America in an Ugly Snapshot

 

In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex, by Nathaniel Philbrick, tells the true story of the whaling ship that was purposefully struck by a sperm whale and sunk. This was the source of the novel Moby Dick.

I certainly feel sympathy for the struggles of the sailors a drift at sea, but when you read of their actions, I can only muster moral revulsion.  Whaling was an environmental catastrophe, of course for the whales, but just about for any other living thing their crew came across. The men of the Essex toted giant tortoises off the Galapagos Island for food, and then failed to feed or give them water (under the mistaken belief that can go for months without sustenance).  

One sailor, as a prank, burned down one the islands, leaving a charred wasteland. The surviving crew resorting to cannibalism – and it is sadly no surprise that the first sailors who supposedly died and were first eaten where the African-Americans among the crew.

This is America in a snapshot: environment destruction, racism, short sighed profit motives, even an abominable version of Quakerism… the whale was correct in identifying and destroying its enemy.  It killed in self-defense.

They were not stabbed in the back

 

Hundred Days: The Campaign That Ended World War I, by Nick Lloyd, is a fascinating look at the conclusion of the First World War and dispels many myths and assumptions.  Lloyd shows how the Western Allies were finally learning the hard lessons of the previous war.  No longer expecting quick breakthroughs of the German line (although those did happen) the Allies applied a constant pressure of shorter, quicker advances.  The German Army, depleted from ill-advised spring offenses, was crumbling under this pressure and a key lack of food, ammunition, and equipment.  

Lloyd’s work shows that the "stabbed in the back theory" of the German defeat is just a reactionary myth.  A myth, unfortunately, that is still employed today in German nationalist circles. This book sets the record straight.

The Mandate of Heaven

 

Heaven Cracks, Earth Shakes: The Tangshan Earthquake and the Death of Mao's China by James Palmer, is a fascinating dive into China in 1976, which was, to say the least, a tumultuous year.  The beloved Zhou Enlai died, and many other founding members of the PRC joined him.  Mao was terminally ill, and soon to die, and the Culture Revolution was coming to a fitful end.  The entire country was on edge, as the Gang of Four and Deng Xiaoping, among other factions, were vying for power.

Then the devastating earthquake in Tangshan.  It appeared, in 1976, that the Mandate of Heaven was being lifted from the Communist rulers of the PRC, and a revolution or civil war would erupt in China.  If not for Deng’s deft political maneuvers, it may have well happened.  After reading this book you realize how important 1976 was for the PRC; it was a pivotal transition from one era to the next.

No, its not a Jewish cabal

 

The Hero's Way: Walking with Garibaldi from Rome to Ravenna by Tim Parks is an interesting read, especially if you are a fan of Garibaldi, the Risorgimento, and the failed republican uprisings of 1848.  Really, you just need to be interested, even mildly, in one.  

The most fascinating thing I discovered in this book is that many Italians, especially those on the margins of this or that, dislike Garibaldi, and believe the unification of Italy was not only a disaster, but a conspiracy between Piedmont, Garibaldi, and Jewish bankers.  Perhaps throw in the Masons too.

Italian unification worked well for some regions, and very poorly in others.  But a conspiracy did not bring this about; in the end, it had more to do with north/south animosities and the government(s) that existed in different regions before unification. Jews or Jewish cabals had no hand in this.  

Sadly, our world is slipping toward these manic and lunatic explanations for why bad things happen.

Give Me That Old Time Hebrew

 

Hebrew Roots, Jewish Routes: A Tribal Language in a Global World, by Jeremy Benstein, is an entertaining and informative trip through the many avenues of the Hebrew language, both today and in antiquity and all places between.  I have two reservations which in no way diminish my appreciation for this book or love of Hebrew.

A. The author has a (sometimes unconscious) fear that the split between English and Hebrew as the two dominant Jewish languages is largely detrimental to the Jewish identity of English-speaking Jews.  Without Hebrew, Judaism is pale and skinny.  To be fair, he does not quite say that, but the implication is often there.  This slant ignores the fact that for most of our history Jews have spoken another language than Hebrew, and except for the very select few, had rudimentary Hebrew skills at best.

B. This book can make Jews who simply do not have the time, or “skills” to learn Hebrew feel like second-class Jews.  This is not stated in the book but is widely implied.  The fact is, it is far better to read an excellent translation of a Hebrew text (one that is annotated, that explains the process of translation from Hebrew to English) than have a poor knowledge of Hebrew. 

