Like-minded readers will find Levy’s blend of Old Testament and New Age appealing.
A rabbi offers a program of soul-craft to get us through the “World of Separation,” this reality where nothing quite works and nothing quite makes sense.
“If the soul is so wise then why do we stop listening to our souls?” That is not the only rhetorical question that LA–based rabbi Levy (Hope Will Find You: My Search for the Wisdom to Stop Waiting and Start Living, 2010, etc.) raises here. Pondering a letter written by Albert Einstein to a rabbi decades earlier, in which the renowned physicist mused about why we humans behave as if we were somehow disconnected from the whole, Levy proceeds to offer common-sensical suggestions to forge links to our better angels—by, for one thing, praying. To skeptical listeners in a class, she posed it as a challenge: “Why not approach it as an experiment? Try waking up and reciting a morning prayer for two weeks and we’ll discuss it then.” Bingo: logging the hours produces results. “If you long to connect to the divine,” she continues, “begin studying, and you will receive timeless wisdom.” The author occasionally drifts into the soft precincts of the Sedona set, as when she likens the “California Roll”—what elsewhere is called the “New York stop,” drifting through a stop sign without ever quite stopping—as the way most of us rush through religious practice: “There is a tradition to stop and take three steps backwards at the start of the prayer. Why? We imagine our souls leaving this space and entering a holy space. Suddenly we are standing in the very presence of God.” For all the cheerful exhortation, there’s also serious reckoning with the big picture, with matters of life and death and the travails of daily life. Throughout, Levy comes off as a trustworthy guide, with just the right leavening (or perhaps unleavening) of humor and endless compassion.
Like-minded readers will find Levy’s blend of Old Testament and New Age appealing.Pub Date: Sept. 5, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-250-05726-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: June 12, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2017
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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