Judging by the continuing boom in celestial publishing, angel mania hasn't let up. And, says best-selling author and angelologist Joan Wester Anderson, more than 60 percent of Americans believe in heavenly guardians. Whether the stories in the following books are to be taken literally or as metaphor, it's a comfort to read that behind each imperfect human being is an unseen cheering squad.
by Joan Wester Anderson
In these stories of miraculous rescue reported by Anderson, angels show up in many different guises: as voices, lights, intuitive thoughts and, frequently, in human form. (Fashion note: they seem to favor white outfits.) Sometimes the angel who saves the day is visible only to the bad guys, as in the story of an inner-city counselor who was threatened by a menacing gang. Just as they were about to attack her, the youths noticed her 7-foot boyfriend and turned on their heels and fled. But there was no boyfriend; the woman was alone at the time. Many of the other stories that appear in these pages involve car disasters—so many, in fact, it makes you wonder what angels did before there were automobiles. (Ballantine, $10)
by Morris B. Margolies
Margolies, a rabbi and scholar of Jewish history at the University of Kansas, has no truck with the angels-are-a-gal's-best-friend set. In this incisive, thought-provoking tour of angelology from the Bible to Isaac Bashevis Singer, angels are a moral metaphor—every bit as demonic as they are benevolent. On top of being God's messengers, they represent conflicting impulses that coexist in all of us: kindness and cruelty, creativity and destruction. The challenge is to act responsibly. As Margolies, the author of such previous works as Ten Turning Points in Jewish History, points out, Satan was once an angel too. (Ballantine, $10)
by Sophy Burnham
In this futuristic fain' tale for grownups, Matthew Adams, President of the United States, wakes up one morning to find an angel hovering at the foot of his bed. (This is not so farfetched: Abraham Lincoln is said to have frequently felt the presence of angels.) Following his encounter with the divine, the formerly smooth and cunning President Adams turns humane and compassionate, immediately arousing the suspicions of his advisers. What sane world leader would waste his time worrying about the meaning of life when there are pressing photo ops to attend to? This deftly penned novel of political intrigue and spiritual transformation is the third angel book by Burnham, who touched off the current angel craze with her best-selling A Book of Angels. (Ballantine, $17.50)
by Eileen Elias Freeman
This is Angelology 101. Freeman, who claims her guardian angel once prevented her from entering a building in which a woman was being stabbed, answers everything you ever wanted to know about celestial caretakers. Angel facts (according lo Freeman): they've got halos but not wings and are assigned a gender—but riot necessarily one you've ever heard of. Furthermore, says Freeman, It's a Wonderful Life got it all wrong: human beings don't die and come back as heavenly messengers any more than trees turn into giraffes. Angels are ancient, highly evolved beings whose job it is to protect us physically and spiritually. At least one question remains unanswered in this otherwise thorough volume: Why are some people saved and not others? Was the guardian angel of the woman who got stabbed out to lunch or what? (Warner, $14.95)
by Karen Goldman
While other authors turn their attention to archangels and guardian angels, Goldman's turf is the angel within. These brief poetic jottings are meant to encourage the "aspiring angels" in all of us to flex their wings. The messages, which range all the way from wise and uplifting to sweet and sometimes saccharine, are wonderfully complemented by the fanciful and colorful illustrations of Anthony D'Agostino. (Simon & Schuster, $18)
by Don Fearheiley
More "amazing, true" stories of the celestial kind—only these are fictionalized versions of accounts that first appeared in print or on television. For those with an appetite for angel rescue missions, these lively tales will satisfy. (Avon, $4.99)
by Terry Lynn Taylor
The core purpose behind our existence is lo create," says Taylor. This is not just hearsay: she has it on good authority from you-know-who. Included in this book—Taylor's third angel-inspired volume—are tips for developing a meaningful relationship with your guardian angel (yep, you've got one), exercises for releasing mental blocks and inspirational stories from creative types, like rock musician Carlos Santana. If you think you can't sing a note or draw a straight line, take heart. With an angel as your personal cheerleader, guidance counselor and talent agent, your success is guaranteed. Besides, there are no straight lines in heaven. (H.J. Kramer, $9.95)
by Alice K. Turner
Asked some years ago if he thought hell was a real place, the Catholic columnist William Buckley replied, "Yes—just like Scarsdale."
While Buckley's simile for hell may be unique, the idea of it as a real netherworld peopled by monsters, Turner tells us, is at least as ancient as some 4,000-year-old Sumerian tablets bearing stories of the Land of the Dead. Starting with Gilgamesh—about 2000 B.C.—Turner, Playboy's fiction editor, takes us on a tour through the nightmarish landscapes conjured up by such icons of Western civilization as Homer, Virgil, St. Augustine, Dante and Milton, as the places where we cool (or toast) our heels while waiting for... well, in many cultures, forever.
