Editor's choice: recent books of interest.

There are two enduring reasons to read a book: for pleasure and for insight. When the two reasons come together synergistically, you have a favorite book and, if the author of that book produces the same pleasure and insight in subsequent works, you have a favorite author. Let my first choices, then, be the works of two of my favorite authors: Jorge Luis Borges and Andre Dubus. Borges, the Argentinean writer who died in 1986 without winning the Nobel Prize for literature (which many thought he richly deserved), has been well served by Collected Fictions, newly and uniformly translated by Andrew Hurley. These short stories combine scholarly and historical references and imaginative flights. Once you read Borges's work, the distinctiveness of his voice and his gifts will become apparent. His influence extends from Latin American writers like Carlos Fuentes and Gabriel Garcia Marquez to John Updike and Umberto Eco. Viking is to be commended for undertaking this collection of his fictions as part of their commemoration of the centenary of Borges's birth in 1999. (Viking will publish volumes of his selected poetry and selected nonfiction next year.)

Another favorite author, Andre Dubus, has published his second collection of essays, Meditations from a Movable Chair. Dubus' reputation is based primarily on his short stories, but he became a writer of unusually fine and well-crafted essays. In 1986, Dubus was hit by a car while trying to help a motorist in need. Until his recent death, he was confined to a wheelchair- hence the title of this collection. Dubus' turn to the essay allowed him to deal with this traumatic event. The accident and its aftermath acted like a time-release capsule that produces consequences over time. These essays are delayed epiphanies.

Dubus tests the limits of his ethic of manliness rooted in the sensibilities of an ex-Marine and a man who lived intensely in his body. He learns to appreciate the simple achievement of taking his first shower after his accident, "hot joy on my body, which for eight months had felt unclean" (78) - or making love as a cripple (91), the unsparing word by which he continues to describe his condition. In one of the best essays in the collection, "Giving Up the Gun," Dubus recognizes the need to resist the seductive link between manliness and gun owning. He had long owned a gun in order to protect those whom he loved. (In the first piece, "About Kathryn," he recounts the rape of his sister.) After his accident he continued to own a gun not only to protect others, but also to protect himself and to retain his manhood. But one day, recalling a confrontation that almost led to his killing another man, he decides to give up his gun. He ends the essay with these words: "Then I felt something detach itself from my soul, departing, rising, vanishing, and I said to God: It's up to You now. This is not the humble and pure and absolutely spiritual love of turning the other cheek On the train, I gave up answers that are made of steel that fire lead, and I decided to sit in a wheelchair on the frighteningly invisible palm of God" (193).

Invisible, but palpable because for Dubus the world exists incarnationally and life is sacramental. "I need," he writes, "sacraments I can receive through my senses. I need God manifested as Christ, who ate and drank and shat and suffered, and laughed. So I can dance with Him as the leaf dances in the breeze under the sun" (187). When the priest goes to the tabernacle for the consecrated hosts, Dubus sees that all experience is consecrated.

But the Eucharist is not only there in the tabernacle. I can feel it as I roll into the church. It fills the church. If the church had no walls, the Eucharist would fill the parking lot, the rectory, the nursing home, the football stadium. And the church has no walls, and the Eucharist fills the women smoking outside the nursing home; and the alcoholics waiting to gather, but already they are gathered, as they are gathered when they are apart; fills the man cursing God from the isolation of his mind; fills the old man watching a woman, and looking for robins. When I am enclosed by the walls and roof and floor, and the prayers and duration of Mass, I see this, and feel it; and when the priest places the Host in the palm of my hand, I put it in my mouth and taste and chew and swallow the intimacy of God (144-45).

The worth of these essays is in the pleasure we take in Dubus' use of language and in the insight they offer because he can look at himself and the world without sentimentality. This insight is profoundly simple to state but far from easy to absorb into our affections and actions:

I sing of those who cannot. To view human suffering as an abstraction, as a statement about how plucky we all are, is to blow air through brass while the boys and girls march off in parade to war. Seeing the flesh as only a challenge to the spirit is as false as seeing the spirit as only a challenge to the flesh. On the planet are people with whole and strong bodies, whose wounded spirits need the constant help that the quadriplegic needs for his body (155).

Dubus did not come by this insight cheaply. His physical and spiritual struggle depicted in these essays is real, and its outcome very much in doubt. These are not in any conventional sense inspirational essays, but in the end they offer a hard-nosed spirituality, a Marine's spirituality, if you will, that are appropriate to this time and this place.

