Like-minded readers will find Levy’s blend of Old Testament and New Age appealing.
A rabbi offers a program of soul-craft to get us through the “World of Separation,” this reality where nothing quite works and nothing quite makes sense.
“If the soul is so wise then why do we stop listening to our souls?” That is not the only rhetorical question that LA–based rabbi Levy (Hope Will Find You: My Search for the Wisdom to Stop Waiting and Start Living, 2010, etc.) raises here. Pondering a letter written by Albert Einstein to a rabbi decades earlier, in which the renowned physicist mused about why we humans behave as if we were somehow disconnected from the whole, Levy proceeds to offer common-sensical suggestions to forge links to our better angels—by, for one thing, praying. To skeptical listeners in a class, she posed it as a challenge: “Why not approach it as an experiment? Try waking up and reciting a morning prayer for two weeks and we’ll discuss it then.” Bingo: logging the hours produces results. “If you long to connect to the divine,” she continues, “begin studying, and you will receive timeless wisdom.” The author occasionally drifts into the soft precincts of the Sedona set, as when she likens the “California Roll”—what elsewhere is called the “New York stop,” drifting through a stop sign without ever quite stopping—as the way most of us rush through religious practice: “There is a tradition to stop and take three steps backwards at the start of the prayer. Why? We imagine our souls leaving this space and entering a holy space. Suddenly we are standing in the very presence of God.” For all the cheerful exhortation, there’s also serious reckoning with the big picture, with matters of life and death and the travails of daily life. Throughout, Levy comes off as a trustworthy guide, with just the right leavening (or perhaps unleavening) of humor and endless compassion.
Like-minded readers will find Levy’s blend of Old Testament and New Age appealing.Pub Date: Sept. 5, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-250-05726-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: June 12, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2017
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 wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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