Books & Authors
85 posts found
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Fight of the Century
Joe Louis' boxing match against Max Schmeling at Yankee Stadium in 1938 remains one of the great sporting events of the 20th century -- even though the fight in front of nearly 70,000 spectators lasted all of two minutes and four seconds. Some 67 years after that fateful night of fisticuffs, David Margolick, a Vanity Fair contributing editor and former New York Times staffer, has written the authoritative account of a time when the fate of nations seemed to hang… -
The Great Question (Who We Are)
THIS WEEK'S COLUMN WAS A COVER STORY IN THE JEWISH JOURNAL OF LOS ANGELES (and a pretty funny cover -- so I thought I'd share it with you). We're almost halfway through the first decade of the 21st century. Not a bad time to assess "Who We Are." "Who We Are: On Being (and Not Being) a Jewish American Writer," edited by Derek Rubin (Schocken Books, 2005), an Israeli-born professor who teaches in the Netherlands, collects 29 essays by Jewish… -
A Read on Life (novels by Zweibel and Rosen)
Lately, I’ve been thinking about two novels I recently enjoyed: “The Other Shulman†by Alan Zweibel (Villard, $23.95), and “Joy Comes in the Morning†by Jonathan Rosen (Picador, $14). The two novels are strikingly different: One deals with confronting a marriage of long standing; the other is about getting married. One is comic with serious moments; the other serious with comic moments. Yet both feature protagonists trying to decide whether they are running toward something, or away from it. “Shulman  -
A Well Lit Place (Steve Wasserman and the LA Times Sunday Book Review)
How does one create a literary community in Los Angeles? It is true that on any given night, there are readings, slams and events at bookstores, bars and auditoriums all over town. Yet rarely does this coalesce into a sense of community, a literary life in Los Angeles. Steve Wasserman, who is leaving the L.A. Times Sunday Book Review, tried to foster a community of books, of writers and of ideas in maximalist and minimalist ways, in the pages of… -
Leaving L.A.
When I go out of town, I often take a novel or two with me, knowing that a plane ride remains one of the few places to get serious reading done. Recently, I read two novels, Seth Greenland’s “The Bones†(Bloomsbury) and Bruce Bauman’s “And the Word Was†(Other Press), which made strong impressions about why, every so often, you need to get out of town. Both novels concern characters who believe their lives are at a dead end, and… -
Kishon - The Writer
The world lost one of its great comic artists last month. I am referring not to Johnny Carson, who was little known outside of the United States, but to Israeli satirist Ephraim Kishon, 80, who, although little known in America, was beloved around the world. I read somewhere that his books have sold more than 43 million copies and have been translated into 37 languages (although I can’t confirm that there are, in fact, 37 languages to publish in). Kishon… -
Death of a Moralist (Arthur Miller)
Although Arthur Miller was only 33 when “Death of a Salesman†premiered on Broadway, it was a transformative moment in American drama, and Miller’s impact on successive generations of writers continues to this day. In “Death of a Salesman,†Miller was able to find poetry in the personal that transcended the mundane — while creating drama that mattered. Rod Serling, then in his 20s, attended the original production and saw the kind of moral drama about average people that he… -
Whose Culture is it? (Ellen Gruber's 'Virtually Jewish")
Does it bother you when a white man sings the blues? Is jazz exclusively an African American art form? When Eminem (who is white) is the most popular rapper, Tiger Woods (who is part African American and part Asian) is the greatest golfer and Serena and Venus Williams (African Americans) dominate women’s tennis, should it upset us that Jewish Culture Festivals are run by non-Jews for audiences of primarily non-Jews, and that klezmer music is performed by non-Jewish performers for… -
The Award Goes to... (2004's Funniest moments on screen)
As the year ends, many of my correspondents (at least one) have been clamoring for the Tommywood Awards, a list of those defining moments in the past year — the best, the worst, the memorable. Frankly, my mind has already gone on vacation and the rest of me is soon to follow. So although I don’t rule out a “best of†list early in the New Year, I won’t trouble you or myself with that this week. Instead, the following… -
Literary Journeys (Memoirs by Jonathan Schwartz, Nessa Rapoport and Stefan Zweig)
The most memorable books I’ve read recently have been, ironically enough, three memoirs that stand out for their sensitivity, intelligence and literary quality. Jonathan Schwartz’s “All in Good Time: A Memoir†(Random House) is a particularly well-crafted, deeply felt story of childhood neglect as the child of famed Broadway and movie music composer Arthur Schwartz, and his own rake’s progress surrounded by music as a radio DJ and cabaret performer. In retrospect, it seems like I spent every night of… -
See Jane Shlep (Yiddish with Dick and Jane)
"See Jane shlep, Shlep, Jane shlep, Shlep, shlep, shlep." This is not your parent’s primer. This is "Yiddish With Dick and Jane," a new parody by Ellis Weiner and Barbara Davilman, who will be reading their work this Sunday, Sept. 19 at the Skirball Cultural Center. The story of how Dick and Jane came to be flavoring their speech with Yiddish began innocently enough two summers ago, when Weiner and Davilman found themselves in Laguna with three hours to kill… -
Tough Guys (Isaac Babel)
Reading "The Collected Stories of Isaac Babel" (W. Norton & Co., 2002) in paperback, edited by Babel’s daughter, Nathalie, got me thinking about Jewish gangsters and tough guys. Babel was born in Odessa in 1894. He wrote of Odessa’s Jewish underworld and its gangsters in sparkling prose. Fifty years before Mario Puzo gave us "The Godfather," Babel offered up Benya Krik. Benya, Babel tells us, had "gangster chic" — a century before Tupac took the stage. Babel’s Odessa was home…