The Peculiar Life of Sundays.

Marty, Martin E.

The Peculiar Life of Sundays. By Stephen Miller. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2008. 310 pp. $27.95 cloth.

Miller, identified only as the author of a book on conversation, here turns the calendar to Sunday, a day which he, after the poet Wallace Stevens, finds "peculiar." Useful for anyone--picture a historian--who seeks diversion while celebrating the brightness or dispelling the gloom of Sunday, it is almost useless for the same "anyone" who would employ it as a research tool. A diversion rather than a systematic historical, theological, or poetic inquiry, it takes the reader down several seldom-connected lanes.

Quite why Miller chose to hop, skip, and jump from "Antiquity" to "Elizabethan and Jacobean England," and then to Scotland followed by a tour to Boswell and on to the Victorians, as opposed to his making other stops along the way, is never made clear. By the time he settles in to case studies of Sunday in the lines of Jonathan Edwards, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Walt Whitman, it becomes clear that he is doing random picking from the thick growth which Sunday through the centuries has acquired. Through chapters that tantalize more than explain why the day had to make a "peculiar way," the author chooses not to stay long with any subject.

The plot line meanders, as if the author is guided chiefly by an "Oh! That reminds me of another..." reach. Miller seems most at home literarily visiting Wallace Stevens, author of the most seriously studied modern poem about Sunday. For the most part he only bides a few minutes or an hour at each stop, not long enough for the reader to satisfy curiosity about the decline of Sunday "blue laws" or to offer thorough reflection on what will replace the Sunday observances that are pushed aside by marathons, soccer, picnics, and other sacred ventures.

doi: 10.1017/S0009640709991636

Martin E. Marty

Emeritus, University of Chicago