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.
Tales of a Mad Yogi: The Life and Wild Wisdom of Drukpa Kunley by Elizabeth Monson, is supposed to be the story of an antinomian Tibetan Buddhist monk born in 1455. The problem is, he was not that wild. Perhaps it is my vantage point. Would I be shocked if I knew more about Buddhist theology and monkish practices. He is supposed to have drunk to excess and had forbidden sex with women. He does, but it's not crazy sex. It just seems like serial monogamy. Nor does he drink too much. Most of this collection involves explicating dharma in long speeches! Kunley is no Diogenes
James McBride’s The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store: A Novel is the book everyone is reading this summer (2024) and it’s not hard to see why. This is a compelling work that is both readily accessible to wide audience and also has deep messages about the state of our society. For me, McBride falls short in certain areas. A character reads the Talmud and the narrative keeps explaining that it is in Hebrew. That is not technically correct. It is in Aramaic and Hebrew, and sometime a curious mix of the two. This chipped away at me. Also, the water sub-plot seems strangely misplaced until it is used near the end. It is confusing and is deployed for a specific use only. It called the entire structure of the novel into question; it exposed the framework of the author’s choices to me for criticism. So, this is an accomplished but by no means perfect novel.
Mafia Summit: J. Edgar Hoover, the Kennedy Brothers, and the Meeting That Unmasked the Mob by Gil Reavill recounts the famous, or infamous Mafia meeting at the home of Joseph "Joe the Barber" Barbara, in Apalachin, New York, on November 14, 1957. This is an interesting subject, but it does not seem to lend itself to a book-length treatment. This topic is more suited for a semi-long magazine article. There is not enough subject matter here to warrant a book. But if the history of the summit, and its ramifications is your area of interest, you won’t find this flawed!
A Cure for Sorrow (Sori HaYagon): A Rabbinic Guide to Suffering by Shem-Tov Falaquera is the closest Judaism will come to offering a consistent stoic philosophy. Unfortunately, the quality of this treatise is not very high. For instance, it certainly comes nowhere near the soaring heights of Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations. As far as I know not even the groundwork has been prepared for a stoic philosophical take on Judaism. We must all wait for one.
Our Immoral Soul: A Manifesto of Spiritual Disobedience by Rabbi Nilton Bonde is certainly interesting to read, if not confusing. Rabbi Bonde pulls a Nietzsche-type inversion in these writings: the soul impedes our progress, while the body breaks boundaries and moves us forward. That is an interesting premise, and worthy of exploration. But these essays certainly need to do more to advance this thesis. They are opaque and clumsily worded.
The subtitle of A Life Worth Living: Meditations on God, Death and Stoicism by William Ferraiolo is not very clear, it turns out. I thought this work would be exclusively about how to practice Stoic philosophy here and now; and certainly, some of it is. But by and large, the author moves to other topics, like a philosophical exploration of No Country for Old Men, and a valiant effort to revive some kind of concept of creation by design. And interesting book, but not quite what I thought it would be.
