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 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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