An absorbing, well-told story of Jewish achievement that is a pleasure to read.
How adversity shaped a century of Jewish creativity and invention.
“A Jew is like a man with a short arm,” said the composer Gustav Mahler. “He has to swim harder to reach the shore.” In this beautifully crafted work, music historian and novelist Lebrecht (Why Mahler?: How One Man and Ten Symphonies Changed the World, 2010, etc.) argues convincingly that “existential angst”—a dread of losing their rights to citizenship and free speech amid widespread persecution—freed many Jews to pursue unusual accomplishments with abandon. Not expecting acceptance, “free to think the unthinkable,” Freud, Proust, Einstein, and others worked brilliantly in such fields as science, art, and music, not because of any genetic advantage but out of opportunity made possible by “marginality.” With anxiety as a “primary motivating factor, the engine of fresh thinking,” they began in the mid-19th century, and especially in the decade after the Dreyfus Affair, to engage in acts of genius. Such individuals as Marx and Disraeli set the tone for “a century of Jewish invention,” unafraid of criticism from those in power. They paved the way for diverse successors, as well, including Trotsky, Sarah Bernhardt, Jonas Salk, and through to Larry Page, Sergey Brin, and Mark Zuckerberg. Taking us into many spheres of endeavor, Lebrecht offers revealing portraits of and stories about these Jews, practicing and not, as they crossed artistic boundaries, advanced science, and reshaped myriad aspects of Western society in the period through the 1947 founding of Israel. He provides nuanced explorations of individuals from Einstein, “a religious man of no religion, a perfect Jewish paradox,” to Kafka, who knows “something terrible is about to happen and there is nothing anyone can do about it.” Written with passion and authority, this book shows how these great minds always took a different point of view—and changed how we see the world. Lebrecht also includes a helpful glossary of Jewish terms.
An absorbing, well-told story of Jewish achievement that is a pleasure to read.Pub Date: Dec. 3, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-9821-3422-8
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Sept. 14, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2019
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
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.
The legendary booze-addled metal rocker turned reality-TV star comes clean in his tell-all autobiography.
Although brought up in the bleak British factory town of Aston, John “Ozzy” Osbourne’s tragicomic rags-to-riches tale is somehow quintessentially American. It’s an epic dream/nightmare that takes him from Winson Green prison in 1966 to a presidential dinner with George W. Bush in 2004. Tracing his adult life from petty thief and slaughterhouse worker to rock star, Osbourne’s first-person slang-and-expletive-driven style comes off like he’s casually relating his story while knocking back pints at the pub. “What you read here,” he writes, “is what dribbled out of the jelly I call my brain when I asked it for my life story.” During the late 1960s his transformation from inept shoplifter to notorious Black Sabbath frontman was unlikely enough. In fact, the band got its first paying gigs by waiting outside concert venues hoping the regularly scheduled act wouldn’t show. After a few years, Osbourne and his bandmates were touring America and becoming millionaires from their riff-heavy doom music. As expected, with success came personal excess and inevitable alienation from the other members of the group. But as a solo performer, Osbourne’s predilection for guns, drink, drugs, near-death experiences, cruelty to animals and relieving himself in public soon became the stuff of legend. His most infamous exploits—biting the head off a bat and accidentally urinating on the Alamo—are addressed, but they seem tame compared to other dark moments of his checkered past: nearly killing his wife Sharon during an alcohol-induced blackout, waking up after a bender in the middle of a busy highway, burning down his backyard, etc. Osbourne is confessional to a fault, jeopardizing his demonic-rocker reputation with glib remarks about his love for Paul McCartney and Robin Williams. The most distinguishing feature of the book is the staggering chapter-by-chapter accumulation of drunken mishaps, bodily dysfunctions and drug-induced mayhem over a 40-plus-year career—a résumé of anti-social atrocities comparable to any of rock ’n’ roll’s most reckless outlaws.
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-446-56989-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
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