Intensely scholarly at times, but also an engaging analysis of one of the Bible’s most complex figures.
A professor takes on the troubling story of Jacob, a deeply flawed man who later earned punishment, redemption and a unique and honored place in Jewish history.
Part of the publisher’s Jewish Lives series, this volume immediately acknowledges that source material on Jacob resides principally in the biblical accounts. Zakovitch accordingly realizes he must rely on what he calls “literary archaeology”—close reading and searches for biblical and extra-biblical parallels—to unearth the story’s significance. The author relates the principal events in Jacob’s life, then reflects on what the biblical writers emphasized and deemphasized, altered or buried in a word or phrase. Zakovitch begins with the clash between Jacob and his twin brother, Esau, over the birthright from their father, Isaac. In these episodes, we see the fundamental ambition that impels Jacob to deceive and betray. Zakovitch spends a chapter on the well-known “Jacob’s ladder” story, then moves on to his troubles with Laban, whose daughter Rachel Jacob wished to marry. Laban practiced some deception of his own, but after much hardship, Rachel delivered sons to Jacob, including Joseph. Off to Canaan went Jacob, then, later, to Egypt, where Joseph gained power. Zakovitch recounts the death and burial and notes how his sons would go on to head the 12 tribes. The author continually points out the similarities in other Bible stories and ends with a discussion of the conflicts in Jacob’s character. Throughout, Zakovitch analyzes the stories as stories and does not explicitly insist that they are either certain history or sacred texts.
Intensely scholarly at times, but also an engaging analysis of one of the Bible’s most complex figures.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-300-14426-0
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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