Horvilleur's deep reflections on mortality remind us that “in death a place can be left for the living.”
A collection of essays meditating on the relationship between life and death.
As one of the only female rabbis in France, Horvilleur, the leader of the Liberal Jewish Movement of France, is accustomed to playing a part in the transition between life and death. “Yet as the years go by,” she writes, “it increasingly seems to me that the profession closest to mine has a name: storyteller.” In the 10 essays that make up her latest book, the author thrives in this role, interweaving biblical stories with those about the lives and deaths of ordinary people, including a woman who planned and attended her own funeral, and public figures such as Simone Veil. Though some of the pieces are fairly anemic, their loose ends getting lost in the complex combination of stories, they all aim to show how life and death are more closely related than we like to think. “Life makes its presence felt in the very moment that precedes our dying and until the end seems to be saying to death that there is a way of coexisting,” writes Horvilleur, reflecting on the first time she saw a dead body. “Perhaps this cohabitation doesn’t in fact need to wait for death. Throughout our existence, without our being aware of it, life and death continually hold hands and dance.” Drawing from her experiences as a secular rabbi, the author shares significant wisdom, illuminating well-known biblical stories and translating even the most difficult experiences of loss—e.g., the death of a child. “Death escapes words, precisely because it signals the end of speech,” Horvilleur writes. In these thought-provoking, occasionally disjointed essays, she shows how it is possible to find language even for that which seems indescribable.
Horvilleur's deep reflections on mortality remind us that “in death a place can be left for the living.”Pub Date: May 7, 2024
ISBN: 9781609457952
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Europa Compass
Review Posted Online: Feb. 10, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2024
Some of Avant’s mantras are overstated, but her book is magnanimous, inspiring, and relentlessly optimistic.
Memories and life lessons inspired by the author’s mother, who was murdered in 2021.
“Neither my mother nor I knew that her last text to me would be the words ‘Think you’ll be happy,’ ” Avant writes, "but it is fitting that she left me with a mantra for resiliency.” The author, a filmmaker and former U.S. Ambassador to the Bahamas, begins her first book on the night she learned her mother, Jacqueline Avant, had been fatally shot during a home invasion. “One of my first thoughts,” she writes, “was, ‘Oh God, please don’t let me hate this man. Give me the strength not to hate him.’ ” Daughter of Clarence Avant, known as the “Black Godfather” due to his work as a pioneering music executive, the author describes growing up “in a house that had a revolving door of famous people,” from Ella Fitzgerald to Muhammad Ali. “I don’t take for granted anything I have achieved in my life as a Black American woman,” writes Avant. “And I recognize my unique upbringing…..I was taught to honor our past and pay forward our fruits.” The book, which is occasionally repetitive, includes tributes to her mother from figures like Oprah Winfrey and Bill Clinton, but the narrative core is the author’s direct, faith-based, unwaveringly positive messages to readers—e.g., “I don’t want to carry the sadness and anger I have toward the man who did this to my mother…so I’m worshiping God amid the worst storm imaginable”; "Success and feeling good are contagious. I’m all about positive contagious vibrations!” Avant frequently quotes Bible verses, and the bulk of the text reflects the spirit of her daily prayer “that everything is in divine order.” Imploring readers to practice proactive behavior, she writes, “We have to always find the blessing, to be the blessing.”
Some of Avant’s mantras are overstated, but her book is magnanimous, inspiring, and relentlessly optimistic.Pub Date: Oct. 17, 2023
ISBN: 9780063304413
Page Count: 288
Publisher: HarperOne
Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2023
This a book of earlier, philosophical essays concerned with the essential "absurdity" of life and the concept that- to overcome the strong tendency to suicide in every thoughtful man-one must accept life on its own terms with its values of revolt, liberty and passion. A dreary thesis- derived from and distorting the beliefs of the founders of existentialism, Jaspers, Heldegger and Kierkegaard, etc., the point of view seems peculiarly outmoded. It is based on the experience of war and the resistance, liberally laced with Andre Gide's excessive intellectualism. The younger existentialists such as Sartre and Camus, with their gift for the terse novel or intense drama, seem to have omitted from their philosophy all the deep religiosity which permeates the work of the great existentialist thinkers. This contributes to a basic lack of vitality in themselves, in these essays, and ten years after the war Camus seems unaware that the life force has healed old wounds... Largely for avant garde aesthetes and his special coterie.
Pub Date: Sept. 26, 1955
ISBN: 0679733736
Page Count: 228
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 19, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1955
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