A pleasant collection of honest, critically discriminating encounters with the Jewish faith and culture.
Men’s Journal articles editor Ross embarks on a sampling mission of Jewish experiences.
Born to Jewish parents, when the author was 9 years old, he moved with his mother, divorced and with a failed medical practice in New York City, to Mississippi. Fearing the repercussions of professing their religion in that place at that time, and not altogether comfortable with Judaism in general, she told her children to say they were Unitarians, and little of real Jewishness touched their lives. Time passed, and Ross wanted to know more about his Jewish identity. “The result has been a furtive fascination with Judaism,” he writes, “one that compels and repels in equal measure.” That ambivalence serves him well as he investigates some of the more eccentric strains of Judaism to see if they speak to him of his Jewish identity. Ross’ voice is both questioning and questing, the passion tamped but alight, and a few communities were seemingly amenable to his way in the world: Reboot, “the Jewish illuminati,” were obvious candidates, but the author wondered about their distinctive efficacy regarding identity, and a Classical Reform Congregation was enticing—liberal, principled, rooted, free of stereotypes—but its cult of synthesis interweaving Judaism and Americanism felt muddled. Ross is a fine practitioner of the kaleidoscopic research approach, but for clear reasons he was not going to join Hasidic, ultra-Orthodox or Crypto-Jewish groups. His lack of faith did not deter him, and he found meaning in contemporary Judaism’s “iconoclasm, abstract monotheism, and social justice,” and its undetectable Supreme Being.
A pleasant collection of honest, critically discriminating encounters with the Jewish faith and culture.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-59463-095-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Hudson Street/Penguin
Review Posted Online: June 16, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2012
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 moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
