An unsatisfying memoir of the search for meaning.
A New Yorker’s wandering spiritual memoir.
In his late 50s, former Parade editor in chief Kravitz (Unfinished Business: One Man's Extraordinary Year of Trying to Do the Right Things, 2010) decided that he needed to find a spiritual dimension to his life. Raised as a Jew, he rejected the religion of his family out of hand due to a distaste for the services of his youth. As a young man, Kravitz dabbled in Christianity but then spent nearly four decades suppressing or ignoring any spiritual desires and instincts. This was largely due to the fact that his wife (also born Jewish) was steadfastly atheist. Though Kravitz paints his wife’s atheism as a source of tension, readers find her to be a tolerant, even supportive, partner in the midst of his quest for meaning. Given the book’s subtitle, readers await a climactic moment of conflict, yet nothing of the sort arises. Kravitz seems to be risking little for his faith, and his struggle seems especially insignificant in the shadow of his immigrant ancestors’ memories. The author’s two-year journey of faith traditions was one that could only exist in a place like New York. He sat in on Quaker meetings and was drawn into transcendental meditation. He explored chanting and Buddhism and even consulted with an astrologer. In the end, he settled on Jewish Renewal, in which mysticism and Eastern religions inform ancient Jewish ritual, and he joined a Renewal synagogue near his home. Readers may be convinced that this may simply be a pit stop, not an ending point, for the author. Kravitz is unclear on whether he believes in an actual, supernatural God, though he makes it clear that he is unconcerned what path his children take, “[a]s long as they lead empathic, meaning-filled lives.”
An unsatisfying memoir of the search for meaning.Pub Date: June 1, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-59463-125-2
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Hudson Street/Penguin
Review Posted Online: April 7, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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