Book Review // Ally
Ally would have been a more effective book if Oren had taken the time to consider the impact of his take-no-prisoners approach, writes Glenn Frankel.
Book Review // A Replacement Life
For Slava Gelman, Fishman’s main character, finding a balance between his Russian and American selves proves difficult.
Book Review // The Life of Saul Bellow
As he lay dying, Saul Bellow, “the most decorated writer in American history,” slipped back into consciousness, looked up, and asked, “Was I a man or was I a jerk?” Somewhere within that sentence lies Bellow’s greatness as a novelist—his fabulous sense of wonder and entitlement about himself, coupled with a magical gift for language and a rattling insecurity. This is what Zachary Leader writes about in his doggedly detailed and adoring biography of Bellow.
Book Review // Suspended Sentences
On October 9th, 2014, when the Nobel Prize for Literature was awarded to the French writer Patrick Modiano, it seemed to his loving readers as if their long quest on his behalf had finally been fulfilled. Not that this shy and modest man ever considered fame or awards, but that he never even considered that writing novels was a career.
Book Review // The UnAmericans
“Listen,” says Tomás to his daughter, Daniela. “I know what you wrote.” Tomás is an academic, a Czech, who got out of Prague before the fall of communism, along with his wife, Katka, and baby Daniela. Now, he’s teaching at a two-bit college in Maine, divorced from Katka when their little girl was only two, and nearly estranged from his grown daughter, now a playwright. As “The Quietest Man” begins, Daniela has sold her very first play—and her father, the tale’s narrator, is determined to use her good fortune to reconnect with her…
The Catholic Conversion in Teaching on Jews
Sometime in my mid-teens, I asked to join the CYO basketball team at the parish church in my New Jersey hometown. For the uninitiated, CYO stands for Catholic Youth Organization, and it was the group to which my two best friends belonged. Jimmy Lyons lived across the street from me, and Tim Mulligan was his buddy from parochial school. Needless to say, I was Jewish.
Reza Aslan’s Jesus
Reza Aslan is an Iranian American scholar of religions, whose internationally acclaimed books include No god But God and Beyond Fundamentalism. His most recent book,...
Book Review | The American Sun & Wind Moving Picture Company
Michael Duffy reviews “The American Sun & Wind Moving Picture Company,” by Jay Neugeboren
Book Q&A: Naomi Schaefer Riley
Naomi Schaefer Riley, a former Wall Street Journal editor and writer, is the author most recently of 'Til Faith Do Us Part: How Interfaith Marriage...
Herod the Great?
Norman Gelb is the author of many works of history, including The Berlin Wall, Less Than Glory, Desperate Venture, and Kings of the Jews. His...
Glenn Frankel on “The Searchers”
Glenn Frankel, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who spent many years as a Washington Post reporter and editor, now serves as director of the School of...
Genesis Secularized: An Exchange Between Ronald Hendel and Jon Levenson
Genesis Secularized
I’m delighted that Jon Levenson has good things to say about my book, The Book of Genesis: A Biography in Moment's March/April issue. In...