Another year of great reads and good discussions is in store for returning and new book group members. For the first meeting on Sept. 25, 2008, at 10:30 AM in the Adult Lounge (meetings take place in the Adult Lounge, 10:30 a.m. to 11:30 a.m. unless otherwise noted), Rabbi Shanks will lead the group in discussion of Walter Isaacson’s prizewinning biography Einstein, His Life and Universe. This is a big book in every sense, so get reading early. Also on the agenda for a future date is a field trip to the Contra Costa Jewish Book & Arts Festival. Find synopses of every title for the year below:
September 25, 2008
Einstein, His Life and Universe, by Walter Isaacson (Non-fiction)
By the author of the acclaimed bestseller Benjamin Franklin, this is the first full biography of Albert Einstein since all of his papers have become available. How did his mind work? What made him a genius? Isaacson’s biography shows how his scientific imagination sprang from the rebellious nature of his personality. His fascinating story is a testament to the connection between creativity and freedom. Based on newly released personal letters of Einstein, this book explores how an imaginative, impertinent patent clerk—a struggling father in a difficult marriage who couldn’t get a teaching job or a doctorate—became the mind reader of the creator of the cosmos, the locksmith of the mysteries of the atom and the universe. His success came from questioning conventional wisdom and marveling at mysteries that struck others as mundane. This led him to embrace a morality and politics based on respect for free minds, free spirits, and free individuals. These traits are just as vital for this new century of globalization, in which our success will depend on our creativity, as they were for the beginning of the last century, when Einstein helped usher in the modern age.
October 23, 2008
Caspian Rain, by Gina B. Nahai (Fiction)
Gina B. Nahai brings us a beautifully written inside view of Jewish-Iranian culture. Capsian Rain delivers an in-depth look into how a woman becomes the sum of her family parts. Capsian Rain tells the story of a main character so lost in the turmoil of her family’s lives that you seldom hear her name. Each character is created with striking clarity, depth, and familiarity though the world they live in is new to the American reader.
November 20, 2008
Souled Out: Reclaiming Faith and Politics after the Religious Right by E. J.Dionne, Jr. (Non-fiction)
In a lead-up to the election….the religious and political winds are changing. Tens of millions of religious Americans are reclaiming faith from those who would abuse it for narrow, partisan, and ideological purposes. And more and more secular Americans are discovering common ground with believers on the great issues of social justice, peace, and the environment. In Souled Out, award-winning journalist and commentator E. J. Dionne explains why the era of the Religious Right--and the crude exploitation of faith for political advantage--is over. Based on years of research and writing, Souled Out shows that the end of the Religious Right doesn’t signal the decline of evangelical Christianity but rather its disentanglement from a political machine that sold it out to a narrow electoral agenda of such causes as opposition to gay marriage and abortion. With insightful portraits of leading contemporary religious figures from Rick Warren and Richard Cizik to John Paul II and Benedict XVI, Dionne shows that our great religions have always preached a broad message of hope for more just human arrangements and refused to be mere props for the powers that be. Dionne also argues that the new atheist writers should be seen as a gift to believers,
a demand that they live up to their proclaimed values and embrace scientific and philosophical inquiry in a spirit of “intellectual solidarity.”
December 18, 2008
Life, Death & Bialys: A Father/Son Baking Story by Dylan Schaffer (Non-fiction)
NOTE: This author will be our guest speaker at Library Shabbat at Temple Isaiah at 8:00 p.m. on Friday, January 9, 2009
When Schaffer’s dying father telephoned him in California to invite him to take a baking class with him in New York, he was less than enthusiastic, but he accepted. This was the man who had abandoned him and his siblings to be raised by his clinically depressed “lunatic” mother. To Schaffer, his father was obnoxious, but to the other students, he was charismatic. Though the author still saw all that his father had not been to him, he began to see a more complete picture of the man as others saw him, and he realized that, in his own way, his father was asking for forgiveness. The book moves quickly; it is clever, funny, and poignant as Schaffer reveals some basic human truths that will resonate with teens. Juxtaposed with the story of the father/son relationship is the story of the baking school, including some specifics of bread making.
January 15, 2009
People of the Book by Geraldine Brooks (Fiction)
One of the earliest Jewish religious volumes to be illuminated with images, the Sarajevo Haggadah survived centuries of purges and wars thanks to people of all faiths who risked their lives to safeguard it. Geraldine Brooks, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of March, has turned the intriguing but sparely-detailed history of this precious volume into an emotionally rich, thrilling fictionalization that retraces its turbulent journey. In the hands of Hanna Heath, an impassioned rare-book expert restoring the manuscript in 1996 Sarajevo, it yields clues to its guardians and whereabouts: an insect wing, a wine stain, salt crystals, and a white hair. While readers experience crucial moments in the book’s history through a series of fascinating, fleshed-out short stories, Hanna pursues its secrets scientifically, and finds that some interests will still risk everything in the name of protecting this treasure. This novel is many things: complex love story, thrilling mystery, vivid history lesson, and a celebration of the enduring power of ideas.
