Word: sheed
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Wilfrid Sheed's In Love with Daylight (Simon & Schuster; 252 pages; $23) and Paul West's A Stroke of Genius (Viking; 181 pages; $21.95) are similar medical memoirs, kind of Blue Cross specials in which the writers recount their tussles with diseases and the imperfect professionals who treat them. Sheed is a novelist, essayist and critic with few equals in the styling of buoyant observations on the decline and fall of just about everything. Prolific only begins to describe West, whose 14 novels, nine works of nonfiction and two volumes of poetry exhibit a range of imagination and richness...
That both writers are British-born Americans is less notable than that both are now in their 60s, the decade when payment is due for living the lives their doctors advised against. Too many celebratory swigs and strong after-dinner cigars eventually led Sheed to seek treatment for alcoholism, depression and cancer of the tongue--a significant piece of which had to be surgically removed...
...Sheed too knows how to deflect fear with badinage. His denial of denial is especially inventive, and the account of his English boyhood is high spirited, considering that he was permanently hobbled by polio and had to trade in his cricket gear for braces and crutches. Yet catching an early bad break had an unexpected upside. "The period when I might have been learning to adjust to the word [handicapped]," Sheed writes, "was so packed with small accomplishments that it was impossible not to feel like one of the world's winners ever afterwards...
...Some 20 married converts have become priests elsewhere in the West since Pope Pius XII allowed the first such dispensation in 1951.) Although church officials have sought to avoid publicity about the unusual American program, it has been chronicled in a new book, The Pastoral Provisions: Married Catholic Priests (Sheed & Ward; 152 pages; $13.95), by priest-sociologist Joseph H. Fichter of Loyola University in New Orleans...