A well-researched and engaging exploration of a classic text through an ecological lens.
An environmentalist rabbi re-examines the biblical Song of Songs.
Decades ago, Bernstein, the cofounder of a river rafting business in northern California, often spent her evenings around a campfire with friends who shared her affinity for nature poetry. When someone read a passage from the Song of Songs, it marked the first time in the author’s life when the Judaism of her childhood had truly “spoken to [her]” and “opened [her] heart.” While traditional interpretations see the work as an allegory of the love between God and his chosen people, and modern observers see it as an erotic love story between a man and a woman, Bernstein’s book offers an alternative approach, seeing “a love story about the lovers and the land and its creatures.” With this novel thesis, the author makes a compelling case for its focus on nature (and “life’s endless desire to live, flourish and create”), as the Song of Songs is rife with references to lush gardens, mountainous landscapes, and diverse flora and fauna. As a rabbi and self-described “ecotheologian” with an advanced degree in Jewish studies from Hebrew College in Newton, Massachusetts, the author expertly uses the “words from my own tradition” to offer readers her interpretation of the divine—one “of color, smell, and sound” intertwined with the “torrent of energy and this romance with the earth.” Bernstein similarly draws upon her lifetime of experience in the environmentalist movement: She’s a graduate of the University of California, Berkeley’s Conservation of Natural Resources program, and the founder of Shomrei Adamah (Keepers of the Earth), the first national Jewish environmental organization, as well as the organizer of Philadelphia’s All Species Parade. Overall, this book is a balanced combination of her two loves, offering keen insight into both Jewish tradition and contemporary issues of environmental justice. At fewer than 150 pages in length, the book will be accessible to lay readers and will challenge Jewish scholars with a well-grounded alternative view.
A well-researched and engaging exploration of a classic text through an ecological lens.Pub Date: Feb. 20, 2024
ISBN: 9781958972199
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Monkfish Book Publishing
Review Posted Online: Jan. 2, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
An ebullient nature lover’s paean to birds.
A charming bird journey with the bestselling author.
In his introduction to Tan’s “nature journal,” David Allen Sibley, the acclaimed ornithologist, nails the spirit of this book: a “collection of delightfully quirky, thoughtful, and personal observations of birds in sketches and words.” For years, Tan has looked out on her California backyard “paradise”—oaks, periwinkle vines, birch, Japanese maple, fuchsia shrubs—observing more than 60 species of birds, and she fashions her findings into delightful and approachable journal excerpts, accompanied by her gorgeous color sketches. As the entries—“a record of my life”—move along, the author becomes more adept at identifying and capturing them with words and pencils. Her first entry is September 16, 2017: Shortly after putting up hummingbird feeders, one of the tiny, delicate creatures landed on her hand and fed. “We have a relationship,” she writes. “I am in love.” By August 2018, her backyard “has become a menagerie of fledglings…all learning to fly.” Day by day, she has continued to learn more about the birds, their activities, and how she should relate to them; she also admits mistakes when they occur. In December 2018, she was excited to observe a Townsend’s Warbler—“Omigod! It’s looking at me. Displeased expression.” Battling pesky squirrels, Tan deployed Hot Pepper Suet to keep them away, and she deterred crows by hanging a fake one upside down. The author also declared war on outdoor cats when she learned they kill more than 1 billion birds per year. In May 2019, she notes that she spends $250 per month on beetle larvae. In June 2019, she confesses “spending more hours a day staring at birds than writing. How can I not?” Her last entry, on December 15, 2022, celebrates when an eating bird pauses, “looks and acknowledges I am there.”
An ebullient nature lover’s paean to birds.Pub Date: April 23, 2024
ISBN: 9780593536131
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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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