A wise, funny look behind the curtains of a family that, it would seem, has little to be ashamed of.
Of family secrets, roads not taken, private failings, and other incidents that induce shanda, the Yiddish word for shame.
Pogrebin, a prolific author and co-founder of Ms. magazine, begins this lively memoir with her four grandparents, who “produced a combined fourteen offspring, who, in turn, birthed twenty-five children, including me, a cast of characters with enough secrets to fill this book twice over.” Once is plenty, as the author’s family dammed up a flood of scandalous secrets that have kept her guessing for decades. The sense of shame that propels her stories is amplified by the idea that Jews are often expected to live “morally upright, socially useful, and professionally exemplary” lives, and its effects are far-reaching. When Bernie Madoff went to prison for fraud, destroying the financial lives of some 37,000 people, one son killed himself, another died of shanda-born lymphoma, another went to prison, and Madoff’s widow went into hiding and tried to kill herself. “I didn’t lose a penny with him, but I, too, felt his swindle to be a blight on the Jewish collective,” writes the author. Though not nearly as venal, Pogrebin’s family skeletons in the closet are real: She hid a brain tumor from old friend Alan Alda out of shame for being ill, for example, and a grandmother was a runaway bride, thus committing “the heinous sin of publicly shaming a man.” In addition, changes of name run throughout the generations to disguise Jewishness in a strange land, “which, I submit, proves that hiddenness, especially hiding one’s true identity, is associated with Jews in particular and explains why I think of shame and secrecy as quintessentially Jewish issues.” Pogrebin writes with sympathy and affection of these and other foibles, some more and some less serious, whether letting a son skip college to go to culinary school or confessing that she panicked when “one of my daughters almost married a Catholic.”
A wise, funny look behind the curtains of a family that, it would seem, has little to be ashamed of.Pub Date: Sept. 13, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-63758-396-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Post Hill Press
Review Posted Online: July 12, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2022
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Essential reading for any Twain buff and student of American literature.
A decidedly warts-and-all portrait of the man many consider to be America’s greatest writer.
It makes sense that distinguished biographer Chernow (Washington: A Life and Alexander Hamilton) has followed up his life of Ulysses S. Grant with one of Mark Twain: Twain, after all, pulled Grant out of near bankruptcy by publishing the ex-president’s Civil War memoir under extremely favorable royalty terms. The act reflected Twain’s inborn generosity and his near pathological fear of poverty, the prime mover for the constant activity that characterized the author’s life. As Chernow writes, Twain was “a protean figure who played the role of printer, pilot, miner, journalist, novelist, platform artist, toastmaster, publisher, art patron, pundit, polemicist, inventor, crusader, investor, and maverick.” He was also slippery: Twain left his beloved Mississippi River for the Nevada gold fields as a deserter from the Confederate militia, moved farther west to California to avoid being jailed for feuding, took up his pseudonym to stay a step ahead of anyone looking for Samuel Clemens, especially creditors. Twain’s flaws were many in his own day. Problematic in our own time is a casual racism that faded as he grew older (charting that “evolution in matters of racial tolerance” is one of the great strengths of Chernow’s book). Harder to explain away is Twain’s well-known but discomfiting attraction to adolescent and even preadolescent girls, recruiting “angel-fish” to keep him company and angrily declaring when asked, “It isn’t the public’s affair.” While Twain emerges from Chernow’s pages as the masterful—if sometimes wrathful and vengeful—writer that he is now widely recognized to be, he had other complexities, among them a certain gullibility as a businessman that kept that much-feared poverty often close to his door, as well as an overarchingly gloomy view of the human condition that seemed incongruous with his reputation, then and now, as a humanist.
Essential reading for any Twain buff and student of American literature.Pub Date: May 13, 2025
ISBN: 9780525561729
Page Count: 1200
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.
The veteran actor, comedian, and banjo player teams up with the acclaimed illustrator to create a unique book of cartoons that communicates their personalities.
Martin, also a prolific author, has always been intrigued by the cartoons strewn throughout the pages of the New Yorker. So when he was presented with the opportunity to work with Bliss, who has been a staff cartoonist at the magazine since 1997, he seized the moment. “The idea of a one-panel image with or without a caption mystified me,” he writes. “I felt like, yeah, sometimes I’m funny, but there are these other weird freaks who are actually funny.” Once the duo agreed to work together, they established their creative process, which consisted of working forward and backward: “Forwards was me conceiving of several cartoon images and captions, and Harry would select his favorites; backwards was Harry sending me sketched or fully drawn cartoons for dialogue or banners.” Sometimes, he writes, “the perfect joke occurs two seconds before deadline.” There are several cartoons depicting this method, including a humorous multipanel piece highlighting their first meeting called “They Meet,” in which Martin thinks to himself, “He’ll never be able to translate my delicate and finely honed droll notions.” In the next panel, Bliss thinks, “I’m sure he won’t understand that the comic art form is way more subtle than his blunt-force humor.” The team collaborated for a year and created 150 cartoons featuring an array of topics, “from dogs and cats to outer space and art museums.” A witty creation of a bovine family sitting down to a gourmet meal and one of Dumbo getting his comeuppance highlight the duo’s comedic talent. What also makes this project successful is the team’s keen understanding of human behavior as viewed through their unconventional comedic minds.
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-26289-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
PERSPECTIVES
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