Critics' choices for Christmas : Peggy Ellsberg.

Linda Gordon's The Great Arizona Orphan Abduction (Harvard, $29.95, 456 pp.), tells the story of a few days--October 1 to 4, 1904--in the lives of forty Irish orphans, and the seven nuns from the New York Foundling Hospital who accompanied them on the train from Grand Central Station to the mining town of Clifton-Morenci, Arizona. At Clifton, the nuns dressed the babies in new clothes, cuddled them one last time, and delivered them with some emotion into the arms of forty adoptive mothers waiting on the platform. The adoptions had been arranged by the hospital and Father Constant Mandin of Clifton. All forty homes had been checked out for cleanliness, good order, and above all, devout Catholicism.

Gordon's account takes place in six scenes, with historical interludes between them. Her narrative voice is enticing, and her descriptions vivid. How could so small a parish yield so large a number of Catholic homes eager to adopt babies? Gordon tells us that childlessness was common in Clifton-Morenci, partly because of the poisonous fumes wafting from the mines, associated with an unusually high number of miscarriages, and partly because of infant mortality. "Many Clifton-Morenci families were childless--30 percent of the white and 18 percent of the Mexican--and almost certainly not by choice."

The happy consensus of forty Irish Catholic babies arriving from the Foundling Hospital in New York to fill the clean, waiting homes of Mexican Catholics in Arizona was not destined to last, however. Late on the night of October 2, 1904, in a drenching rain, an armed Anglo posse went door to door, kidnapping the orphans and threatening the New York nuns and Father Mandin with lynching. A riot ensued.

The Great Arizona Orphan Abduction, which won the prestigious Bancroft Prize for American History, has been widely reviewed in the past year, with every review emphasizing the racism of the Anglos who thought it a fate worse than death for "white" babies to be cared for by "Mexican" mothers. Some reviewers also noted that Gordon's story addresses women's issues. Indeed, Gordon treats the Sisters of Charity reverently, noting precocious "feminism": "They indulged far less than the Protestants in characterizing single mothers as 'fallen.' Instead, the sister dedicated themselves to rescuing poor mothers, by providing opportunities for them...and by offering a chance to surrender a child only temporarily."

Most striking for me, though, is Gordon's recognition of Catholicism as a marker of joint identity among immigrant groups. In arranging the adoptions by parishioners in Arizona, authorities in New York took impeccable care that the new homes be Catholic. Who cared if they were Mexican? Roman Catholics in New York in 1904--whether Irish or Polish or Italian--were not classified as "white" anyway. Whiteness, a subject of study and consideration in recent years, is an artificial construction, a designation pertaining more to class than to gradations of color. But in Arizona, the sociology was different: the underclass was Mexican before it was Catholic, and thus the mixing of ethnicities troubled the dominant culture, in this case, Arizona Anglos.

The story does not end happily for the Mexican Catholics. The Catholic church sued, all the way to the Supreme Court, to get the babies back, and lost. This book provides a gripping piece of a puzzled history not only of American racism, but of the Catholic experience of it.

In Sheri Holman's The Dress Lodger (Atlantic Monthly Press, $24, 291 pp.) the time is the 1830s; the place is Sunderland, a seaside town in northern England; the smells and sounds are poverty, squalor, and mass death; the tone is Dickens on Dexedrine. The big news is cholera, which has come to town by way of a boat. Gustine, the fifteen-year-old heroine of this historically precise novel, embodies most of the classical virtues. She works all day at "the pottery" hefting huge plinths of wet clay. She lodges at the filthy and overcrowded Labor in Vain, where, in return for her nest of straw to sleep on, she spends her evenings as a prostitute. Her landlord is a pimp. He compels her to use a fancy blue dress (hence the title of the book) to attract clients, and sets a mutilated hag, named simply "The Eye," to tail her on her nightly beat. Gustine is intelligent and uncomplaining, dedicating her ceaseless labors to support her beloved infant son.

Fate and plot connect Gustine with Dr. Harry Chiver, a research surgeon short on cadavers. He resorts to the ghoulish practice of robbing graves. He has been accused of murdering beggars to dissect their bodies. Harry's problem will soon vanish, because cholera will yield more corpses than he needs. One night at the theater a man who was sitting beside Eustine "vomited quietly into his cap." Death will come within hours for this victim of cholera morbis. But first, the poor thing must endure violent convulsions: "In great heaving waves the old hero would vomit basinfuls of gruelly white flocculent matter, the color of soap in hard water." Finally, the patient turns cold and blue. Soon bodily effluvia and contaminated clothing are everywhere in Sunderland, and so is the epidemic.

Now you might find my claim perplexing after that introduction, but The Dress Lodger is certainly the best novel I read this year, and for many years before. Forgive the cliche, but I could not put it down. Holman's prose shivers with intellectual brilliance--fast, fuguing, sharp as glass. The end of the book is absolutely breathtaking (do not peek!), and brimming with quiet redemption.

Two years ago I read Alain de Botton's How Proust Can Change Your Life, and feel it did change my life, and so I hastened to buy his Consolations of Philosophy (Pantheon, $22, 265 pp.) the minute it appeared. It is exquisite and delightful.

The author is chair of the Department of Philosophy at the University of London, and yet--or thus--he writes about the griefs that human flesh is heir to (unpopularity, poverty, frustration, for example) and how philosophers (Socrates, Seneca, Montaigne, for example) can cure or at least console them. So if you have always wanted to understand difficult philosophy but dreaded the effort it would entail, this is the book for you.

Peggy Ellsberg teaches English at Barnard College.