February 12, 2009
You Never Call, You Never Write: A History of the Jewish Mother by Joyce Antler (Non-Fiction)
Joyce Antler provides an illuminating and amusing history of one of the best-known figures in popular culture--the Jewish Mother. Whether drawn as self-sacrificing or manipulative, in countless films, novels, radio and television programs, stand-up comedy, and psychological and historical studies, she appears as a colossal figure, intensely involved in the lives of her children. Antler traces the odyssey of this compelling personality through decades of American culture. She reminds us of a time when Jewish mothers were admired for their tenacity and nurturance, as in the early twentieth-century image of the “Yiddishe Mama,” a sentimental figure popularized by entertainers such as George Jessel, Al Jolson, and Sophie Tucker, and especially by Gertrude Berg, whose amazingly successful “Molly Goldberg” ruled American radio and television for over 25 years. Antler explains the transformation of this Jewish Mother into a “brassy-voiced, smothering, and shrewish” scourge (in Irving Howe’s words), detailing many variations on this negative theme, from Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint and Woody Allen’s Oedipus Wrecks to television shows such as “The Nanny,” “Seinfeld,” and “Will and Grace.” But she also uncovers a new counter-narrative, leading feminist scholars and stand-up comediennes to see the Jewish Mother in positive terms. Continually revised and reinvented, the Jewish Mother becomes in Antler’s expert hands a unique lens with which to examine vital concerns of American Jews and the culture at large. You Never Call, You Never Write will delight anyone who has ever known or been nurtured by a “Jewish Mother,” and it will be a special source of insight for modern parents.
March 12, 2009
A Pigeon and a Boy by Meir Shalev , Evan Fallenberg (Translator) (Fiction)
A masterpiece of two woven stories, the love story between two pigeon handlers in the period prior to Israel’s War of Independence framed and intersected by that of a tour guide specializing in bird watching who learns the details of the tale from one of his guests. In this unlikely subject, the reader is treated to learning the habits and handling of homing pigeons that served as reliable means of communication during the British Mandate of the land of Israel until 1948. The power of the novel is in the crafting of the tale as it unfolds, with the main characters--although beautifully detailed--remaining nameless but for their functions as pigeon handlers. Not so the tour guide, whose life is unraveling before it is put together again with a new love.
April 16, 2009
Disobedience by Naomi Alderman (Fiction)
For Ronit Krushka, thirty-two and single, who lives on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, Orthodox Judaism is a suffocating culture she fled long ago. When she learns that her estranged father, the preeminent rabbi of the London Orthodox Jewish community in which she was raised, has died, she must return home for the first time in years. There, amid the traditional ebb and flow of the community, Ronit reminds herself of her dual mission: to mourn and to collect a single heirloom—her mother’s Shabbat candlesticks. But when Ronit reconnects with her complex and beloved cousin Dovid as well as with a forbidden childhood sweetheart, she becomes more than just a stranger in her old home—she becomes a threat. Set at the crossroads of tradition and modernity, of personal desires and the demands of God, Disobedience is about the importance of moving on and what we lose when we do—and it is about the tendency toward disobedience that we all possess.
May 14, 2009
You Don’t Have to Be Wrong for Me to Be Right: Finding Faith Without Fanaticism, by Brad Hirschfield (Non-fiction)
In this compelling and engaging volume, Hirschfield urges people of all faiths to accept their differences while seeking commonality and reaching out to one another with love and forgiveness. As an Orthodox rabbi, Hirschfield bases his faith on Jewish tradition, yet he draws on his unusually varied upbringing in a secular home to implement his own strategies and theories for living a fulfilling life, and is not afraid to reference Jesus or Muhammad as great teachers. In his teens, Hirschfield joined a small group of fanatical Jewish settlers defending Hebron, but renounced that way of life after witnessing a scene of inexplicable and unrepentant violence. Now he posits that there is room for more than one religious or moral viewpoint to be correct. Hirschfield integrates this thesis with many personal anecdotes to keep the text alive and interesting. He shares his memories of participating in the groundbreaking ceremony for a synagogue rebuilt near Auschwitz, and he remembers taking part in a meeting of the Islamic Society of North America. Hirschfield’s admirable objective of expanding ourselves to let others in comes across nicely and should attract a wide interfaith audience.
June 11, 2009
City of Thieves by David Benioff (Fiction)
Author and screenwriter Benioff follows up The 25th Hour with this hard-to-put-down novel based on his grandfather’s stories about surviving WWII in Russia. Having elected to stay in Leningrad during the siege, 17-year-old Lev Beniov is caught looting a German paratrooper’s corpse. The penalty for this infraction (and many others) is execution. But when Colonel Grechko confronts Lev and Kolya, a Russian army deserter also facing execution, he spares them on the condition that they acquire a dozen eggs for the colonel’s daughter’s wedding cake. Their mission exposes them to the most ghoulish acts of the starved populace and takes them behind enemy lines to the Russian countryside. There, Lev and Kolya take on an even more daring objective: to kill the commander of the local occupying German forces. A wry and sympathetic observer of the devastation around him, Lev is an engaging and self-deprecating narrator who finds unexpected reserves of courage at the crucial moment and forms an unlikely friendship with Kolya, a flamboyant ladies’ man who is coolly reckless in the face of danger. Benioff blends tense adventure, a bittersweet coming-of-age and an oddly touching buddy narrative to craft a smart crowd-pleaser.
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