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.