Using as an example the Harrowing of Hell—Christ's release of souls there during the time between his death and resurrection—Turner demonstrates how similar infernal themes crop up in different cultures. She also shows how often self-appointed creators of abysses and pits populated them with their enemies. Dante was mathematical in placing some of his in the Inferno's sixth circle. The 18th-century theologian Swedenborg reserved the vilest region for Catholics, while the early Christian apologist Tertullian consigned heretics, actors and charioteers to eternal flames.
Turner, writing for the layman, can occasionally seem flippant when she tries to enliven an otherwise arid patch, and once in a while her conclusions miss the mark. Surely it is to misunderstand Shakespeare to say that he never wrote about hell because the subject was banned at the time. His genius lies in prefiguring some later and lesser writers in creating characters whose hells are of their own making.
eschatological angst, and the well-chosen illustrations, though mostly predictable—Hieronymous Bosch, Gustave Doré, William Blake etc.—add to the pleasure. (Harcourt Brace, $29.95)
ONE HUNDRED SAINTS
In 1245 there was an Italian student at the University of Cologne who because of his bulk and his silence in class was known to his contemporaries as the Dumb Ox. His name was Thomas Aquinas, a name that became to later generations a byword for intellectual achievement.
It is one of the charms of the lives of saints that you so often come upon the unexpected. Joan of Arc's history' as a nuisance has been presented often on stage and screen, but she was hardly unique as a holy pest. Francis of Assisi was easily her match, publicly stripping off his clothes when his father disowned him, and the demure Thérèse of Lisieux managed to disrupt a papal audience by begging Leo XIII to allow her to join her sisters in the Carmelite order at the early age of 15.
These and 96 other mystics, heroes, oddballs and curmudgeons are the subjects of the anonymously edited essays that make up One Hundred Saints, most of which have been adapted from Alban Butler's Lives of the Saints, the classic English-language work on the subject first published in London in the late 1750s. The present volume mixes the probably legendary—Agnes, Barbara, Cecilia—with such historical figures as Benedict, Dominic and Ignatius of Loyola, whose impact as the founders of religious orders remains with us today.
What most of these people looked like is uncertain—though that has never stopped the world's greatest artists from depicting them, and One Hundred Saints is superbly illustrated with such masterworks as Caracci's Christ Appearing to St. Peter, Titian's moody St. Sebastian and El Greco's St. Martin of Tours. (Little, Brown, $35)
Elizabeth Hallam, general editor
St. Martin makes five appearances in Saints, his likeness rendered in two paintings, a woodcut, an illuminated manuscript and a stained-glass window. Each shows the incident that made his cult famous: Martin cutting his Roman officer's cloak in half so that he can clothe a beggar.
Saints is the perfect complement to One Hundred Saints. Where the second tends toward piety, the first is businesslike. Saints are listed under areas of patronage—despairing prostitutes, repentant prostitutes, lawyers are just a few—and each entry is followed by a fact box telling us for instance that St. Hubert, patron saint of dogs, was an 8th-century bishop of Maastricht, that he is invoked against rabies, that his emblem is a stag and that his feast day is May 30.
The book is copiously illustrated, worth the price if only for introducing us to the Roman virgin and martyr Bibiana, who helps out with hangovers. (Simon & Schuster, $22)
>Joan Wester Anderson
EARTH ANGELS
EVEN THOUGH SHE WAS RAISED A Catholic, Joan Wester Anderson, 55, never paid much attention to angels—that is, until Christmas Eve 1983. That night her then-21-year-old son, Tim, was driving home to Arlington Heights, Ill., from Connecticut through a blizzard when his car broke down on a deserted Indiana road. Suddenly, a tow truck appeared. The driver calmly hitched up the stalled car and towed it to Tim's friend's house in Fort Wayne. When Tim went out to pay him, the man had disappeared; the only tracks in the snow belonged to Tim's car.
"I called the highway patrol and tow-truck companies in the area," says Joan, the mother of five. "No one had any record of it." She let the matter drop and continued to write freelance magazine articles on parenting until several years later, when she began hearing stories of divine intervention. Then one day, a red ceramic angel arrived in the mail from a pen pal. Even though Anderson worried that an angel book would tarnish her credibility as a journalist, she took the fragile gift as a sign and decided to write Where Angels Walk. That was in 1990, before the heavenly messengers became a national obsession—a phenomenon she attributes to a kind of mass sadness. "Angels have a way of lifting us and giving us hope," she says.
They've certainly worked their magic for Anderson. While she is delighted with her recent climb up The New York Times best-seller list, she says the money isn't the best part. "One of my children said recently, 'The best thing about your success is that you'll never have to write another article on potty training.' That just about sums it up."
- Contributors:
- Barbara Graham,
- Ben Harte.
Saved by the Bell Reunion
The hookups, the meltdowns, the memoires
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