C. Still read this book, just don't feel bad about yourself.  You are a good Jew.

The Cave of the Heart

 

Nachman Davies’ book, The Cave of the Heart (Kuntres Maarat Ha-Lev): A Treatise on Jewish Contemplative Prayer, provides an excellent and insightful program in a little known area.  Other traditions have contemplative traditions and practices, but Judaism has always lagged behind in this regard.  One reason is the Jewish emphasis on communal worship and activities.  Judaism view narrowly does not appear to sanction solitary, contemplative work.  But this is not correct.  There have always been small numbers of people engaged in Jewish contemplation.  

Inside us, Davies writes, is a heart that yearns for individual connection to HaShem.  Davies tell us: 

When we attempt to meet G-d in private, on a one-to-one basis… we are being drawn into that cave. When we enter it in the contemplative prayer of attentiveness, we can become vehicles for the Presence of G-d. The Shekhinah then prays through us and thereby, each of us can attain a close intimacy with the Divine; with the rest of Knesset Yisrael (the Community of Israel); and with Kol ha-Olam (all creation).  -Why do I call it a cave of the Heart?  The heart of something is its essential core, its deepest.

Davies’ cave of the heart is both a place and an idea.  It is a place in that we seek it alone, like a person isolated in a cave.  It is an idea in that it exists within us just waiting for us to tap into it.  This book is crucial for anyone trying to do deep religious/spiritual work in the Jewish tradition.

Sitting with Your Pain

 

Every now and again it is good to read a book like The Places That Scare You: A Guide to Fearlessness in Difficult Times by Pema Chödrön.  The greatest gift that Buddhism gives the world is the ability, through discipline and work, of seeing your life clearly.  It helps us to remove the road blocks, clutter and walls that we create for ourselves and that hide our true inner (and outer) working.

This book helps guide and train you to sit, very literally, with the feelings that scare you and not fight them.  This is very difficult to do.  We want to hide our fear, go around it, fix it, be distracted from it... anything but face it.  This books invites us to do that.  And not only that, but to sit and accept it just as we do the joys and pleasures of our lives.  Try it.  This is one of the most difficult things to do.

The Lost Café Schindler: One family, two wars and the search for truth

 

The Lost Café Schindler: One family, two wars and the search for truth by Meriel Schindler is one of those marvelous books about second or even third generation children of Holocaust survivors returning to Europe to search for their lost past.

Meriel Schindler’s family suffered from displacement and loss, but as Austrian Jews who left for England before the war, the author has a significant cache of family memories and documents to guide her.

What we get is a very full treatment of a family and its loss, and eventual gains the post-war world.  The titular café, and its life and afterlife, becomes a poignant center of gravity for the tale of this family.

A Large Genus

 

Tom Higham’s The World Before Us: The New Science Behind Our Human Origins is an both an excellent overview, and detailed account (!) of some of the more recent work done in archeology and ancient genetics which has fundamentally altered our view of human origins.  We are, I believe, on the cusp of even more amazing discoveries about our early ancestors and hominid cousins.  In the near future, the idea of completely separable “species” of the genus homo will lose all functional meaning.

Replacing the Codes

 

The Talmud: A Biography by Barry Scott Wimpfheimer is a well-written and informative journey through the groundwork laid for the Talmud, up to its modern incarnations and possible future.  

One important element that the author lays out with great clarity (which I never fully realized before) is that the growth of “codes” to organize and in a sense replace the Talmud in the Middle Ages failed to take hold by a concerted effort by Litvak Jews and the growth of the “modern” yeshiva.  

The Litvak yeshiva held the Talmud as the pinnacle of Jewish learning, as it was (and is) so demanding to study.  This was a way to assert authority.  Wimpfheimer shows us the pride of place of the Talmud among (certain) religious Jews is in fact a modern phenomenon.

An Accomplishment

 

Raven Leilani’s novel Luster has a great sense of energy, depth, and control.  She has all the elements here of a very accomplished novel.  The main character is flawed but likable, and the plot is interesting to the point of distraction.  This novel also has many cutting and incisive things to say about race in America, but with style and panache. She has a rich palette of words and phrases that she uses in surprising, even jarring ways.  Luster is one of the more accomplished novels I have read by a young writer in a long time.

