A largely successful prayer guide, geared mainly toward Reform Jewish audiences.
Salkin, a former congregational rabbi, provides an introduction to the Reform movement’s prayerbook.
The author, a widely recognized thinker in the Reform movement, has previously written 11 books, including the bestselling Putting God on the Guest List: How to Reclaim the Spiritual Meaning of Your Child’s Bar or Bat Mitzvah (1992). His latest work, a guide to Jewish prayer, focuses on the Reform Jewish liturgy for Shabbat (the Jewish Sabbath). In this volume, Salkin takes the reader through the Friday night and Saturday morning service, according to the practices of the current prayerbook of the Reform movement, Mishkan T’filah (the tabernacle of prayer). He offers an in-depth explanation of each prayer and blessing, including their histories and various meanings. Each section of the book ends with questions for readers to consider that help bring out the relevance of prayers or practices that might seem anachronistic or obscure: “What do you think of the idea of minyan—of needing a quorum for prayer? Is it necessary?” Salkin’s book is illustrative of the advances—and potential limitations—of worship practices in the Reform movement, which in recent decades has moved back toward prayers and customs that the movement in its inception had rejected, including the use of the Hebrew language and prayer garments. The book’s purpose appears to be to help liberal Jews find meaning in prayer and in the Shabbat service in particular, and it largely succeeds. That said, the author takes a maximalist and, in some ways, traditionalist approach to the service, which doesn’t always account for the variations in many Reform services (which the Mishkan T’filah itself does). On the other hand, this book is specifically intended to serve as a companion to the Reform prayerbook and doesn’t include the Musaf (additional) service that’s an integral part of traditional Jewish Sabbath worship. Even with these limitations, Salkin offers a work that will speak to many who seek deeper meaning in Jewish prayer.
A largely successful prayer guide, geared mainly toward Reform Jewish audiences.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2025
ISBN: 9780881236743
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Central Conference of American Rabbis Press
Review Posted Online: Sept. 18, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A frank and funny but uneven essay collection about neurodiversity.
An experimental, illustrated essay collection that questions neurotypical definitions of what is normal.
From a young age, writer and comedian Myers has been different. In addition to coping with obsessive compulsive disorder and panic attacks, she struggled to read basic social cues. During a round of seven minutes in heaven—a game in which two players spend seven minutes in a closet and are expected to kiss—Myers misread the romantic advances of her best friend and longtime crush, Marley. In Paris, she accidentally invited a sex worker to join her friends for “board games and beer,” thinking he was simply a random stranger who happened to be hitting on her. In community college, a stranger’s request for a pen spiraled her into a panic attack but resulted in a tentative friendship. When the author moved to Australia, she began taking notes on her colleagues in an effort to know them better. As the author says to her co-worker, Tabitha, “there are unspoken social contracts within a workplace that—by some miracle—everyone else already understands, and I don’t….When things Go Without Saying, they Never Get Said, and sometimes people need you to Say Those Things So They Understand What The Hell Is Going On.” At its best, Myers’ prose is vulnerable and humorous, capturing characterization in small but consequential life moments, and her illustrations beautifully complement the text. Unfortunately, the author’s tendency toward unnecessary capitalization and experimental forms is often unsuccessful, breaking the book’s otherwise steady rhythm.
A frank and funny but uneven essay collection about neurodiversity.Pub Date: Oct. 28, 2025
ISBN: 9780063381308
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2025
A pleasure for fans of old-school historical narratives.
Avuncular observations on matters historical from the late popularizer of the past.
McCullough made a fine career of storytelling his way through past events and the great men (and occasional woman) of long-ago American history. In that regard, to say nothing of his eschewing modern technology in favor of the typewriter (“I love the way the bell rings every time I swing the carriage lever”), he might be thought of as belonging to a past age himself. In this set of occasional pieces, including various speeches and genial essays on what to read and how to write, he strikes a strong tone as an old-fashioned moralist: “Indifference to history isn’t just ignorant, it’s rude,” he thunders. “It’s a form of ingratitude.” There are some charming reminiscences in here. One concerns cajoling his way into a meeting with Arthur Schlesinger in order to pitch a speech to presidential candidate John F. Kennedy: Where Richard Nixon “has no character and no convictions,” he opined, Kennedy “is appealing to our best instincts.” McCullough allows that it wasn’t the strongest of ideas, but Schlesinger told him to write up a speech anyway, and when it got to Kennedy, “he gave a speech in which there was one paragraph that had once sentence written by me.” Some of McCullough’s appreciations here are of writers who are not much read these days, such as Herman Wouk and Paul Horgan; a long piece concerns a president who’s been largely lost in the shuffle too, Harry Truman, whose decision to drop the atomic bomb on Japan McCullough defends. At his best here, McCullough uses history as a way to orient thinking about the present, and with luck to good ends: “I am a short-range pessimist and a long-range optimist. I sincerely believe that we may be on the way to a very different and far better time.”
A pleasure for fans of old-school historical narratives.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2025
ISBN: 9781668098998
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: June 26, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
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