July/August 2003

Views expressed are those of the authors, not necessarily of the AFSC.

Books are Still Better than TV

Scott Schaeffer Duffy is an activist who is a member of the Saints Francis and Thérèse Catholic Worker Community in Worcester, Massachetts. This article is reprinted from The Catholic Radical, June/July 2003.

Josh and Ellen at breakfast © Ellen Shub

In one of her columns, the founder of the Catholic Worker Movement, Dorothy Day, expressed her love of books by quoting Saint Jerome: “Reading is the oil that keeps the lamp burning.” In another column she wrote, “while [I was] on the top floor of a Cleveland hotel, an earthquake struck. All the rooms’ terrified occupants rushed out in their nightclothes all the way down into the lobby. If it had not been for the distraction offered by an engrossing novel, I should have been hard put to it for the rest of the night to sleep.”

During a 90-day jail sentence for civil disobedience, friends and relatives sent me thirty-one books. The following reviews are of my favorites. I hope they delight you too.

Cold Mountain, Charles Frazier, Vintage Books, 1997

Set in 1864, this novel personalizes the Civil War’s impact on ordinary human beings. Told from the alternating perspectives of a young woman in the Blue Ridge Mountains and her would-be lover, a wounded Confederate soldier who has decided to walk home from the fighting, the novel is beautifully descriptive of the land and people. The horror of war hangs like a vulture over the romantic hopes of the two main characters.

Men talk of war as if they committed it to preserve what they had and what they believed. But Inman now guessed it was boredom with the repetition of the daily rounds that made them take up weapons. The endless arc of the sun, wheel of seasons...He had not been immune to its pull. But sooner or later, you get awful tired and just plain sick of watching people killing one another for every kind of reason at all, using whatever implements fall to hand.

This wonderful novel was especially powerful for me to read in jail, bombarded as I was with television images of war, while physically separated from my own wife. I think that anyone would gain from this epic search for redemption and happiness.

The Quiet American, Graham Greene, Penguin Books, 1955

This is a remarkable story about the folly of military intervention in Vietnam. Written in the period of the French War in Indochina, this novel is an almost prophetic description of how badly things would go once the United States fully stepped into the conflict. While this book was not as appealing to me as Greene’s masterpiece, The Power and the Glory, I was nonetheless moved by the author’s compassionate descriptions of suffering juxtaposed to callous disregard for life. He blasts the naïveté of those who believe that violence, properly placed, can improve a country’s situation.

Greene describes the results of a politically motivated killing in this way:

The doctors were too busy to attend to the dead, and so the dead were left to their owners, for one can own the dead as one owns a chair. A woman sat on the ground with what was left of her baby in her lap; with a kind of modesty she had covered it with her straw hat. She was still and silent, and what struck me most in the square was the silence. It was like a church I had once visited during Mass—the only sounds came from those who served, except where here and there the Europeans wept and implored and fell silent again as though shamed by the modesty, patience, and propriety of the East.

I have yet to see the film version of the book, but I encourage everyone to read it as a reminder that the evils of war can be anticipated and, hopefully, avoided.

Crime and Punishment, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Bantam Books, 1866.

Favorites of Dorothy Day, the Russian novels of Dostoevsky and Tolstoy are notoriously hard to sell to young people. (My daughter believes that “classic” is a synonym for “boring.”) Dostoevsky’s works are long and filled with characters who go by numerous unpronounceable Russian names, but his books reward the persistent reader with marvelous insight into the human condition. He is one of the few authors who can write about selfless love without a hint of sentimentality. Like Flannery O’Connor, Dostoevsky gives us suffering protagonists to remind us of our own need for grace. He lampoons the self-deceptions we all fall prey to, making moral dilemmas where there ought not to be any. He is also a darn good storyteller with a flair for dramatic surprises and gestures.

I raised a few eyebrows reading this book in jail, (where I was unfortunately unable to convince anyone else to take it up after me), but I hope more of you will accept the challenge. It is very worth the effort.

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