Is this Backed Up?

 

Jill Leovy’s Ghettoside: A True Story of Murder in America posits an intriguing idea.  The murder rate of  black men is so high not because of over-policing, but a lack of policing.  Black men are over-policed for all crimes but murder.  The lack of policing leads to a kind of shadow or vigilante justice in black neighborhoods.  The police are supposed to have a monopoly on “violence.”  The fact that they is ceded in cases of black and black murder, compounds the problem, creating a power vacuum that gang fill.

Is this true?  Do statistics back it up? I am in no position to say so.  The book is about (mainly) white detectives in LAPD who decide to prosecute gang violence like any other crime.  They are painted as heroes.  The  LAPD?  Heroic people?  White saviors helping (helpless) blacks?  I feel uneasy about endorsing this book with  more information.

Getting Hurt / Getting Bored

 

Author Annie Ernaux won the Nobel Prize in literature this year (2022).  Getting Lost is her memoir of an affair with a married Soviet diplomat from 1988 to 1990.  This journal/memoir is very claustrophobic and repetitive, and I wonder why Ernaux would continue to have such an affair when it is so excruciatingly painful.  She is not married, and the diplomat is, but she never wishes for him to leave his wife. What she really wants is to experience more sex, and given the detailed erotic attention she provides him, and the acts she performs to give him pleasure, the reader does wonder why he did not visit her more.  Was he an idiot?

I can only imagine that Ernaux put herself through this affair because she is a writer, and these emotions are grist for her mill.  But this work, from my vantage point, wasn’t worth the effort.  The end product, the book, is flawed and just boring. 

Too Much Company

 

The Consolations of the Forest: Alone in a Cabin on the Siberian Taiga by Sylvain Tesson, as the title suggests, documents the author’s six-month stay in a cabin in Siberia.  An interesting book.  Tesson is not a run-of-the-hill hermit.   He drinks a lot of vodka, he visits his distant neighbors.  He certainly feels the highs and lows of solitary living, but you could hardly say he spent six months alone in a cabin. He was still part of a real (although far-flung) community of fellow cabin dwellers.  So if you are looking for the musing of the religiously isolated individual, this is not the book for you.  Tesson writes well about topics you would expect in such a book, but he has too much company.

A Crushing Condemnation

 

I was certainly aware of the complicity of the Roman Catholic Church in the rise of fascism in Italy, and totalitarian (non-communist) states elsewhere before (and during) the Second World War, but until reading this book I never knew the extent.  The Pope and Mussolini: The Secret History of Pius XI and the Rise of Fascism in Europe by David I. Kertzer is eye-opening.  The Vatican worked closely with Mussolini for the benefits it could derive from the Fascist movement. This work is a crushing condemnation of the Church and its recent history of organized antisemitism.

The Multiplier Effect

1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed: Revised and Updated by Eric H. Cline documents what is probably the first collapse of what we now call a world order, the Bronze Age.  In the past, scholars looked for one reason for this collapse and usually hung the blame on the so-called Sea Peoples and their seemingly omnipresent invasions.  

Now history and historians are pivoting and realizing that it is usually a bundle of factors that produce societal collapse, as events like climate change, warfare, migrations, earthquakes, pandemics, and volcanic eruptions, interact to create multiplier and domino effects. 

This sounds a great deal like our world, does it not?  This appears to be Cline’s thesis. Is our world too “complex” to survive?  Have our multipliers gotten out of hand?   Are dominos starting to fall?  We really won’t know until we can’t read anymore, and new Homers are singing of a lost golden age.

The Heresy of Jacob Frank: From Jewish Messianism to Esoteric Myth by Jay Michaelson

 

The Heresy of Jacob Frank: From Jewish Messianism to Esoteric Myth by Jay Michaelson is quite a wild ride.  This is even more impressive as this is an academic book, unlike the bulk of Michaelson’s other work.  So there is the paraphernalia of academic productions, footnotes, and references to other scholars you have probably not read.  Usually, this slows down a text.

