Book Review Exodus

Exodus by Leon Uris
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

A reviewer on Goodreads says that Exodus is to the History of the Jews as Gone With the Wind is to the Civil War.


I can think of no better review than that;  this book is readable, disturbing and enlightening.  It is packed with historical events but also marred with the omissions that one all too often finds in historical fiction.


However, for 20 years now, I've been meaning to take steps to solidify my education on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict and the founding of Israel.  To this book's credit, this is the first time I've actually finished taking the first step.  So now I'm ready to move on to more scholarly tomes, primed with the empathy this book allows the reader to feel for the people involved.


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Book Review Throne of Fire

The Throne of Fire by Rick Riordan
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Another rollicking adventure from Riordan.  These Kane adventures are not as enjoyable to me as the Percy Jackson epic, if only because I'm much more familiar with Greek and Roman mythology than I am with Egyptian mythology.  Egyptian mythology is darker and more serious, which makes these books a little less playful than the Percy Jackson/Heroes of Olympus books.


However, Sadie Kane is a really fun character and Riordan captures her voice, and the angst of a 13 year old girl, very, very well.


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Book Review Julie and Julia

Julie and Julia: 365 Days, 524 Recipes, 1 Tiny Apartment Kitchen by Julie Powell
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Eh.

But I read the whole thing.  The rags to riches of an early blogger intrigues me.  And she started a trend, right?  We're all now trying to find the schtick that we can blog about so that we can write a book and hang out in our pajamas.  But Julie Powell just did it to do it.  And it changed her life.

I wanted to come over to her apartment and clean.  Several times.  I laughed out loud.  Several times.  The lobster chapter rang home heartily, as I remember not being able to eat lobster as a youth in Jamaica because I couldn't stand the idea that we boiled them alive.  Me too, Julie.  Me too.

The insertions of snippets of Julia Child's life were nice but not well-formed;  they didn't really help the narrative in the way I think they were designed to but I still enjoyed getting a little glimpse and think that perhaps I should read more Julia Child.


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Why Beau Jest?

Why Beau Jest? 

“So Sarah has this Jewish boyfriend who is neither Jewish nor her boyfriend.”

That’s the tag line I wrote for advertising materials for our production of Beau Jest. I almost added the additional tag, “Discuss.” Remember the Mike Myers Saturday Night Live skit Coffee Talk? Myers played Linda Richman, a stereotypical Jewish middle-aged woman who wears gaudy sweaters, large, dark glasses and has big hair, which she constantly adjusts. “The chickpea is neither a chick nor a pea. Discuss,” she’ll say. Or “The Mormon Tabernacle Choir is neither Mormon nor a tabernacle nor a choir. Discuss.”

Beau Jest is wonderful fodder for a Linda Richman tangent. Sarah is a nice Jewish girl from a nice Jewish family who has fallen in love with a nice Christian boy. But she tells her nice Jewish parents that she’s dating a nice Jewish doctor. It’s all nice. Until her parents invite the Jewish doctor, who doesn’t exist, to Passover.

Cue Guess Who’s Coming to Seder?

Beau Jest is funny, with its convoluted-interpersonal-relationships-based-on-mistaken-identity plot line. But it also engages themes that have deeper meaning; how important is a shared religion to a relationship? And how important is a shared religion to building a cohesive and strong extended family?

According to the 2001 American Religious Identification Survey, more than 28 million married or cohabitating Americans - almost one quarter - are interfaith. For some, the choice between their faith, which often incorporates their family and community, and the person they love is fraught with challenges and heartache. For others an interfaith relationship represents the ultimate reconciliation ceremony; it brings together the best elements from two faiths.

On the one hand, some believe that each member of an interfaith family will hold different beliefs about deity, humanity and the rest of the universe and the result will be irresolvable conflict. On the other hand, conflict over faith can happen in an intrafaith family as well; even with a shared set of beliefs, interpretations of those beliefs can differ. Two people of the same faith can take a religious text and come up with two vastly different interpretations and each person believes that his interpretation is truth because it’s based on scripture. Irresolvable conflict.

So how important is a shared religion to building a cohesive and strong extended family?

 Discuss.

 Krista Lang Blackwood Director of Cultural Arts

Jewish Community Center of Greater Kansas City

Book Review The Sabbath

The Sabbath by Abraham Joshua Heschel

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Thoughtful book about the importance of the Sabbath because it is about "time" not about "space." 

"There is a realm of time where the goal is not to have but to be, not to own but to give, not to control but to share, not to subdue but to be in accord.  Life goes wrong when the control of space, the acquisition of things of space, becomes our sole concern." 

"We must conquer space in order to sanctify time.  All week long we are called upon to sanctify life through employing things of space.  On the Sabbath it is given us to share in the holiness that is in the heart of time."

Though this is a Jewish text, it isn't only for Jews;  folks of all stripes can get something out of Heschel's thoughtful, if sometimes scattered, disorganized, and repetitive, prose:

"Technical civilization is man's triumph over space.  Yet time remains impervious.  We can overcome distance but can neither recapture the past nor dig out the future.  Man transcends space, and time transcends man."

"Every one of us occupies a portion of space.  He takes it up exclusively.  Yet, no one possesses time.  there is no moment which I possess exclusively.  This very moment belongs to all living men as it belongs to me." 

"We share time."



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Book Review The Influencing Machine: Brooke Gladstone on the Media

The Influencing Machine by Brooke Gladstone
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A graphic novel that gives you a history of the media in visual bits that bite deep.

The main point;  "We hunger for objectivity, but increasingly swallow "news" like Jell-O shots in ad hoc cyber-saloons.  We marinate in punditry season with only those facts and opinions we can digest without cognitive distress.   I see our most hallowed journalistic institutions crumbling, I see our business model that relied on mass audiences being displaced, with stunning speed, by one that survives by aggregating millions of tiny, targeted audience fragments.  The reality that anyone with a cell phone can now presume to make, break, or fabricate the news has shaken our citadels of culture and journalism to the core.
The once mighty gatekeepers watch in horror as libelous, manifestly unprofessional websites flood the media ether with unadulterated id.  Terrifying.  I can't wait to watch it play out."

Something oxymoronic about a book like this pointing out that we, as a people, have lost our ability to read in-depth for long periods of time.  But would I have picked up a 500 page tome on this subject?  Probably not. I blame Google.


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Book Review The Three Musketeers

The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Rereading in my middle age;  I flipped between two translations the Bantam classic translation by Lowell Blair and the Tor Publications anonymous translation, discovered and introduced by Steven Brust.  The Tor edition was highly recommended as being the closest to capturing the clever language of the original French but I found it so clunky and impregnable that I lost the story-line.  When I switched back to the Blair translation, the story came alive once more.


There have been a million stage and screen adaptations focusing on the diamond tags but I found myself wondering why someone hasn't made a psychological thriller out of the Lady de Winter/Fenton section.  Creepy as hell, she is.


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