A worthy effort that suffers from its own cloudy aims.
Wisse (If I Am Not for Myself, 1992) seeks to define a modern canon of works—in Yiddish, Hebrew, Russian, German, Polish, Italian, and English—through which Jews have expressed their sense of who they are and what they have come to be in the years since the monopoly of their sacred literature was broken during the Enlightenment.
The phrase “Jewish canon” immediately suggests Torah in its fullest sense—the sacred book par excellence and the great corpus of exegesis and commentary that have grown up around it over two millennia and have been through most of that time the center of Jewish education and the source of Jewish identity. After an introduction that discusses the notion of canon, Wisse’s ten chapters consider examples of “canonical” Jewish fiction from the Tevye stories of Sholem Aleichem to the Hebrew literature of modern Israel. She writes incisively about a representative work of each writer and manages to sustain a sense of dialogue among the works she examines in each chapter; even readers familiar with all of the writers discussed will find new insights here. But there are limitations to this approach, as the author herself admits. Her canon is restricted ethnically to Ashkenazi Jews; it is restricted in genre to long works of prose fiction; and some important and interesting writers like Chaim Grade are mentioned only in passing. More fundamentally, Wisse never quite faces the tension between the old Jewish canon and the modern one she has constructed. What is the relationship between the national or cultural reading of Jewishness operative in this canon and the religion of Judaism? The Zionist project seems to function here as the telos of modern Jewish history, as Israel becomes the geographical and spiritual center of Jewry and Hebrew replaces Yiddish as its most widely spoken language. Yet in Shabtai’s novel, with which this study ends, Israeli society seems frozen in anomie and despair. Is it only the pressure of Arab hatred that makes it so?
A worthy effort that suffers from its own cloudy aims.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-684-83075-2
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2000
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
IN THE NEWS
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
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