A welcome reintroduction to the psalms for 21st-century Jews.
A rabbi offers commentary on ancient psalms for a contemporary audience.
“Life is joyful, tragic, visionary, mired in muck,” writes Rabbi Elyse Frishman. Reflective of the range of human experiences and interactions with the divine, the Bible’s Book of Psalms explores topics that range from expressions of gratitude for God’s gifts during personal triumphs to accusations against God’s seeming desertion amid heartbreaks. While psalms are relevant to contemporary society, their traditional biblical arrangement often makes them inaccessible to those unfamiliar with them. Seeking to pair “traditional psalms with different moments of our contemporary lives,” Sank Ross offers readers 72 psalms rearranged thematically into six categories (anticipation, commemoration, despair, gratitude, pain, and relief). The first section, “Psalms for Anticipation,” suggests pairing specific psalms for periods of anxious waiting, such as before a surgery, before traveling, or during a pregnancy. Additional sections provide similar matchings of psalms to real-life experiences through topics that include celebrating anniversaries, mourning death, moving on after divorce, and experiencing antisemitism. Given its goal of connecting with modern readers, the book utilizes Richard Levy’s 2018 translation of psalms, Songs Ascending. Each psalm is accompanied by a stylized Hebrew heading and a brief introduction by Sank Ross, who provides guidance on how to incorporate the psalm into one’s prayer practices. Many entries contain footnotes that refer readers to similar psalms that are found in different sections of the guide. An associate rabbi at the Community Synagogue in Port Washington, New York, Sank Ross excels at making her editorial comments meaningful to a general audience, from those who attend temple weekly to those who haven’t been in decades. The book opens with a fascinating introduction that draws on Sank Ross’ academic background in anthropology; she provides a brief historiography of psalters and introduces readers to the literary nature of the psalms as metaphorical poetry. “The beauty of metaphors,” she notes, “is that they can be redefined.” Guided by an impressive editorial advisory committee of eleven rabbis and Jewish scholars, this book is both profound and refreshingly simple.
A welcome reintroduction to the psalms for 21st-century Jews.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2024
ISBN: 9780881236453
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Central Conference of American Rabbis Press
Review Posted Online: Nov. 5, 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
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.
The veteran actor, comedian, and banjo player teams up with the acclaimed illustrator to create a unique book of cartoons that communicates their personalities.
Martin, also a prolific author, has always been intrigued by the cartoons strewn throughout the pages of the New Yorker. So when he was presented with the opportunity to work with Bliss, who has been a staff cartoonist at the magazine since 1997, he seized the moment. “The idea of a one-panel image with or without a caption mystified me,” he writes. “I felt like, yeah, sometimes I’m funny, but there are these other weird freaks who are actually funny.” Once the duo agreed to work together, they established their creative process, which consisted of working forward and backward: “Forwards was me conceiving of several cartoon images and captions, and Harry would select his favorites; backwards was Harry sending me sketched or fully drawn cartoons for dialogue or banners.” Sometimes, he writes, “the perfect joke occurs two seconds before deadline.” There are several cartoons depicting this method, including a humorous multipanel piece highlighting their first meeting called “They Meet,” in which Martin thinks to himself, “He’ll never be able to translate my delicate and finely honed droll notions.” In the next panel, Bliss thinks, “I’m sure he won’t understand that the comic art form is way more subtle than his blunt-force humor.” The team collaborated for a year and created 150 cartoons featuring an array of topics, “from dogs and cats to outer space and art museums.” A witty creation of a bovine family sitting down to a gourmet meal and one of Dumbo getting his comeuppance highlight the duo’s comedic talent. What also makes this project successful is the team’s keen understanding of human behavior as viewed through their unconventional comedic minds.
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-26289-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
PERSPECTIVES
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