Despite this, Michaelson's book moves along and shines a lively and fascinating light on the “heresy” of Jacob Frank, which is little known to people or Jews at large.  What he reveals is unexpected.  Frank’s final teaching, written in Polish, is a compendium of bravado, materialist explications of the universe, odd folklore, and, most importantly, a decisive turn from both Judaism and the teaching of Sabbetai Zevi. In the end, what we get is something that is hard to explain but extremely fascinating.  Frank’s writing, according to Michaelson’s read, did not cause many modern trends in Judaism but anticipated them. 

Michaelson appears to be teaching us that (ultimately many) mainstream notions have heretical roots.  

What is This?

 

The Marriage of Heaven and Hell is part prophecy, poem, prose, heresy, and a deep invocation of religious/spiritual life, with all its joys and pitfalls.  I am still absorbing what I read; this book needs to be read again and again.

After the Eclipse

 

It is hard not to come away from Sarah Perry’s After the Eclipse: A Mother's Murder, a Daughter's Search without feeling a complex set of emotions and thoughts.  The overwhelming feeling is of the gut punch of sorrow caused by the steep and terrible price of violence in human life – and in this case, in the lives of women.  

Perry titles her chapters before and after (her mother’s murder) signifying how that event was singular, worthy of a different reckoning of time.  This violent act is a marker of a new era.

Perry is an able writer, and she has organized this book so it rises above the genres it seems destined to fall into.  Yes, her memoir is about crime, violence, revenge, justice, and toxic masculinity… all we come to expect from such a book.  But the author transcends the expectations of the genre to create something far more complex, harrowing, and interesting.  

Off the Derech - And it is Fine

 

Enlightenment by Trial and Error: Ten Years on the Slippery Slopes of Jewish Spirituality, Postmodern Buddhism, and Other Mystical Heresies is fascinating and compelling.  The reader is struck by his ever-evolving evolution along the spiritual/religious/whatever path of the author.  Michaelson is relentless.  As I read, it became obvious that his quest (or non-quest) will go on and on. His derech is far from Orthodox – but for seekers or non-seeks or somehow both, this is an enriching and provocative work where no stone is left unturned.

On Genocide, Books & Films

 

The Elimination: A Survivor of the Khmer Rouge Confronts His Past and the Commandant of the Killing Fields by Rithy Panh is a hard-hitting look at the Cambodian genocide.  Pahn was a teenager when the Khmer Rouge took power, and is now a documentary filmmaker.  This powerful work examines his time in camps, his suffering, the death of nearly all of his family, and then after – as he dedicates his life to creating films about the genocide.  This book is a corollary to those films, but also stands brilliantly alone.

Neanderthal Man: In Search of Lost Genomes

 

I cannot say I understood all, or even most of the concepts, and techniques discussed in Neanderthal Man: In Search of Lost Genomes by Svante Pääbo.  But the great feature of this book is that the author (somehow) creates a coherent narrative even when the reader does not know very much about genetics.

In a wider sense, this book documents a revolution in our understanding of what it means to be homo sapiens.  Our deep past is shrouded in silence, revelated only in cave paintings, tools, and bones. Pääbo groundbreaking work is the Copernican Revolution in our understanding of our origins.  And like all great discoveries, it has generated a host of questions waiting for answers.

Latin Alive: The Survival of Latin in English and the Romance Languages by Joseph B. Solodow

 

Latin Alive: The Survival of Latin in English and the Romance Languages by Joseph B. Solodow, is a fascinating, if not a somewhat technical examination of Latin’s evolution.  The author takes us through classical Latin and its spoken counterpart in antiquity, then Vulgar Latin, Romance, and finally, the evolution of Romance into French, Italian and Spanish.  

Perhaps the most fascinating part of this work is at the end, when Solodow examines the first written versions of French, Italian, and Spanish.  The author helps us to see the modern language emerge from the matrix of Latin with great clarity. 

Typhoid Mary: An Urban Historical

 

As many have noted, Anthony Bourdain’s Typhoid Mary: An Urban Historical, probably reflects more of Bourdain’s worldview than Mary Mallon’s.  But his sympathy for her as a human being is so appealing we feel he knows her.  What I do know is that then reading this, his use of language on the page, brings a pang and makes me realize, once more, how much we lost when we lost Bourdain.

The Lost City of Z

 

The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession, by David Grann, is interesting, entertaining, and well-written.  In and of itself, this story is really about the denial that Native Americans could form complex civilizations before the arrival of Columbus.  Indeed, the Aztecs, the Inca, and the Maja are not the only peoples who created advanced social and political structures. 

