Good, sweaty work: all this turning of the spirit’s and mind’s soil yields a nourishing outlook on life.
Brickner, a Reform rabbi for 45 years, uses the garden as a viewing lens for such big religious and philosophical issues as our ethical comportment, our approach to death, God's character, and the nature of sex and love.
Working away in the garden, it has often occurred to Brickner that “if I looked up, I would better understand what was going on when I looked down, and vice versa.” He takes plenty of cues from the garden, but they serve mostly as jumping-off points for an extended ramble through his religious rationalism. For those with a mind to it, God is in the garden as in the cosmos, the lawful orderly universe. Brickner has little to say on the matters of chaos and improbability, not because he doesn't recognize them—he knows luck and weeds and the random workings of fate as well as anyone—but because he believes in cultivating a body of understanding that helps address such issues when they burst forth. We can absorb and learn. Free will gives us the ability and responsibility to act; hopefully, our deeds reflect the positive ethical values we associate with the divine. Balance can give perspective and harmony; “we find answers to our prayers by concentrating on the best we can think, feel, and then decide to do.” Brickner has sharp things to say about patience, memory, and loss, the role of miracles in an orderly universe, and about the interplay of moral, ethical, and factual truths in the pseudo-debate of science versus religion—they complement one another, as everyone from Brickner to Stephen Jay Gould has written. Not least, he has wise things to say about the necessity of a Sabbath day each week for rest, serenity, and reflection.
Good, sweaty work: all this turning of the spirit’s and mind’s soil yields a nourishing outlook on life.Pub Date: Aug. 29, 2002
ISBN: 0-316-24871-1
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2002
The writing is merely serviceable, and one can’t help but wish the author had found a way to present her material as...
An unlikely love story set amid the horrors of a Nazi death camp.
Based on real people and events, this debut novel follows Lale Sokolov, a young Slovakian Jew sent to Auschwitz in 1942. There, he assumes the heinous task of tattooing incoming Jewish prisoners with the dehumanizing numbers their SS captors use to identify them. When the Tätowierer, as he is called, meets fellow prisoner Gita Furman, 17, he is immediately smitten. Eventually, the attraction becomes mutual. Lale proves himself an operator, at once cagey and courageous: As the Tätowierer, he is granted special privileges and manages to smuggle food to starving prisoners. Through female prisoners who catalog the belongings confiscated from fellow inmates, Lale gains access to jewels, which he trades to a pair of local villagers for chocolate, medicine, and other items. Meanwhile, despite overwhelming odds, Lale and Gita are able to meet privately from time to time and become lovers. In 1944, just ahead of the arrival of Russian troops, Lale and Gita separately leave the concentration camp and experience harrowingly close calls. Suffice it to say they both survive. To her credit, the author doesn’t flinch from describing the depravity of the SS in Auschwitz and the unimaginable suffering of their victims—no gauzy evasions here, as in Boy in the Striped Pajamas. She also manages to raise, if not really explore, some trickier issues—the guilt of those Jews, like the tattooist, who survived by doing the Nazis’ bidding, in a sense betraying their fellow Jews; and the complicity of those non-Jews, like the Slovaks in Lale’s hometown, who failed to come to the aid of their beleaguered countrymen.
The writing is merely serviceable, and one can’t help but wish the author had found a way to present her material as nonfiction. Still, this is a powerful, gut-wrenching tale that is hard to shake off.Pub Date: Sept. 4, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-06-279715-5
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 16, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
These letters from some important executive Down Below, to one of the junior devils here on earth, whose job is to corrupt mortals, are witty and written in a breezy style seldom found in religious literature. The author quotes Luther, who said: "The best way to drive out the devil, if he will not yield to texts of Scripture, is to jeer and flout him, for he cannot bear scorn." This the author does most successfully, for by presenting some of our modern and not-so-modern beliefs as emanating from the devil's headquarters, he succeeds in making his reader feel like an ass for ever having believed in such ideas. This kind of presentation gives the author a tremendous advantage over the reader, however, for the more timid reader may feel a sense of guilt after putting down this book. It is a clever book, and for the clever reader, rather than the too-earnest soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1942
ISBN: 0060652934
Page Count: 53
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 17, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1943
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