THE BERRIGAN BROTHERS

Curtis doesn't repeat the objections (voiced by critics on both the Right and the Left) to the Berrigans' roles as moral warriors and gadflies; nor does he make very extensive use of the brothers' -- especially Daniel's -- own writings which state their case more eloquently than even his sympathetic reportage possibly could. Nevertheless he does a fine job of tracing their intellectual and practical involvement in social causes -- back as far as their union leader father and religious mother, Daniel's contact with the worker-priest movement in France and Philip's graduation from the hard school of sit-ins and civil rights marches. The more complex aspects of Daniel's thought -- the influence of Thomas Merton, his attraction to mysticism, his poetry -- are acknowledged without ever being subjected to oversimplistic ""explanations"" on the YA level. And if Curtis makes his admiration clear, he also makes the Berrigans admirably human -- men who have suffered from self-doubt, nervousness and impetuosity at the same time as they have extended their influential witness.