Word: coffining
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...Connecticut-based organization Promoting Enduring Peace, Inc., a nationwide affiliation of 1,000 clergymen and laymen, decided in September to give their 1974 Gandhi Peace Award to Viet Nam War Protester Father Daniel Berrigan, 52. (Previous winners: the Rev. William Sloan Coffin Jr., Eleanor Roosevelt, Dr. Benjamin Spock and Rabbi Maurice Eisendrath.) But after the controversial Jesuit sounded off on the Middle East war recently, attacking both Israeli and Arab leadership (TIME, Dec. 31), some of P.E.P.'s 45 board members objected. The organization's head, the Rev. Roy Pfaff, polled the full board to find out whether...
...helped make him one of the best popular critics going, as well as the editor of the New York Times Book Review section, but takes some getting used to in Leonard's fiction. In Black Conceit, for example, Leonard offers three different major characters: New Englander Kenneth Mackenzie Coffin, a young Wasp of means, qualms and wavering commitment to the New Left; Coffin's brilliant wife Marcy, a nice enough Texas girl caught in the coils of biology and history, who is not unfairly described as "a graduate student of herself; and Rinsler, a cynical organizer...
Intellectual Fix. No one should be too much put off. The book's quip-filled tirades, like Shaw's prefaces, provide a splendid intellectual fix on the drama. Coffin temporarily leaves his wife and children, as well as Rinsler's movement, which proves as unscrupulous as any Establishment organ. He then tries to practice one-on-one enlightenment as straw boss to a crew of black migrant apple pickers on his ancestral New Hampshire estate. The results are hilarious but depressing...
...drowning. Under the black comic claptrap in Black Conceit is a deeply felt, uncompromising book about an idealist's disappointment that human nature does not prove perfectible, that human decency, liberally applied, cannot suspend the law of the jungle. "We go on making choices, after the original helplessness," Coffin reflects, "and ultimately it becomes our fault...
...Then the coffin is borne through the mud and past the grunting of the pigs up to a plateau where the graveyard lies above the dark hills and valleys. The grave was dug the day before among the similar small graves which comprise more than half of the graveyard. Don Faustino lowers the casket, pours holy water over it in the shape of the cross, covers it with planks and quickly, with the help of other men, shovels the dirt back...