Book Reviews

Richmond author shares personal and universal stories in new book Erin Mahone Motivational Press, 2017 Reviewed by Amy Zelenka Did you ever feel like you were living in that famous idiom: the inmates are running the asylum? Well, Erin Mahone, in her new book, If You...

Tragedy impacts generations Jenna Blum Harper Collins Publishing | New York, New York Reviewed by Lynn Woods In The Lost Family, author Jenna Blum explores how tragic grief and loss can impact a family for generations. Years have passed since Peter Rashkin, chef and...

Perfect for baseball and history fans Carrie Jones Kar-Ben Publishing | Minneapolis, MN Reviewed by Sam Levin I had the opportunity to read a great book called, The Spy Who Played Baseball. It is about how Moe Berg played baseball and was a spy. Nobody expected Moe to...

Tragedy Impacts Generations Jenna Blum | The Lost Family: A Novel Harper Collins Publishing New York, New York In The Lost Family, author Jenna Blum explores how tragic grief and loss can impact a family for generations. Years have passed since Peter Rashkin, chef and...

This one’s for every grandparent Unconditional Love: A Guide for Navigating the Joys and Challenges of Being a Grandparent Today. Jane Isay Harper, March 6, 2018 Reviewed by Alene Jo Kaufman It’s hard to read a book when one’s head is continually nodding up and down,...

An unfortunate topic The Opposite of Hate: A Field Guide to Repairing Our Humanity Sally Kohn Workman Publishing, 2018 Wendy Juren Auerbach To be honest, the copy of The Opposite of Hate: A Field Guide to Repairing Our Humanity by Sally Kohn languished on my pile of...

Memoir meets financial guide This Is The Year I Put My Financial Life In Order John Schwartz Penguin Random House LLC, 2018 Money is often an overwhelming and stressful topic. While some people love discussing financial matters, others cringe at the thought of...

Can be read alone Sadie’s Snowy Tu B’Shevat Jamie Korngold Kar-Ben Publishing I like this book very much because although I could read it by myself, I read it with my mom. Like Sadie, I love Tu B’Shevat, and while I know that it’s winter here, in Israel for...

Thou Shalt Innovate: How Israeli Ingenuity Repairs the World. Avi Jorisch Gefen Publishing House LTD In the summer of 2014, along with the rest of the world, I was watching closely as Israel launched  Operation Protective Edge to protect her citizens from Hamas-led...

Gone To Dust, A Novel Matt Goldman Macmillan Publishing Group, LLC If the litmus test for a compelling murder mystery is not being able to put a book down, Matt Goldman’s first novel, Gone To Dust, is quite the success and already a New York Times Best Seller. Aided...

Peter Lovenheim explains, “It began wonderfully, as romances do, but later devolved into a turbulent on again, off again affair. She was looking for a commitment I couldn’t make and I was looking for emotional intimacy she couldn’t give.” Years of breakups and makeups. The relationship became polarized—he was an anxious partner demanding more intimacy and she was an avoidant partner who shut down and withdrew. His Anxious Attachment style and her Avoidant Attachment style led to the Anxious-Avoidant Trap.

Robert H. Gillette Charleston: History Press, 2015 252 pages Robert H. Gillette is a retired educator living in Lynchburg, Va., who researched this intriguing story and retraced it within its larger historical context through the experiences of Werner (Töpper) Angress...

Nathan’s Famous: The First Hundred Years William Handwerker with Jayne A. Pearl Morgan James, 2016 192 pages, $17.95 Paper Famous Nathan Lloyd Handwerker and Gil Reavill Flatiron Books, 2016 306 pages, $26.99 As a child growing up in New York during the Great...

The Seven Good Years: A Memoir Etgar Keret Riverhead Books, Penguin Random House, 2015 171 pages, $26.95  Last spring, Etgar Keret’s The Seven Good Years, appeared in my mailbox. The cover and press release promised a fun read, so i gave it a try. After the first...

The Morning They Came For Us (Dispatches From Syria) Janine Di Giovanni New York: Liveright Publishing 206 pages, $25.95 The Morning They Came For Us is an important book with lasting consequence by author Janine Di Giovanni, award-winning (including two Amnesty...

A Rage For Order—The Middle East in Turmoil: From Tahrir Square to ISIS Robert F. Worth Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016 259 pages, $26 ISBN978-0-374-25294-6 When Robert Kaplan published his collection of articles, Balkan Ghosts, in 1995, it was immediately recognized...