The Lost City of Z turns out to be the memory, both among early Spanish and Portuguese explorers/conquers, and Native Americans, of former Amazon towns and cities in the Amazon forest. It seems Grann could have spared himself a difficult trip if he had read Michael Heckenberger’s work before he set out for Brazil.

The Book for Inbetweeners

 

The Practical Tanya - Part One - The Book for Inbetweeners, by Chaim Miller, took me over three years to read.  Granted, I took breaks.  But this work certainly deserves a slow go and I probably should have taken six years. That said, you should either hire a teacher to teach you the Tanya, or read this book.  Miller is an excellent guide through this complex text.

In a wider sense, it is hard to believe that the Alter Rebbe wrote this work so he could teach more people his Torah, and not be interrupted by so many visitors.  This is the Alter Rebbe's introductory text!!  Our knowledge of Chassidus has certainly really atrophied. 

I Can't Get You Out of My Mind, by Marianne Apostolides

 

[Note: I know Marianne Apostolides.  First through her works, and email, and recently, in person.]

I Can't Get You Out of My Mind, by Marianne Apostolides takes the reader into some very deep (and sometimes swift) water.  This novel is an explanation and exploration of how we communicate and express love.  If you are familiar with her work, you will know that Apostolides throws everything into her writing, leaving nothing behind.  If she is going to explore love, then every avenue will be exhausted.  She will just as soon leave scorched earth behind in her quest.

In the process, the author examines love against and with AI, philosophy, art, and psychology, But the author is, as in many of her works, fascinated by the somatic experience.  How does love feel in the body?  What is loved as lived in flesh.

In the end, the reader will sense that they have been taken on a great voyage of discovery – although some of the ‘answers’ to the problem of love can never have adequate answers, and the author respects this.  Love is all around us, it binds us, it fills us with joy or hurts us, we live it, but it is a millennial-old mystery.  

Apostolides’ exploration of love both respects the past attempts to define love while forging ahead into the uncertain future.  She succeeds wildly. 

Babel: Around the World in Twenty Languages

 

Babel: Around the World in Twenty Languages by Gaston Dorren is a delightful and entertaining voyage through some of the world’s most interesting and influential languages. Dorren is not hung up on method or style; the work varies to a great degree, much to his credit and the book's quality.  He also destroys the notion that a lingua franca is used because it is easy - and somehow inevitable.  They are not; power, economics, and social hegemony create them.  A language does not have a destiny.

Stalingrad: The Fateful Siege: 1942-1943

 

How much can a people, or people, suffer?  By reading Stalingrad: The Fateful Siege: 1942-1943 by Antony Beevor, you find out a great deal.  How could an event like the Battle of Stalingrad occur? Beevor will take you through it.  You realize, on reading this book, that Hitler and Stalin, may their names be blotted out, fought at Stalingrad not for any logical or strategic reason.  It was pure ego.  And just as when the Japanese lost the Battle of Midway, and thereby lost the war, so too did Germany lose the war when they lost Stalingrad.  More people would suffer and die, but the tide had turned away from Germany.

He Hates Women

 

James Salter is (was) an impressive technical writer and this collection of short stories, Last Night, certainly bears this out.  But the writing here, and much of his writing, is so marred by misogyny and just casual disregard of women as anything else but a) sexual playthings of men and b) some post or ladder that a man uses to further his own goals and/or achievements, that the collection is spoiled.

There is little reason to read them.

The First Celebrity Rabbi

 

It is not Steven Nadler’s fault that his book Manasseh ben Israel: Rabbi of Amsterdam (Jewish Lives) is a bit boring.  Manasseh ben Israel, unfortunately, is not a very compelling figure. He seems to have been, perhaps, the world’s first celebrity rabbi for non-Jews.  That is his claim to fame.

Many Jews seemed to dislike him – sometimes rabidly.  Others were suspicious of his interactions with Messianic Christians.  If anything, perhaps Manasseh ben Israel was ahead of his time: an ecumenical man living in a still very narrow religious world. 

Still Radical

 

Say what you want about Hemingway the man, or even about the particulars of his writing: his treatment of woman characters, his casual, 1920-style antisemitism.  All of this is true.  But when you pick up a collection of his early writings like the collection of short fiction In Our Time, it feels as cool and crisp as ever.  He had such an impact on the prose style of the twentieth century, yet this book still feels artistically radical, nearly a hundred years after its publication.

