Adam & Eve and the City: Selected Non-Fiction

Starting with an article about Philip Berrigan pouring blood on draft files in 1967 and ending with a background piece on the 1987 trial of Klaus Barbie, critically acclaimed novelist Gray (Lovers and Tyrants and October Blood brings together 20 of her essays that originally appeared in the New York Review of Books, the New Yorker and elsewhere. Under ""Politics and Salvation'' she gathers meditations on the anti-Vietnam War movement, Nixon's second inaugural celebration, Harvey Cox's ``spiritual gyrations,'' Thomas Merton's life and thought, Rennie Davis and the Perfect Master Maharaj Ji, and the Unification Church of Sun Myung Moon. Under ``Homelands'' she groups her reactions to Teddy Kollek's Jerusalem, a safari in Kenya and Tanzania, the secession movement in Hawaii's ``sugar-coated fortress,'' and a gathering of her family in France. ``Women's Lives'' contains her impressions of writings by Margaret Atwood, Jane Bowles and Madame de Sevigne. She reviews Wilfrid Sheed's biography of Clare Boothe Luce and the career of Coco Chanel, that ``hard-core collaborationist,'' and recalls life at Black Mountain College under poet Charles Olson. There are also chapters of Gray's ``ongoing dialogue with Him/She/It Out There,'' a dialogue fittingly now given more permanent form here. (August 31)