Crictics' choices for Christmas

National Geographic photographers often use a thousand rolls of film to produce twenty photos for an article. New technology has made a good photo easier to take. Sensing that he had lost touch with his craft, world-renowned photographer Jim Brandenburg retreated to his home in Minnesota's north woods and gave himself an assignment: to take one picture a day for the ninety days from the fall equinox to the winter solstice. Sometimes it took a full day's wandering to come upon the scene that was "it." Chased by the Light (NorthWood Press, $24.95, 132 pp.) exists only because one of Brandenburg's colleagues saw these photos and urged him to make them public. Readers can marvel at cedar groves, frozen ponds, frost-covered flowers, wolves, the Lake Superior shoreline, and the aurora borealis. And they can share the photographer's reverence for this northern landscape. The book includes reflections on the genesis of certain photos and how Brandenburg's three-month odyssey changed him. All ninety photos are here, along with an addendum, photographed after a 1999 windstorm wreaked havoc on the area. Each photo is distinct and interesting. As amateur photographers know, photos of trees, sunsets, and lakes can quickly become cliches. Not here.

Kathy Coffey's Dancing in the Margins: Meditations for People Who Struggle with Their Churches (Crossroad, $14.95, 159 pp.) intertwines scriptural reflections with the stories of clergy, religious, and lay ministers who have been alienated from their churches. Many, but not all, are Catholic. One is Maura, a nun who used to be a parish minister, but who now works for an agency that helps ex-convicts get off drugs. She says that she meets Jesus in the addicts and the prostitutes that she serves. Most of Coffey's scriptural reflections concern stories of Jesus healing or meeting people in unexpected places. She notes that the Samaritan woman's life-changing encounter with Jesus occurred while the woman was performing a mundane chore, not while she was in the synagogue or its precincts. After retelling the story of the bent woman in Luke 13, Coffey asks readers, "What causes you to feel bent over? Where do you seek Jesus' healing touch that restores you to standing upright?" She writes that no one chooses to be on the margins, but she shows these can be places of grace, and that emptiness can lead to abundance.

Sena Jeter Naslund's Ahab's Wife or, The Star-Gazer (William Morrow, $15, 688 pp.) is a historical novel inspired by Herman Melville's Moby-Dick. It is built around a character Melville only mentions in passing: the wife of Captain Ahab, whom Naslund names Una Spenser. Born in Kentucky, Una is sent at the age of twelve to live with relatives in New England in order to keep her safe from her violent father. She spends the next four years with her aunt and uncle on an island off New Bedford. Her uncle is the keeper of the lighthouse, which is virtually another character in the story. When two young men arrive to install a new lens, Una dreams of a wider world. She follows the young men to New Bedford and disguises herself as a cabin boy on their whaling vessel. Ahab is the captain of the ship that rescues Una when her boat is split in half by a vengeful whale.

Una is an odd protagonist in that she never undergoes any major internal conflict. Still, she is an engaging heroine, and her adventures are compelling, if sometimes surreal. For example, she encounters (and befriends) both a fugitive slave and the bounty hunter who is pursuing her. The book has a succession of bizarre twists. Despite these strange going-on, the novel seems curiously familiar, even paradigmatic. Ahab's Wife touches on something universal in the struggle to meet life's various challenges.

Anne-Marie Wolf is assistant professor of history at the University of Portland.

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