Bus Stop Poem

 

Girl a black oak shrouds

Smothering tender moments

Of blond hair in twines

Minutes to hours to days

Even already gone now

All the sense of love

And nothing but nothing 

Of the promises and vows

 

Hemingway was a Jerk

 

Everybody Behaves Badly: The True Story Behind Hemingway's Masterpiece The Sun Also Rises by Lesley M. M. Blume, exposes nothing really new about Hemingway or his roman à clef.  We know that Hemingway was a jerk.  He started early in life, and it continued until he died.  I do not feel particularly sorry for any of the real-life people who Hemingway turned into characters in this novel.  They knew Hemingway – they were artists or writers or fellow travelers – did they not know he would write about them if the story was good?

That said, I feel bad about the fate of Lady Duff Twysden.  The author does an admirable job searching for evidence of her life (both before and after The Sun) and there is little remaining.  She died young, and her possessions appeared to have been thrown away.  There is a very sad story about her we will probably never learn.

I think I have heard/read this before.

Malcolm Gladwell has his own style, and if you don’t like it, he isn’t changing it for you.  So, you should stop reading his books.

This is certainly the case with The Bomber Mafia: A Dream, a Temptation, and the Longest Night of the Second World War.  It is inescapably a Gladwell book in tone and structure.  

However now there is confusion. There is his Podcast, and even the hybrid book-podcasts, so this material feels like I have read it before, or listened to it.  Did I?  Maybe so...

So, Gladwell’s scene has become complex, yet really the same.  He is still firmly Gladwell in tone and style.  Now we are just thrown into confusion if we have read/heard his work before.  I think I have heard/read this before [?]

 

What Happened to Paula: An Unsolved Death and the Danger of American Girlhood

 

The title tells us as much, that in Katherine Dykstra’s What Happened to Paula: An Unsolved Death and the Danger of American Girlhood, we never do learn who killed Paula Oberbroeckling.  Theories are explored, but this true crime book moves away from the details of the particular crime to the culture we have created where woman and girls face danger from men with male impunity.  This book shows how the all-male police failed to take Paula’s disappearance and murder investigation seriously.  She was a girl who had gone “bad” and therefore deserved what happened to her.  Although her death took place in 1970, this author reminds us these prejudicial and unfavorable attitudes are still prevalent today.  Ask the woman closest to you!  Our culture forces women to be fearful for their safety and wellbeing.

Infinite Powers: How Calculus Reveals the Secrets of the Universe by Steven H. Strogatz

 

Infinite Powers: How Calculus Reveals the Secrets of the Universe by Steven H. Strogatz is the best book written for laypeople about Calculus (I have yet to read).  The author handles it all: the rise of the questions and challenges of Calculus before its exact formulation, its formulation and how it works, and how it is employed in all manner of human endeavors.  But Calculus not only has a past and a present but a future.  Stogatz speculates how this form of math, the language God speaks, may work for us in the time to come.

Sonorous Desert: What Deep Listening Taught Early Christian Monks―and What It Can Teach Us

 

With Sonorous Desert Kim Haines-Eitzen has written a gorgeously evocative book about an experience most of us take for granted. As an expert on early Christian hermits and monasticism, she has given us a work where sound is the primary conduit to understand both the solitary and the social sides of our experience.  How much do we give to others, and how much time do we need for ourselves?  We all face this to some degree or another.  Haines-Eitzen has written a book where this primary dilemma is explored through how we hear our world, our sonorous experience.  This is a novel and exciting investigation of how sound deeply informs how we experience, and live in our world.  With this  book Haines-Eitzen has given us a key to a deeper understand of ourselves.

The Corrosion of Conservatism: Why I Left the Right

 

The Corrosion of Conservatism: Why I Left the Right is Max Boot’s elegy of his departure from the Republican Party and conservative politics.  This is the route many more conservatives should have taken with the rise of Trump and Trumpism.  Their duty was to put country before party and their own narrow self-interests.  Most did not.  Boot did, and he is to be commended for doing so and telling his story.

