There is a saying that it's hard to be a Jew. In this deeply moving memoir, Fink, a cofounder of Tikkun magazine, shows that it's equally hard to become a Jew. Fink's tale is filled with sad ironies. Having confronted, as a child and a teenager, anti-Indian and other racist sentiments in her Waspy, northern California family, she converted to Judaism only to discover the existence of Jewish chauvinism. Married to Michael Lerner, with whom she founded Tikkun, and thus solidly ensconced in the progressive, supposedly feminist, part of the Jewish community, she had to face sexism from the journal's predominantly male editorial board. And, having to suffer incomprehension and rejection from her family because of her conversion (one aunt, invited to Fink's housewarming, smashed the new mezuzah she had nailed to her doorpost), she also found that she had to overcome a shocking degree of suspicion and mistrust of converts within the Jewish community. But most affecting in this memoir by a woman whose ingenuousness lends both fragility and strength to her narrative, is Fink's description of her spiritual journey—of her attraction to Judaism; her sense of dislocation after converting, unsure of the solidity of her Jewish identity but no longer belonging in the Gentile world; her growing dissatisfaction with certain aspects of Judaism (especially its patriarchal nature) as she grew more familiar with it. Her marriage to Lerner did not survive these conflicts, and for a while, Fink became alienated from Jewish life. But eventually the author crosses what she calls her Red Sea—a difficult passage to a distant shore, one in which she fears she might drown. Fink rediscovers the Jewish roots of her spirituality in the mystical tradition and in the Jewish renewal movement. This an instructive look at the conflicts, internal and external, of a convert's life. But most impressive is Fink's commitment to finding the true meaning of Jewish prayer and practice.
Pub Date: March 12, 1997
ISBN: 0-465-08200-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Basic Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1997
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.
The authors have created a sort of anti-Book of Virtues in this encyclopedic compendium of the ways and means of power.
Everyone wants power and everyone is in a constant duplicitous game to gain more power at the expense of others, according to Greene, a screenwriter and former editor at Esquire (Elffers, a book packager, designed the volume, with its attractive marginalia). We live today as courtiers once did in royal courts: we must appear civil while attempting to crush all those around us. This power game can be played well or poorly, and in these 48 laws culled from the history and wisdom of the world’s greatest power players are the rules that must be followed to win. These laws boil down to being as ruthless, selfish, manipulative, and deceitful as possible. Each law, however, gets its own chapter: “Conceal Your Intentions,” “Always Say Less Than Necessary,” “Pose as a Friend, Work as a Spy,” and so on. Each chapter is conveniently broken down into sections on what happened to those who transgressed or observed the particular law, the key elements in this law, and ways to defensively reverse this law when it’s used against you. Quotations in the margins amplify the lesson being taught. While compelling in the way an auto accident might be, the book is simply nonsense. Rules often contradict each other. We are told, for instance, to “be conspicuous at all cost,” then told to “behave like others.” More seriously, Greene never really defines “power,” and he merely asserts, rather than offers evidence for, the Hobbesian world of all against all in which he insists we live. The world may be like this at times, but often it isn’t. To ask why this is so would be a far more useful project.
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-670-88146-5
Page Count: 430
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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