A paean, in a way, to the rigors and frustrations—and ultimate joys—of trying to comprehend the unfathomable.
A freelancer debuts with a memoir/disquisition about the Hebrew Bible and the difficulties—linguistic and personal—that translators into English have faced.
Kushner grew up speaking Hebrew in a scholarly family that often had intense discussions about the Bible and the intricacies of the Hebrew texts. While attending the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, the author took a course in the Bible from Marilynne Robinson, a course to which Kushner brought a perspective and an intelligence that must have illuminated the room. With Robinson’s encouragement, Kushner—after 10 years’ labor—completed her text, which covers all sorts of autobiographical, historical, religious, and geographical ground. We learn about her girlhood, her family history (with some painful family stories from the Holocaust), her medical problems (her writing hand failed her; she severely injured a foot), her peripatetic lifestyle (and various jobs), and her relationships with assorted family members. There are some wrenching moments in Bremen, Germany, where she visited the former home of her grandfather, whose family faced the Holocaust. But Kushner is principally interested in the meanings and translations of key Biblical passages, and she pursues this interest with a fierce passion, collecting and reading and collating numerous English translations. She leads us into some dense discussions of particular passages—from the creation story to the Ten Commandments (a phrase, she tells us, that does not appear in the Hebrew) to Psalm 42 and others. At times, she considers her own belief—and disbelief—but never veers too far from her texts, organizing each section under headings like “Laughter” and “Law.” A most patient tutor, she neither preaches nor exhorts but mostly tries to explain and to understand. Among her grimmest stories are those of the violent fates of some early translators.
A paean, in a way, to the rigors and frustrations—and ultimate joys—of trying to comprehend the unfathomable.Pub Date: Aug. 18, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-52082-9
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 13, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2015
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
SEEN & HEARD
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