NONFICTION : The Girls Next Door: A 12th-Century Mystic, a Spy, an Aviatrix, a Persian Princess, a Mother and a Journalist

VALUE JUDGEMENTS by Ellen Goodman. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux: $22; 354 pp.) “Judgement,” writes Ellen Goodman, “needn’t be the opposite of understanding or even compassion. To be valueless is not a compliment. We all make decisions and choices. We use our own judgement, and base that judgement on our values.” Goodman, columnist and associate editor at the Boston Globe, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the Herbert H. Humphrey Civil Rights Award, author of five other books, writes about choices in American life. And somehow, she levels the playing field between competing goods: “Which break more easily: condoms or vows of celibacy?” In her straightforward language, in the very balance of her phrases, we are able to see clearly and with some sense of humor, what the choices are. She takes a lot of the desperation out of daily life. And Goodman has a lot to say about women, but one of her greatest reminders is that women today stand on the shoulders of several generations of women who had far fewer choices. “If women are at the top of the ticket,” she writes of the 1992 Senate races in California, “it’s not because they are the sudden, overnight sensation of infatuated voters. . . . It’s not a one-election stand.” If only Ellen Goodman could sit in our living room while we all watched the evening news, putting the brakes on daily life so we could better consider what we hear. In a column called “Picking Rites,” Goodman describes herself in the third person, on vacation, picking mussels in Casco Bay, Me. “For most of the year, the woman on the mussel flats ‘makes a living.’ She produces sentences in a building constructed for people who make and sell sentences in return for paychecks deposited and withdrawn in banks created for their convenience and their debt. . . . The reward for people who ‘make a living’ is, if they are lucky, a few weeks in a place where it seems possible to simply live. And to live simply.” There’s more than a little Thoreau in this New England journalist.