George N. Shuster: On the Side of Truth.

GEORGE N. SHUSTER: ON THE SIDE OF

TRUTH, by Thomas E. Blantz, C.S.C.

University of Notre Dame Press, $34.95,

382 pp.

With a long public career as distinguished as was his, George N. Shuster deserves an official biography which is this comprehensive. A less thorough study than Father Blantz's would have missed many of the accomplishments of an extraordinary life. To begin with, there were the twelve years (1926-37) George Shuster served as managing editor of The Commonweal. Week after week he planned each issue, wrote and edited articles, editorials, and book reviews--at times using a pseudonym to obscure the amount of his writing in a single issue. He secured impressive contributions to the magazine's pages from eminent American and European authors. His anti-Franco stance in the Spanish Civil War and his opposition to American participation in the 1936 Berlin Olympic Games are examples of his firm unwillingness to shun controversy when principle was at stake.

Demanding as all these activities were, they hardly bear comparison with the number and complexities that were to follow. As president of Hunter College from 1945 to 1960 Shuster encountered the intense controversies of a period of change. By then he had lost to the Nazis in Vienna the manuscript of his long-developed study of German democracy. During his Hunter years, important international assignments kept him crossing the Atlantic For perhaps his most important official post, land commissioner for Bavaria, he took an eighteen-months' leave of absence from Hunter, ending in December 1951.

Shuster had a leading role in the founding and activities of UNESCO, in the American Council of Education, the National Conference of Christians and Jews, and many more agencies of a comparably constructive stature that are too numerous to cite in a brief review. Even in his last sixteen years, when he served as assistant to Father Theodore Hesburgh, president of his beloved Notre Dame, George Shuster was not spared the tensions of several major controversies.

What I missed in this well-researched official biography was a more explicit, intimate picture of the man. What was George Shuster really like in person? More examples of his kindliness, sense of humor, desire to encourage younger writers, and other endearing personal qualities would have filled out this tribute to a notable scholar, educator, administrator, and statesman. But Father Blantz has produced an enthusiastic, well-documented study which does due justice to a life of consistently Christian achievement.

REVIEWERS

JOHN T. MCGREEVY teaches history at Harvard.

RAND RICHARDS COOPER is the author of a book of stories, The Last to Go (Harcourt Brace).

MOLLY FINN, a frequent Commonweal contributor, lives in New York City.

JOHN FEFFER is the author of Shock Waves: Eastern Europe after the Revolutions (South End, 1992).

EDWARD S. SKILLIN is the publisher of Commonweal.