Best Books of 2000

Editor’s Note: Two titles were inadvertantly omitted from the Best Books of 2000 (Book Review, Dec. 3).

SELECTED POEMS AND PROSE OF PAUL CELAN

By John Felstiner

St. Martin’s / Thomas Dunne:

436 pp., $27.95

Possibly the most decisive sign that Paul Celan matters essentially comes from the poets, in America and elsewhere. Former Poet Laureate Robert Hass calls John Felstiner’s translation of Todesfuge “one of the most indelible poems of the 20th century.” For John Hollander, Celan is “genuinely great,” and for Denise Levertov, his work forms “at once so inward and such a quintessential artifact of history.” Poets as diverse as Adrienne Rich, Michael Palmer, Heather McHugh, Geoffrey Hill, Sharon Olds, Edward Hirsch, Eavan Boland, Rita Dove and many others all consider Celan a touchstone--for his life-and-death lyric seriousness, his uncompromising verbal honesty, and his courage in exposing his native German, driving language to the verge of unexpected revelation.

*

W.E.B. DU BOIS

The Fight for Equality and the

American Century, 1919-1963

By David Levering Lewis

Henry Holt: 574 pp., $35

David Levering Lewis, who holds the Martin Luther King Jr. Chair in History at Rutgers University, has produced the second volume of his monumental study of W.E.B. Du Bois, a figure whose life reads as something of a noble tragedy in American intellectual history. The first widely acclaimed volume, “W.E.B. Du Bois: A Biography of a Race, 1868-1919,” won the Pulitzer Prize for biography in 1994.

In the present volume, recently nominated for a National Book Award, Lewis has come through once again with a work of keen scholarship that will appeal to the general reader responsive to graceful, lucid prose by an author with an eye for ironic situations and complex emotions.

In the academic world today, much of the writing on Du Bois tells us little about the man or his world. The “discourse” is arcanely analytical. Was Du Bois a post-structuralist who saw life as socially conditioned, or was he an essentialist who saw race as innately given? Was he a pragmatist who, having studied with William James, believed we can get along without truth, or did he, like Lincoln, whom he admired, hold America up to standards of right and wrong?

Lewis wisely avoids such theoretical issues as he unfolds a masterful narrative that tells us as much about America as about this grand mind who struggled with it. His biography is a major book that is a joy to read--even if Du Bois’ final years are too sad for words.