praised, a book in the country’s oldest tradition: the book of shrewd opinions about everything in the wind. Its young author wrote it in the Middle East while translating anti-Christian documents of the first centuries. The Rev. John Brown’s book is indissoluble in critical acid. Its prose is close-grained and intricate. Opinion is threaded into opinion until a fancy knot is elegantly secure for our admiration. There is no unifying subject, unless it be the awareness throughout that any subject nowadays is teased by an unguessable future and that the past breathes more hotly on our napes. John Brown’s comments are drier than one has heard in quite a while, but he knows the granite places where one might stand. The church, as is, does not seem to be one of them. Any witty, graceful, acid sentence could be detached from this engaging little book and emblazoned on a poster, though the corridors are limited in which it might hang for long before a committee took it down. Or we took it down ourselves, not wanting to live with that much lucidity.

G. DAVENPORT

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The Displaced Person’s Almanac, by John Pairman Brown (Beacon, $3.50). Last year in Lebanon but not in the U.S. a book appeared that Thoreau would have admired and Emerson have praised, a book in the country’s oldest tradition: the book of shrewd opinions about everything in the wind. Its young author wrote it in the Middle East while translating anti-Christian documents of the first centuries. The Rev. John Brown’s book is indissoluble in critical acid. Its prose is close-grained and intricate. Opinion is threaded into opinion until a fancy knot is elegantly secure for our admiration. There is no unifying subject, unless it be the awareness throughout that any subject nowadays is teased by an unguessable future and that the past breathes more hotly on our napes. John Brown’s comments are drier than one has heard in quite a while, but he knows the granite places where one might stand. The church, as is, does not seem to be one of them. Any witty, graceful, acid sentence could be detached from this engaging little book and emblazoned on a poster, though the corridors are limited in which it might hang for long before a committee took it down. Or we took it down ourselves, not wanting to live with that much lucidity.

G. DAVENPORT