Word: books
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...autobiography is complete unless its writer arranges to fall dead across the last page of corrected proofs, and Lind's account is no exception. But the book has a certain unity. At the end, young Lind has fled and fumbled his way backward from extinction to his tribal beginnings, and is now as ready as any two-year-old to start life...
Novels about nuns, even if the holy ladies drive Jeeps and play baseball, have a hard time making it. When the nuns are members of a contemplative order, the outlook is bleak indeed. Yet this chronicle of 15 years in an English monastery is an immensely readable book, partly because the way of life detailed here proves as exotic and medieval as Cosa Nostra society, partly because the story moves briskly forward, with only a few lapses into melodrama...
...solved when a scapular cross cracks open revealing a ruby as big as the Ritz. Miss Godden's stylistic triumph is the placing of events within the cycles of the divine office and the liturgical year. She lived at England's Stanbrook Benedictine monastery while writing the book, and has translated her observations of life there into a quiet celebration of reverence...
...best. A fantasy involving late medieval Cornwall and Kilmarth, a house in which Daphne du Maurier lives, the book shrewdly borrows an old device to exploit the current literary craze for communication with the dead. Richard Young, a suggestible publisher, is persuaded by a scientist friend to be guinea pig for his latest discovery: a potion which abruptly evokes the past. One sip puts Young in the company of Roger Kylmerth, an early occupant of Kilmarth, who is immersed in the intricate plottings of the neighboring gentry and even a national struggle between partisans of Edward III and England...
After nearly three years in New York, living alone ("I didn't even have enough money to take out a girl"), he moved back to his family's farm in Minnesota, and has been in the neighborhood of it ever since. His first book, Silence in the Snowy Fields, collected a group of poems as muffed as a snowstorm in midwinter. They were like quiet songs, spoken out of solitude, poems in which A Man Writes to a Part of Himself. Even then, a nervous aura of crisis crept into his work...