Book Review // The Girl from Human Street
The Girl from Human Street by Roger Cohen // Alfred A. Knopf // 2015, pp. 320, $27.95
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…
Book Review: Eichmann Before Jerusalem
Eichman Before Jeruslem: The Unexamined Life ofa Mass Murderer / Bettina Stangneth / Translated from the German by Ruth Martin / Alfred A. Knopf / 2014, pp. 579, $35
Book Review // Queen of Thieves
Queen of Thieves: The True Story of “Marm” Mandelbaum and Her Gangs of New York by J. North Conway / Skyhorse Publishing / 2014, pp. 240, $24.95
Book Review // Babel in Zion
Babel in Zion:Jews, Nationalism, and Language Diversity in Palestine, 1920–1948 by Liora R. Halperin / Yale University Press / 2014, pp. 328, $40
Book Review // The Zone of Interest
THE ZONE OF INTEREST by Martin Amis // Alfred A. Knopf // 2014 // pp. 306
Book Review // The Talmud: A Biography Banned, Censored and Burned…The Book They Couldn’t Suppress
Full disclosure: I am not a biblical or Talmudic scholar. As a professor of literature, I have taught selections from the Bible in humanities courses. I think of myself as a secular humanist and an agnostic interested in understanding the role of religion in the lives of millions of people.
Book Review // Village of Secrets: Defying the Nazis in Vichy France
French anti-Semitism, c’est une vieille histoire. True, following the Revolution, les Juifs were liberated from their ghettos. True, the Jewish Leon Blum was elected prime minister of France during the late 1930s. And true, except for the United States and Israel, no other country contains so many Jews—some 600,000 according to the latest statistics.
Book Review // An officer and a Spy
Be wary of historical fiction, especially if it’s good. It will forever mix up in your mind what actually happened, or what we can be fairly certain happened, with the inventions of playwrights and novelists, whose aim might be to draw a deeper meaning from events than mere facts can provide, but who do some violence to those puny facts.
Book Review // Knish: In Search of the Jewish Soul Food
Knish: In Search of the Jewish Soul Food Laura Silver Brandeis University Press 2014, pp. 275, $24.95 by Gloria Levitas Reader alert:
Book Review: David, The Divided Heart
by Linda Tucker David: The Divided Heart David Wolpe Yale University Press September 16, 2014, 184 pp, $25.00 A man
Book Review // The Torture Trap
This thriller about the Israeli-Arab conflict comes with rare praise from one of the masters of suspense fiction and with a premise that suggests exploration of deep moral dilemmas. The endorsement comes from Stephen King, who says the book is “about the lies we tell ourselves until the truth is forced upon us,” and is “what great fiction is all about.”