Dubus's struggle is situated within larger struggles to reinvent the intellectual and spiritual life. Perhaps the most pervasive force pushing for such reinvention is the computer. There has been, and will most likely continue to be, a spate of books applauding or deploring the impact of computers and the Internet on the shape of our times. Unfortunately, few give pleasure or offer insight. One that does is Avatars of the Word: From Papyrus to Cyberspace by James O'Donnell. It is more a series of meditations and reflections than a sustained or scholarly treatment, even though O'Donnell is a classical scholar who has done work on Cassiodorus and Augustine. He has also been active in developing web sites that contain most of his scholarly work and links to other sites as well. In fact, there is a web site constructed specifically as an adjunct to this book: http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/jod/avatars.

It is to O'Donnell's credit that he offers no apocalyptic pronouncements about the end of print-driven civilization - a Bucherdammerung to use George Steiner's phrase- or about the dawning of an age of new and better everything. Rejecting the role of either zealot or Luddite, he judiciously sketches the reality of the situation we are in and the alternatives suggested by history. Looming before us is the specter of a Darwinian struggle to survive, with the victorious bits of information serving as the basis for the story of their own survival. The defeated bits of information will be consigned, if they survive at all, to "ghost sites" which are inaccessible using normal search engines. They will become fossils buried in cyberspace.

Even though O'Donnell is a university professor, he foresees that libraries, or library-like institutions may eventually replace universities, just as universities replaced monasteries as the intellectual centers of Western civilization. Libraries- even virtual libraries- should no longer be regarded as being exclusively in the business of storing and conserving information. Libraries should be in the business of helping us to find the information we need. Librarians must become pathfinders and explorers in the wilderness of information. O'Donnell usefully points out in this context that the greatest storage bin of information, the Internet, is not really a library because "there is no organized cataloging, there is no commitment to preservation, there is no support system to help you find the difficult or missing resource. Finally, there is no filter: that is, there is none of the sense that a user of a great library has that somebody has thought about the possibilities and selected a set of materials to be both comprehensive and yet delimited. On the Internet you never know what you're missing" (70).

What we need most of all is not more information or even an increased ability to preserve more information, but ways of dealing with information.

Publishers hope that I will still be willing to pay for special pieces of information in the future, but I wonder if they are not too optimistic. . . . The thing that I will be willing to pay for as the oceans of data lap at my door is help in finding and filtering that flood to suit my needs (90).

There will be new ways of organizing information in cyberspace through multiple paths and imaginative manipulation of material. With the written word, the trustworthiness of the author becomes less important than how the words are manipulated. In the language of Postmodernism, the text not the author is primary. With Web pages, the possibility of manipulation is increased enormously, and truth and trust are harder to attain. The older notion of liberal arts that put you in touch with some unifying vision of the totality of things has given way, in O'Donnell's view, to a confused mix of disciplines lacking any intrinsic connections, especially in their university setting. Since the late nineteenth century, disciplinarity and departmentalization, which shattered the common liberal arts curriculum of antebellum colleges, have dominated the structural and intellectual organization of higher education in America. Cyberspace offers one of the first serious challenges to their hegemony because it "is the place where people whose offices are several blocks from each other can be encouraged to shape new alliances in a parallel virtual university, to experiment with the intellectual and pedagogical practicality of new affiliations that can always be given bureaucratic reality after the fact" (151).

The role of professors rooted in disciplines and departments will be transformed. Instead of being the authorities who dispense information in lectures prescribed by a discipline-based curriculum - the sage on the stage - they will help students to process the infoglut spewed forth by a global culture which threatens to engulf us- the guide on the side. The professor will become less of a producer of information and become more of an organizer of information like the librarian: "The professor turns into a kind of software icon-click on the professor and let him take you to the world that he knows" (157). Perhaps the merger of the role of professor and librarian will be the prototype of what the twenty-first century will call an intellectual.

O'Donnell's book situates the role of the professor in the midst of the larger changes besetting our cultural and intellectual lives. Randall Collins, a sociologist, has situated our current changes in the context of what seems like the entire history of human intellectual development, East and West. In The Sociology of Philosophies: A Global Theory of Intellectual Change, he covers all of the major intellectual traditions in 1098 pages. He traces intellectual networks that connect thinkers in various traditions over a period of time and shows how networks intersect.

To be a literate person today is like living in the library of Jorge Luis Borges, where near-infinite corridors of books contain the universe but we lack a key to their contents. ["The Library of Babel"] My strategy has been to focus on intellectual networks: the social links among those thinkers whose ideas have been passed along in later generations. I have chosen philosophers because theirs is the archetypal intellectual role, which goes back several thousand years in each of the world civilizations, and from which have branched off most of the specialized disciplines (xviii).