Perhaps the most interesting part of this book is Boot’s post-mortem on contemporary conservatism.  He sees, for the first time in his life, that conservatism has from the very beginning had been built on a foundation of nativism, misogyny, racism (all the bad-isms).  Therefore, Trump is not an anomaly from the conservative movement and the Republican Party, but produced by it and its natural progression.

Canada's Fault Line

 

A People's History of Quebec by Jacques Lacoursière and Robin Philpot offers a readable account of the history of French-speaking Canada.  Americans tend to think of Canada as a harmonious and polite county, not rent apart by painful and deep divisions like the United States.  But that is only our liberal fantasy about Canada.  There have always been fault lines in Canada: ethnic, political, social, regional, and economic – and this book explores and explains one of Canada’s most consequential, the friction between English and French-speaking Canada.

The authors provide a brisk and informative overview of one of Canada’s thorniest existential issues.

The Happening happening as all happening: Rami Shapiro

 

I have read most of Rami Shapiro’s books and I am an unqualified fan.  He presents a flexible and appealing non-dual version of Judaism which I believe is one way for people to get involved in Judaism without having to literally buy into many things they can no longer believe.

Rabbi Shapiro here defines God as: “The Happening happening as all happening” which is a version of the name God provided Moses on Sinai.  This is not a personal god but the very ground of being, which is not ground at all, but process.  Another of his similes is that Reality is God) and Reality is the ocean, and individual beings, like us, are merely waves in that great ocean.  We think we are free, detached entities, but we are always a part of Reality, of God, and eventually, we return to Reality.

This book is for anyone, Jewish or not, who would like to embrace a religion for grownups. 

Heroin & The Cloisters

 

When I was in college and 20 years old, I dated a fellow student, a young woman, for a VERY short time.  One day, she took me on a trip to upper Manhattan to see the Cloisters.   We rode the subway north, and once there, the Cloisters and its setting took my breath away. A gem was hidden at the tip of Manhattan.  She took me there for one reason: she had read The Basketball Diaries and wanted to see the place where most of the novel occurs. 

Now, decades later, I have read it.  I can see her attraction to the novel: she was a troubled person, moving sideways without anyone helping her.  It is apparent how this story of marginalization and addiction would appeal to her: something was guiding her life that she could not control, like the author of this book.  The trajectory of doom would have mirrored how she felt at that time.

The Last Duel: A True Story of Crime, Scandal, and Trial by Combat

 

As a true crime book, Eric Jager’s The Last Duel: A True Story of Crime, Scandal, and Trial by Combat is in a class by itself.  This book takes a single story involving three people, a crime, in a distant place long ago, and works the material like a modern non-fiction true crime story (with some literary liberties taken, I would think).

In world where everything was viewed as the will of God, a trial by combat, a judicial duel, makes a great deal of sense.  This was the last "official duel" – for the kings of France began to reign in the powers of their aristocrats and centralize their governments as evolving, modern national states.  This was the beginning of the end of the Middle Ages.

Jager paints the Norman French landscape of knights, squires, aristocrats, and kings in vivid colors.  This compelling book is well researched and written. 

War on the Border: Villa, Pershing, the Texas Rangers, and an American Invasion

 

Few Americans know the history of Mexico, even when the Mexico’s history is entangled in our history.  Jeff Guinn’s War on the Border: Villa, Pershing, the Texas Rangers, and an American Invasion is a helpful way to alleviate our abysmal ignorance of US meddling in Mexico. 

Here Guinn documents our intricate, and nearly always illegal, manipulations of Mexico’s internal affairs, in this case in the Mexico Civil War in the early years of the twentieth century.  Reading this book one can’t help but see in Perishing’s Punitive Expedition more recent invasions of other countries to pursue America’s enemies.  We never did get Poncho Villa, by the way.  Catching a fugitive in his own country, or a friendly country, or in this case an indifferent country, was as difficult in 1916 as it is in 2022.  

Lingo Fun

 

Lingo: Around Europe in Sixty Languages by Gaston Dorren is a humorous trip through both the history and contemporary scene of Europe’s languages, both in Europe and elsewhere.  Despite being entertaining and smooth reading – this book also provides a first-rate study of and why we study language, without falling into witless jargon. 

