Family traditions and intergenerational love are strong and endearing in this fresh look at Purim.
A celebration of Purim with an appropriate Persian flavor.
Raya is happily baking cookies for Purim with her grandmother, Maman joon. They are called koloocheh and are from the family’s Persian Jewish heritage. Unfortunately, Raya is too young to be in the school play, in which her older brother will play Mordecai. Maman joon pauses cooking in order to adjust his costume and beard. She can do even more for her granddaughter, though. In a trunk in her bedroom is a wide assortment of sparkly jewelry and brightly colored scarves—just perfect for a little girl who wants to pretend to be Esther. Maman joon has saved them from the time that she lived in Hamadan, a city in Iran. Together, the costumed girl and her grandmother share their baked treats with the neighbors, and Raya explains that she is a “Persian princess” just as Esther was. Even better, Raya decides to invite everyone to the house, where she will perform the story of Purim. It is a joyous time, indeed. Goldin’s sweet story offers readers a celebration of Purim that is both familiar and different to that observed by Ashkenazic Jewry and more commonly seen in U.S. children’s books but that can be enjoyed by all. Doneva’s delicate cartoon illustrations are suitably colorful and depict a neighborhood of various ethnicities.
Family traditions and intergenerational love are strong and endearing in this fresh look at Purim. (author’s note) (Picture book. 4-7)Pub Date: April 1, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-68115-553-1
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Apples & Honey Press
Review Posted Online: Dec. 17, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
A meandering, uneven fire-and-brimstone sermon.
America’s post-war cohort should repent its godless ways before it’s too late, according to Winley’s jeremiad.
Writing in the persona of “Baby Boom Prophet” Jonah Ubiquitous, Winley, a minister at Harlem’s Soul Saving Station for Every Nation, subjects those born between 1946 and 1964 to a serious scolding. His demographic rationale is two-fold. First, the boomer generation authored the culture of sexual permissiveness, abortion, homosexuality, drug abuse, violence, welfare dependency, personal irresponsibility and unorthodox spirituality that he blames for America’s moral rot and the travails of the African-American community. Second, a recap of four decades’ worth of boomer-dominated history, from the 1960s assassinations to Monica-gate and the war in Iraq, serves as a framework for viewing modern times as a parade of depravity, war, natural disaster and apostasy, all of it leading inevitably to Armageddon. Winley’s manifesto interweaves disparate themes, stories and registers. There is a murky digression into a failed publishing venture, a confusing discourse on the structure of Heaven (the fourth heaven is the paradise where saved humans go, while hell itself is “a type of heaven”) and a dash of end-times numerology (“June 6, 2006, represents forty years from the symbolic birth of the Anti-Christ world ruler (6-6-66)”). There’s some religious-right politics—Winley denounces materialism and money-grubbing while defending George W. Bush’s tax cuts for the rich and decides that the Christian injunction to turn the other cheek need not apply to Al Qaeda. And there is a persistent voice crying out in the wilderness, warning that “racial hatred, murder of innocents, political corruption, family disintegration, killer children, home-grown terrorism, violence, greed, lust, and every imaginable evil dwell within the borders of the United States.” Winley’s message is standard Christian Fundamentalist doctrine, but in some passages—especially during a long, affecting parable about a black man who, after an abusive upbringing, lands in prison, where Jonah tries to bring him to the Lord—he writes with real pathos about the moral chaos that ravages men’s souls.
A meandering, uneven fire-and-brimstone sermon.Pub Date: April 30, 2007
ISBN: 978-0595417636
Page Count: 175
Publisher: iUniverse
Review Posted Online: Aug. 25, 2011
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
An impressive monograph by two scholars well-positioned to examine the impact of religion on secular life.
Two biblical scholars combine to dig into the actions and words of the billionaire Green family, founders of the Hobby Lobby chain of craft stores.
Moss (New Testament/Univ. of Notre Dame) and Baden (Hebrew Bible/Yale Divinity School), co-authors of Reconceiving Infertility: Biblical Perspectives on Procreation and Childlessness (2015), focus on the lawsuit filed by the Greens that reached the Supreme Court in 2014. The Greens, who have long been major funders of evangelical Christian initiatives, believed they possessed the right as business owners to ignore federal law requiring employers to cover the costs of contraceptives for employees. In a 5-4 decision, the justices sided with the Greens. The authors explain how the family arrived at their view of the prosperity gospel: due to their literal interpretations of the Bible and their generosity to evangelical Christian causes, God rewarded them with widespread business success. Patriarch David Green claimed that the legal battle occurred because the family could not abide abandoning religious beliefs to obey a provision of the federal government’s Affordable Care Act, signed by President Barack Obama. The authors began their deep dive into the Green empire after becoming aware of the vast sums the family was spending to inject religion into school curricula, to collect rare biblical manuscripts, and to open a massive Museum of the Bible in Washington, D.C., which is currently under construction. Moss and Baden portray the Green family members and their key executives as sincere evangelicals and benevolent employers. Throughout the book, however, they also show the Greens as naïve or disingenuous. To be sure, the family’s proselytizing is not neutral. Rather, they are promoting a historically inaccurate saga of the U.S. as an exclusionary Christian nation meant to marry church and state.
An impressive monograph by two scholars well-positioned to examine the impact of religion on secular life.Pub Date: Oct. 3, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-691-17735-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Princeton Univ.
Review Posted Online: July 2, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2017
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