The history and symbolism of 39 plants of the Bible, presented with related Bible texts. The dramatic, full-color paintings are the book's most successful aspect. A typical two-page spread presents a graceful arc of dates, figs, and pomegranates that glows with color. Bible texts and retellings are sometimes so abbreviated they are difficult to follow even with brief introductions. Passages include stories of Ruth, David, Jacob and Esau, as well as less familiar selections from Jeremiah, Hosea and Isaiah. Indexes of scriptures and plant names are provided. Plant lore gleaned from botanists and Biblical scholarship is presented in italics: the "lilies of the fields" were probably anemones; and myrrh may refer either to the gum of the Commiphona or of the rock rose; etc. A visual delight which may find an audience with both Bible students and naturalists.
Pub Date: Sept. 25, 1986
ISBN: 039588828X
Page Count: 96
Publisher: T.Y. Crowell
Review Posted Online: Oct. 26, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1986
Michael Lerner has found God, and he wants other alienated progressive Jews to find God, too. Unfortunately, this overlong tome is more likely to put readers to sleep than to awaken them to Jewish spirituality. Who is Lerner's God? ``S/he'' is ``the possibility of possibility,'' that is, the possibility of transformation. Lerner wants to return Judaism to its original revolutionary creed of freedom, equality, and social justice and to its belief that the world must be ``repaired.'' Editor of the progressive journal Tikkun, he convincingly responds to critics who say that Jewish renewal, with its revisions of liturgy and ritual, is inauthentic, by showing how through its history Judaism has undergone a continual process of change. But he is on squishier ground when he draws on psychoanalytic theory. In an almost comical act of biblical interpretation, Lerner explains that Abraham's binding of Isaac for sacrifice was a repetition compulsion, a reenactment of his own father's supposed cruelty to him. Similarly, all oppression and injustice—from slavery to the Holocaust—is reduced to a form of collective neurosis. Lerner's arguments are often philosophically weak; claiming Jews have internalized such ``distortions'' as anti-Semitism, Lerner states that ``it is ludicrous to describe the abandonment of Judaism...as a product of rational choice.'' We are all victims of the past—so much for radical freedom. Contemporary Jews, according to Lerner, have lost touch with the revolutionary message of their religion, instead accommodating to secular, capitalist society. He paints a portrait of the American Jewish community as venal and corrupt. He offers no evidence, but he does have a villain: his favorite bogeyperson, Norman Podhoretz, and other neo-cons. Readers may want to go directly to Part III, a useful discussion of the ways in which Jewish renewal ideas are being expressed in ritual, from nonpatriarchal liturgy to a reappropriation of the Sabbath as an expression of human equality and dignity. Lots of mind-numbing analysis and little inspiration for Jews seeking a religious expression for their political convictions.
Pub Date: Sept. 21, 1994
ISBN: 0-399-13980-X
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1994
Fifth, final, and least satisfying volume of Merton's prodigious correspondence (The Courage for Truth, 1993, etc.). Previous books in this series have presented Merton's letters on writing, spirituality, friendship, and love. This time the prime focus is war, a subject about which Merton, a cloistered Cistercian monk, has little original to say. Mostly composed in the years just before and after the Cuban missile crisis, and usually directed toward peace activists like James Forrest or Gordon Zahn, these letters offer predictable mutterings about the dangers of nuclear holocaust, tendentious attacks on American right-wingers, and cracker-barrel advice on the idiocy of fallout shelters (``Lots of shelters that have been built have caved in or filled with water, etc.''). Occasional forays into religious themes reveal him to be a poor prognosticator as well, as when he misreads Vatican II as a ``tightening of the screws.'' More intriguing are letters concerning a meeting in 1956 between Merton and psychoanalyst Gregory Zilboorg, who, in the words of editor Shannon, labeled Merton ``neurotic in his need to get his own way and pathological in his demand for solitude.'' This harsh evaluation, which Merton seems to accept (``Zilboorg has been terrific''), is bolstered by letters surrounding Merton's vocational crisis of 1959, in which he applies for permission to leave his monastery for a hermitage. When the request is denied by his superiors, Merton at first accepts the decision but soon begins to agitate; tensions run high until he is allowed to enter a hermitage in the 1960s. In this episode and others, Merton comes off as Peck's Bad Boy, endlessly provoking Vatican officials and siding with mischief-makers. Some compensation for all this ego-preening comes near the end, in correspondence with unidentified monks and nuns to whom Merton offers simple, solid spiritual advice (``be patient, pay attention to obedience and to grace, trust God...''). Merton as bore. Try The Seven Storey Mountain instead.
Pub Date: Sept. 27, 1994
ISBN: 0-374-29191-8
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1994
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