The writing could be more felicitous and less indebted to jargon, but nonetheless this is an important book. We are undergoing, whether we acknowledge it or not, a transformation of our cultural and intellectual lives. Precious few books attempt to offer a serious discussion and overview of that transformation. Specialists will find a lot to disagree with in this book, but it raises significant issues that we must address. My advice is to dip into the areas of your special knowledge or interest: official Confucianism in the Han Dynasty, the philosophical factions among the Vedic ritualists, Hindu scholasticism, the Sufis, Catholic anti-modernism and Heidegger, philosophical context of the scientific revolution, and the like. There is, to tell the truth, too much to take in by reading the book straight through. Rather, break it up into manageable portions. You will enjoy it more and digest it better.

Richard Rorty, perhaps America's most noticed and notable philosopher, focuses on one aspect of the transformation of the cultural and intellectual life in America. In Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth-Century America, he tells the story of the disintegration of "the old alliance between the intellectuals and the unions" as "Leftists in the academy have permitted cultural politics to supplant real politics" (14). Like many others, Rorty locates the decisive dislocation of America's self-image in the Sixties and emphasizes the impact of the war in Vietnam. Before Vietnam, the Left aimed to reform the country by participation in social and political movements. This Left was criticized and countered by what Rorty terms the "New Left": "people - mostly students - who decided, around 1964, that it was no longer possible to work for social justice within the system" (43).

Rorty's sympathies are with the reformists: he was raised by parents who were communists and read the Daily Worker when he was a boy. His maternal grandfather was the theologian Walter Rauschenbusch, who railed against excessive wealth from a gospel perspective. Rorty criticizes the cultural or academic left for "naming" the system rather than undertaking the participatory efforts required to change it. That is, since the Sixties the academic Left has been content to expose the system as racist or patriarchal by naming it as such, expecting it to shamefacedly reform itself. This worked when English departments were exposed as racist and patriarchal because English departments, under the prod of affirmative action laws, could be forced to seek out minority and women candidates. But as Rorty has often remarked, it is easier to reform an English department than to reform society.

What particularly riles Rorty is that the academic Left has ignored those victimized by their economic status rather than by their race or gender. "Nobody is setting up a program in unemployed studies, homeless studies, or trailer-park studies, because the unemployed, the homeless, and residents of trailer parks are not 'other' in the relevant sense. To be other in this sense you must bear an ineradicable stigma, one which makes you a victim of socially accepted sadism rather than merely of economic selfishness" (80). While Rorty is generous in praising the success of the Left in reducing racial and gender discrimination, he feels that it has largely ignored the increase in economic inequality and insecurity among the majority of the population - Rorty estimates it as about 75 percent of Americans. Rorty argues that both social oppression and economic oppression ought to be uppermost on the Left's agenda.

Academics should emphasize less theory and more of "what remains of our pride in being Americans" (91-92). Rorty emphasizes inspiration instead of scolding and encourages the Left "to stop thinking up ever more abstract and abusive names for 'the system' and start trying to construct inspiring images of the country" (99). Change will come about from enthusiasm engendered by inspiration. The failure of the humanities in academe is the failure to cultivate these driving forces of change. In the end, the Left will flourish if it again becomes a purveyor of hope, imagining a different future and offering the means for attaining it.

Finally, I want to exercise my editor's prerogative and make a choice which is very personal. In When the Mines Closed, Thomas Dublin offers an account of the changes in the coal mining industry, concentrating on the Panther Valley anthracite coal region. The book is based on many heart-wrenching, amusing, and insightful interviews conducted by Dublin over a number of years. My grandfather was one of those miners, and I spent part of several summers living with them when I was a child. While I do not remember specific individuals, the places and atmosphere he describes I do remember. In addition to provoking memories, Dublin's book made an interesting follow-up on Rorty. These are the people who have suffered most from the economic oppression which Rorty feels the academic left has ignored. Books like this put a human face on economic insecurity and its consequences. Perhaps they will encourage academics to expand their list of the victimized. Or better, to recognize the basic resilience and decency with which lack of economic opportunity can be met. Victims can become less victims, a category, and more human, an achievement. In the words of Sartre, whom Dublin quotes, "the essential is not what life has done to people, but what people do with what life has done to them" (4).

JAMES E. GILES is Professor of Philosophy at Iona College and Book Review Editor for Cross Currents.