How the Talmud Can Change Your Life: Surprisingly Modern Advice from a Very Old Book by Liel Leibovitz lives up to its title. The author contextualizes the Talmud in novel ways. The author starts each chapter with some modern story that seems not connected to Talmud. But it does,, every time, in many successful ways. If you want a book that makes Talmud relevant, here it is.
Despite its salacious title, While the City Slept: A Love Lost to Violence and a Young Man's Descent into Madness, is not salacious. Unlike most true crime, especially featuring a sexual crime against women, this book makes great efforts to humanize everyone – including the perpetrator. This book is about a terrible crime, but also about a system that is unable to treat the mentally ill. This book transcends its genre to become an important statement about the price we all pay for a broken healthcare system.
I was in my late teens and early 20s when the Soviet Union fell, and I was too distracted by my life to pay more than fleeting attention to the fall of both the Iron Curtain and the USSR. For me, The Future Is History How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia by Masha Gessen is a great way to fill in the gaps. In a certain sense, it should not surprise us that Russia would become totalitarian in the decades following the collapse of the USSR. What other kind of society and political system had Russians ever known?
But at the same time, it is profoundly disheartening to read Gessen’s book. How can a people turn their society, culture, and political system around? It almost seems impossible. Gessen’s book hammers on the inevitable: will Russians always live and be a party to their doom?
Jewish Bible Translations: Personalities, Passions, Politics, Progress by Leonard Greenspoon is an interesting exploration of the grand and minute history of Bible translations conducted by Jews from the Septuagint to the New JPS translation in the 1980s. Truthfully, unless you come to this book with a healthy interest in biblical tradition, this is not a good way to spend your time. But if you have such an appetite, Greenspoon will satisfy it with his expansive scholarship on remote corners of the Jewish linguistic world.
Far from Zion: In Search of a Global Jewish Community by Charles London is the author's search for the meaning of Jewish identity. London is an interesting choice for this mission. As of the writing of this book in 2009, he knew little about “synagogue” Judaism – and he visits synagogues in diverse places such as Arkansas, Teheran, and Burma. Despite this (or because of it) he is a deft guide, and as a gay man, he brings even more to the table of “intersectionality” than we would otherwise expect.
What They Didn't Burn: Uncovering My Father's Holocaust by Mel Laytner shows how difficult it is to really know a loved one, in this case a father. Laytner’s father survived the Holocaust, and while not completely silent about his experiences to his son, so many of his stories were simply part and parcel of his father’s life, that Laytner never dug deep.
With his father’s death, Laytner started to find out details though documents, interviewing witnesses, and combing through archives. The vision of his long gone father is by some measures clearer, and by others, far murkier. But his search makes for fascinating reading.
All of Craig Childs’ prodigious gifts are on display in his The Animal Dialogues: Uncommon Encounters
in the Wild. I am not even an animal
person (I am more drawn to plants) but Childs pulled me into the life of wild
animals with an immediacy that is difficult to explain. Read this book, and you will get as close to
inside the life of animals as (humanly) possible.