Three Minutes in Poland (Discovering a Lost World in a 1938 Family Film) Glenn Kurtz Farrar, Strauss and Girioux 415 pages, $33 It began on July 23, 1938, almost a year before the outbreak of WWll in the European theatre, when David and Liza Kurtz from Brooklyn, New...

Celebrate Elizabeth Kurtz To benefit Emunah of America Feldheim Format 35 pages, $34.99 Four-pound recipe books, however gorgeously illustrated, are not usually my favorite. However, this one caught your reviewer’s eye, first, because the proceeds were going to...

Pumpkinflowers: A Soldier’s Story Matti Friedman Algonquin Chapel Hill, 2006 243 pages, $25.95 ISBN 978-1-61620-458-7 The least knowledgeable military planner understands the advantage of holding “the high ground.” Using this rationale, young men (and now women) have...

The War Reporter Martin Fletcher St Martin’s Press, 2015 306pp., $25.99 Martin Fletcher, former NBC Middle East correspondent and Tel Aviv Bureau chief, won the American National Book Award in 2010 for Walking Israel: A Personal Search for the Soul of a Nation and...

Leaving Iran: Between Migration and Exile Farideh Goldin Athabasca University Press, 2016 291pp., $22.95(paper) ISBN 978-1-77199-137-7(pbk) 1-177199-138-4 (pdf) 1-177199-1-137-1(epub) Leaving Iran, 13 years after Wedding Song, reminds one of a reunion with a college...

Pastrami on Rye An Overstuffed History of the Jewish Deli Ted Merwin New York University Press, 2015 189pp. plus notes ISBN 978-0-8147-6031-4 “I’ll have what she’s having!” Who doesn’t remember that line from Rob Reiner’s 1989 hit When Harry Met Sally? No current book...

An Improbable Friendship: The Remarkable Lives of Ruth Dayan and Raymonda Tawil and Their 40-Year Mission to Build Understanding Between Their Peoples Anthony David Arcade Publishing, 2015 312 pages As we observe the tide of rising rage and violence in Israel,...

Myths of the Oil Boom Steve A. Yetiv Oxford University Press, 2015 251 pages, $29.95 ISBN 978-0-19-021269-8 Does anyone remember (only yesterday?) when “unleaded regular” gasoline approached $4 a gallon? Just this summer, people were grumbling that prices were...

The Sea Beach Line Ben Nadler Fig Tree Books, 2015 224 pages, $15.95 Author Ben Nadler has created a novel steeped in Judaica, yet a mystery. Izzy Edel, not quite wasted on drugs, determines to search for his father, reported deceased, but possibly alive. What follows...

The Greatest Jewish-American Lover in Hungarian History Michael Blumenthal Etruscan Press, 2014 218 pages Michael Blumenthal has been called “one of the natural poets of his generation” by no less than the late Irish poet Seamus Heaney, a winner of the Nobel Prize in...

How About Never Is Never Good For You? My Life in Cartoons Bob Mankoff Henry Holt and Company 285pp, $32 ISBN 978-0-8050-9591-3 Cartoon: Three men: Man on the left is wearing a deerstalker (yes, deerstalker) hat; man on the right is an older man; man in the middle is...

The Lion’s Gate: On the Front Lines of the Six Day War Steven Pressfield Sentinel (Penguin), 2014 426pp., $18.00 (paper) ISBN 978-1-59523-119-2 Forgiving Maximo Rothman A.J. Sidransky Berwick Court (Chicago), 2013 306pp., $16.95 ISBN 978-0-9889540-0-7 The Pawnbroker...

Unlikely Warrior A Pacifist Rabbi’s Journey from the Pulpit to Iwo Jima Lee Mandel Pelican, 2015 368 pp., $28.95 ISBN: 978-1-455619887 To a child growing up at the end of the 20th century, the epic battles of the Second World War were 50 years in the distant past...

It’s summer, that time of year when everyone drops everything they’re doing, finds a quiet stretch of sandy shore and spends all day delving into their new favorite books. Or maybe not. But whatever your plans, there’s no denying that the season brings a bumper crop...

The Promise (A Tragic Accident, a Paralyzed Bride, and the Power of Love, Loyalty and Friendship) by Rachelle Friedman Globe Pequot Press, 2014. $24.95 Rachelle Friedman and Chris Chapman, both from Virginia Beach, met at East Carolina University in Greenville, N. C.,...

America in Retreat: The New Isolationism and the Coming Global Disorder Bret Stephens Sentinel, 2014 269 pages, $27.95 ISBN 978-1-59184-662-8 Bret Stephens, is a Pulitzer Prize winning correspondent and deputy editorial page editor of the Wall Street Journal and...