Rabbi Telushkin (An Eye for an Eye, 1991), rooted in the tradition of reverence for past learning, has gathered lots of hoary jokes and aged wisecracks, together with a few more recent japes, that make Jews laugh. To coreligionists, they'll seem like old friends; to others, the gags and their elucidation may be more in the nature of revelation. Another book of ethnic gags? Hold the cry of ``gevalt!'' because Telushkin has an unstated agenda. True to his calling, he uses the funny stuff to instruct. In this collection (in which some bits are, naturally, funnier than others), everything stands for something else—but all of it carries explanations. The exegesis of the jokes becomes a little primer on a religion and a way of life mystifying to strangers and sometimes just as puzzling to nominal adherents. It's a truism that Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle applies to humor—observing and analyzing it alters it. That effect can be seen here as Telushkin trots out Jackie Mason and Sigmund Freud, as well as Leo Rosten and a host of Unknown Comics for a higher purpose. The tales of the wise rabbis, the fabled fools of Chelm, the anti-Semites, the schnorrers, and the big shots all serve to illustrate his lessons. Was the shtetl a forerunner of Catskills on Broadway? Why are comedians so often Jewish? Why are Jews so often comedians? Why ask questions? Just listen to the rabbi and his jokes. Fine, funny fare for Jew and non-Jew alike.
Pub Date: Sept. 16, 1992
ISBN: 0-688-11027-4
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1992
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
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