A Grudging Admiration

 

I have read nearly all of Tom Segev’s books, and I never felt an overwhelming sense of esteem in his works for Ben Gurion.  In his A State at Any Cost: The Life of David Ben-Gurion Segev finds more to admire about him, but with important caveats.   Despite Ben Gurion’s many accomplishments, Segev paints a picture of a deeply flawed man.  He is a leader but does not appear to understand people.  He is popular but has difficulty maintaining friendships.  He can be petty, small and vindictive.

But Segev presents a picture of the man in full.  He has faults, but also his strengths.  Segev strongly suggests that without Ben Gurion, Israel would not have been founded (at least not in its present incarnation).  His work ethic in his prime is Olympian. He also admires Ben Gurion’s journalism, high praises from a noted journalist like Segev.

Nothing New Here

 

Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz is an extremely beloved and popular writer in Israel.  His translation of the Talmud in Israeli Hebrew was a surprise hit.  For years, I tried to start and complete his The Thirteen Petalled Rose – a work about Jewish mysticism that is also immensely popular.  This book never connected with me, despite starting it many times; but I decided to read it for Shavuot.  

I must admit, there is still a lack of connection.  His books are written in Hebrew, and translated into English, so perhaps that is part of the disconnect.  There was a time when few religious Hebrew writing/writers tried to reach secular Israelis.  Steinsaltz did, with favorable results.  But The Thirteen Petalled Rose contains nothing that cannot be found in many places in English.  There is nothing new here.  I kept asking myself, why is there nothing new here?

Tracing Time: Seasons of Rock Art on the Colorado Plateau

 

Craig Childs is probably the best guide to the American West we have living today, and his Tracing Time: Seasons of Rock Art on the Colorado Plateau certainly bears this out.  This work was written during the height of the pandemic, and you can sense some fear and sorrow around the edges of his story.  This makes this book seem a bit more detached than some of the author’s other works.  So while this may not be his best book, it is certainly a dedicated introduction to Rock Art in the American West.

The Talmud We Deserve... Maybe

 

Maddening, insane, brilliant, Fragments of the Brooklyn Talmud by Andrew Ramer is unsettling and strange.  

I read this book for Tikkun Leil Shavuot, wanting something different, and the book certainly delivered the goods.  Ramer's work is difficult and frustrating.  It is, in that sense, like the Talmud that precedes it, a work of great importance that is unstructured, rambling, profound, and humorous.  And as in reading the Talmud, I come away from Ramer's book wondering just what we are supposed to take from this text.  

Read this book but be prepared to feel deeply conflicted.  Ramer has given us something that is both amazing and frightening.  Let us hope we don’t get the world and (parts of) the Jewish future depicted here.

To have your Avodah Zarah cake and eat your Kabbalah too

 

Practical Kabbalah: A Guide to Jewish Wisdom for Everyday Life by Laibl Wolf is geared toward the psychological element of Kabbalah made popular by Hasidim.  In this case, Wolf presents us with Chabad’s religious psychology, which revolves around the soul/psychological states of Chokmah, Bina and Daat.  These are the concepts that form Chabad’s name, and the “intellectual” orientation of their corner of Chassidus.  

Wolf is sly.  He realizes that many of the concepts he expounds on can be found in Asian religions.  He explains these parallels through the genealogies in the Torah.  Adam was the first Kabbalist, and he passed his knowledge through the generations.  

With the coming of Abraham, Kabbalah took a sharper, more focused turn.  Abraham had children with a woman named  Keturah after Sarah died (in many traditions, she is supposed to be Hagar by another name, as it makes old Abe seem too randy to take yet another child-bearing age woman to bed).  He eventually sends these children, who are a bad influence on Isaac, away with “gifts” that Wolf interprets as Kabbalistic knowledge.  These Abrahamic offspring head east, to India.  There, they took local wives.  Their already corrupted esoteric knowledge mixes with local religions to form Hinduism and Buddhism.  Hence, the similarities between esoteric Judaism and religions of Asia.

Well, this is certainly insulting to those religions.  Other Jewish thinkers have made this kind of move toward religious triumphalism in the past.  Philo and Maimonides believed that Moses thought the early Greek philosophers their craft.  Abraham Maimonides thought the Sufi orders were descended from the original Hebrew band of prophets, now corrupted by Islam.  All wrong, but these moves are fascinating.  We get to borrow but not acknowledge sources from avodah zarah.  Wolf is the first person I have read propounding this theory for Kabbalah.  It is gutsy and odd.