Critics' choices for Christmas : Robert Schmuhl.

Advancing age or acute aversion to futuristic fairy tales of millennial musing prompts the indulgence of a long look back. Three very different books, all published in 2000, animate the past with such felicity and force that readers will welcome them for years to come.

Seamus Heaney's verse translation of Beowulf (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $25, 220 pp.) succeeds on so many levels it is no wonder this thousand-year-old work came back to life as a worldwide bestseller. The 1995 Nobel laureate in literature, Heaney makes the Anglo-Saxon classic of heroism and moral nobility an accessible, contemporary page turner. Even though the narrative is well known--Beowulf vanquishes Grendel and Grendel's mother before losing his own life slaying a dragon--Heaney's rendition infuses a poetic majesty into familiar proceedings.

This Beowulf is a cross-cultural tour de force. An Old English poem set in Scandinavia is now a work of modern English by an artist with an Irish sensibility. Born in Northern Ireland and currently living in the Republic, Heaney notes in his introduction, "where a local Ulster word seemed either poetically or historically right, I felt free to use it"--adding an up-to-the-moment political dimension to this translation.

Vivid phrasing propels the poem, yet the temptation is to tarry instead of moving to the next adventure. We read that "reavers from hell roam on their errands," or that someone "wintered into wisdom," or that "Fate goes ever as fate must."

Beyond the linguistic virtuosity, Beowulf is an old-fashioned, albeit timeless, tale of good defeating evil, of heroism demanding courage, and of God's will being done. Yes, the valiant warrior and virtuous leader dies. But, thanks to Heaney's artistic taxidermy, the story and all it symbolizes will endure well into the new millennium.

Closer to home--and with its depiction of heroic leadership strikingly more ambiguous--Adam Cohen and Elizabeth Taylor in American Pharaoh (Little, Brown, $26.95, 614 pp.) portray, in the words of their subtitle, Mayor Richard J. Daley: His Battle for Chicago and the Nation. Impeccable research and impressive contextualization give this biography a muscular command mirroring its subject.

Daley, who won six mayoral elections (1955 through 1975) and ruled twenty-one years, was visionary about revitalizing areas of his city and practical to the point of reporting potholes for repair. Similar to Willie Stark in Robert Penn Warren's All the King's Men, Daley is a dictatorial Democrat, more concerned with amassing (in Chicago patois) "clout" than agonizing over what's right or wrong.

Called by the authors "a gregarious loner, acquainted with thousands of people but close to almost none," Daley ran his political machine with frightening efficiency that produced results, especially for Chicago's business elite and middle classes. Poorer neighborhoods, often populated by minorities, had less priority, suffering the consequences.

With Pharaonic force, Daley made sure monuments were built to mark his time--O'Hare International Airport, Sears Tower, the Civic Center, McCormick Place, the Dan Ryan Expressway, to name a few. As political boss of the Cook County Democratic Party, he also constructed election slates to strengthen his position. Cerebral liberal Paul Douglas was chosen to run for the Senate because Daley saw "no harm in selecting a reformer for an office like U.S. senator, since it was not a position that carried a significant number of patronage jobs with it."

Richard J. Daley is a lasting stereotype of a big-city pol and power broker of the twentieth century. American Pharaoh probes beyond this stereotype to provide a three-dimensional portrait that itself will last.

Finally--and for a changeup--Red Smith on Baseball (Ivan R. Dee, $24.95, 365 pp.) proves that journalism at its best can occupy shelf space in the literature department. In 167 columns written between 1941 and 1981, Smith not only elevates news writing but also affirms his belief: "Baseball is dull only to dull minds."

The descriptions of long-ago games and players crackle with such life and immediacy that prior knowledge of the subjects doesn't matter. What counts is the prose of rare originality and playful pertinence--as arresting today as when it appeared in a next-day column for the New York Herald Tribune or the New York Times.

An infielder is "a compact little bundle of distilled malice." A homer clears the fence "on a line as flat as old beer." An outfielder jumps to make a catch and "stayed aloft so long he looked like an empty uniform hanging in its locker." A general manager "smiled with the warmth of a brave man having splinters thrust under his fingernails." Brawls among players lack real danger because "nobody has thrown a punch that would break the Mother Superior's glasses."

Predictably, Smith's at the top of his game rendering the sport's most dramatic moments. His account of Bobby Thompson's pennant-winning home run for the New York Giants in 1951 begins: "Now it is done. Now the story ends. And there is no way to tell it. The art of fiction is dead. Reality has strangled invention. Only the utterly impossible, the inexpressibly fantastic, can ever be plausible again." Smith then devotes four paragraphs of keen observation to a drunk celebrating on the field--before getting down to business.

Smith died in 1982, but three volumes of his work have been published posthumously. The title of the last collection he himself assembled was Strawberries in the Wintertime. You might call Beowulf, American Pharaoh, and Red Smith on Baseball literary strawberries for this wintertime--and other seasons as well.

Robert Schmuhl is professor of American Studies and director of the John W. Gallivan Program in Journalism, Ethics & Democracy at the University of Notre Dame. His most recent book, Indecent Liberties (University of Notre Dame Press), appeared earlier this year.