Arts & Culture | Books

The Road Back To Haiti

01/19/2011 | Eric Herschthal | Staff Writer | Books

Nearly all of the 18 short stories in the new "Haiti Noir" collection are written by Haitians. The book's editor, the prominent Haitian writer Edwidge Danticat, made an exception, however, for Mark Kurlansky.

A 62-year-old Jewish writer who lives in New York City, Kurlansky is well known for his best-selling histories of food - on salt, on cod, on oysters. But writers that know him well, like Danticat, are well aware of his longtime involvement with Haiti.

Funny Girls

12/28/2010 | Sandee Brawarsky | Jewish Week Book Critic | Books

This was a year of growth for the e-book and flourishing for the Jewish American novel, with fine new fiction across the generations.

The Chabad Scribe

12/14/2010 | Sandee Brawarsky | Jewish Week Book Critic | Books

‘Sometimes you see them/in the dressing area/of the ritual bath,” Yehoshua November begins his poem, “Baal Teshuvas at the Mikvah.

Concerto For Interfaith Dialogue

12/07/2010 | Steve Lipman | Staff Writer | Books

If Gilbert Levine had fulfilled his lifelong dream to spend his days making music, but never conducted some of the world’s leading orchestras — dayenu. It would have been enough.

If he had gone to Poland in 1987 as artistic director of the Krakow Philharmonic, the first American to lead an orchestra in still-communist Eastern Europe, but never met Pope John Paul II — dayenu.

Montaigne’s Jewish Question

12/07/2010 | Eric Herschthal | Staff Writer | Books

It should be no surprise that author Sarah Bakewell found in the 16th-century French writer Michel de Montaigne a voice that is entirely of the present.

Israel Rising

11/30/2010 | Jerome A. Chanes | Special To The Jewish Week | Books

There have been surprisingly few books written about the history of the Zionist enterprise and about the success story of that enterprise, the State of Israel. Walter Laqueur’s 1972 “A History of Zionism” is magisterial, and Martin Gilbert’s 1998 “Israel: A History” is a frankly admiring portrait of the Jewish state, rich in detail; it reads as if it were the “official” biography of the state.