The Writings of Daniel Berrigan by Ross Labrie (review)

400 Shorter Book Reviews Both books are well done. American Temperance Movements may well be the best survey of the topic for some years to come. Dry Diplomacy, though an equally fine study, is likely to be of interest mainly to the specialist. Graeme Decarie History Department Concordia University Ross Labrie, The Writings of Daniel Berrigan. Lanham, N.Y.: University of America Press, 1989. x + 273 pp. This book is an enlightening, well-structured, readable introduction to Father Daniel Berrigan as a man of letters, providing sound critical analysis and showing how the life and times of the Jesuit priest influenced, and are reflected in, the content and style of his work. Labrie's method is fundamentally chronological, and the first two chapters provide material about the experiences and education that influenced Berrigan to think and write as he did about aspects of American society and his Church in the 1950s and early 1960s. These chapters, while treating the young priest's studies, his poetry and his more formal theological writings, give a sense of the religious, social and political setting in the United States. The next three chapters sketch Berrigan's emergence as one of the leading American opponents of the Vietnam War and as an activist critic of the policies of his country and his Church concerning the morality of war and the use of nuclear arms. With clarity and objectivity, Labrie shows the relationship of his subject's involvement in these issue~ to his life as a writer and a priest. The biographical account recalls the turbulent 1960s and 1970s and continues the description of the personal, political and social context of Berrigan's actions and writings. The literary analysis in these chapters shows how the events of the time influenced the way Berrigan looked at the world and his own place in it, and how what he saw and experienced influenced what and how he wrote. The story Labrie tells and the enlightening literary comments he makes enable the reader to follow the evolution of Berrigan's thought as the priest, poet and activist struggled to find meaning in a world that to him was becoming more and more absurd. With literary and biographical insight and sensitivity, Labrie traces the relationships among Berrigan's embattled but Shorter Book Reviews 401 persistent faith, the crucial events of his time, and the content and style of his writings, exploring recurring themes, dominant images and changing stylistic techniques. We see Daniel Berrigan as a religious man of letters, as well as a religious man of social and political protest, and are able to follow the development of his artistic powers. We are able to see the negative as well as positive effects of the physical and emotional stress caused by his increased activist involvement, a fugitive existence and then a harsh term in prison. The first five chapters contain comparative references to several literary figures. In the sixth and final chapter, the author places his subject primarily in the contemporary scene. There are many perceptive reflections about the distinctive character of Berrigan's artistic work and thought in this chapter and throughout the book; their quality prompt the reader to wish that the author had treated the place of his subject in the history of American literature in greater detail. But that was not Labrie's purpose, and the approach he has chosen enables us better to understand and appreciate Daniel Berrigan the writer. Robert Afaddcn Department of English University of Toronto Andrew DelBanco, The Puritan Ordeal. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989.xiv + 306 pp. The historical profession continues to witness a fruitful and seemingly endless proliferation of American Puritan studies. Indeed, the past decade has seen a resurgence of Puritan intellectual history that has reaffirmed the wealth of interpretive possibilities. DelBanco's book builds on these studies to take a bold and largely successful step towards a new synthesis of the meaning of New England Puritanism for American culture. His ostensible focus is on the effective life of seventeenth-century American Puritans. But the central themes of this impressive work are more directly concerned with the "fear of the emergent selr' (12) which DelBanco contends motivated Puritans to...