General Non Fiction

In this section we'll keep you up to date with news of books you might be interested in. The information will come from the publishers' website and we will add our reviews as often as we can.

Do also look out for events information and keep us posted if you are an organiser.

And remember, feedback is always welcome.

The Future of Art in a Digital Age: From Hellenistic to Hebraic Consciousness

Mel Alexenberg

Intellect ISBN 1841501360

This book develops the thesis that the transition from premodernism to postmodernism in art of the digital age represents a paradigm shift from the Hellenistic to the Hebraic roots of Western culture. Semiotic and morphological analysis of art and visual culture demonstrate the contemporary confluence between the deep structure of Hebraic consciousness and new directions in art that arise along the interface between scientific inquiry, digital technologies, and multicultural expressions. Complementing these two analytic methodologies, alternative methodologies of kabbalah and halakhah provide postmodern methods for extending into digital age art forms. Exemplary artworks are described in the text and will be illustrated with photographs.

Mad, Bad and Sad: Women and the Mind Doctors from 1800

Lisa Appignanesi

Virago ISBN 978-1844082339

February 2008

From the depression suffered by Virginia Woolf and Sylvia Plath to the mental anguish and addictions of iconic beauties Zelda Fitzgerald and Marilyn Monroe. From Theroigne de Mericourt, Fury of the Gironde, who descended from the bloody triumphs of the French Revolution to untameable insanity in La Salpetriere asylum, to Mary Lamb, sister of Charles, who in the throes of a nervous breakdown turned on her mother with a kitchen knife. From Freud and Jung to Lacan and the new women-centred therapies. This is the story of how we have understood extreme states of mind over the last two hundred years and how we conceive of them today, when more and more of our inner life and emotions have become a matter for medics and therapists. Here too is the story of the professions that have grown up to offer treatment, of how over the years symptoms and diagnoses have developed together to create fashions in illness and how treatments have succeeded orsometimes failed, even when those providing care were women too. Mad, Bad and Sad takes us on a fascinating journey through the fragile, extraordinary human mind.

Beyond the Border: The German-Jewish Legacy Abroad

Steven E. Aschleim

Princeton ISBN 978-0-691-12223-6
January 2007

The modern German-Jewish experience through the rise of Nazism in 1933 was characterized by an explosion of cultural and intellectual creativity. Yet well after that history has ended, the influence of Weimar German-Jewish intellectuals has become ever greater. Hannah Arendt, Gershom Scholem, Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Franz Rosenzweig, and Leo Strauss have become household names and possess a continuing resonance. Beyond the Border seeks to explain this phenomenon and analyze how the German-Jewish legacy has continuingly permeated wider modes of Western thought and sensibility, and why these émigrés occupy an increasingly iconic place in contemporary society.

Steven Aschheim traces the odyssey of a fascinating group of German-speaking Zionists--among them Martin Buber and Hans Kohn--who recognized the moral dilemmas of Jewish settlement in pre-Israel Palestine and sought a binationalist solution to the Arab-Israel conflict. He explores how German-Jewish émigré historians like Fritz Stern and George Mosse created a new kind of cultural history written against the background of their exile from Nazi Germany and in implicit tension with postwar German social historians. And finally, he examines the reasons behind the remarkable contemporary canonization of these Weimar intellectuals--from Arendt to Strauss--within Western academic and cultural life.

Beyond the Border is about more than the physical act of departure. It also points to the pioneering ways these émigrés questioned normative cognitive boundaries and have continued to play a vital role in addressing the predicaments that engage and perplex us today.

Steven E. Aschheim holds the Vigevani Chair of European Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His books include Scholem, Arendt, Klemperer: Intimate Chronicles in Turbulent Times, In Times of Crisis: Essays on European Culture, Germans, and Jews, and The Nietzsche Legacy in Germany: 1890-1990.

Jewish London: An Illustrated History

Gerry Black

Breedon Books Publishing Co Ltd ISBN 978-1859835937

June 2007

Jewish History in London properly begins with the arrival of a small group of Jews with William the Conqueror. Despite their expulsion in 1290, the influence of Jews on the life of the capital has grown, especially after the large-scale immigrations of the 19th and 20th century. The Jews have had an extraordinary impact on the life of the city, and this book shows how it happened.

Gerry Black recalls the origins and motives of the generations of Jews who came to make their home in London. The development of the famously close-knit societies they formed in the East End, in north London and else-where in the capital is recorded, and illustrated, in graphic detail. He also gives a fascinating account of their struggle to establish themselves in the city - their housing, their work and trades, schools, hospitals and synagogues.

His narrative gives a vivid portrait of outstanding individuals who made notable contributions to the Jewish community and to the wider history of the capital - businessmen, artists, lawyers, artisans. At the same time he records momentous events that marked the course of Jewish History in the city, from the expulsion of 1290 to the Jack the Ripper case and the Sydney Street siege. The story comes right up to the present day. Gerry Black looks back at the further immigration that took place from Germany and Austria before World War Two and from Egypt, Hungary, Iraq, Iran and India after the war.

His lively account offers a sharp insight into the contribution made by modern Jews to the culture and economy of London. His book will be essential reading for everyone who is interested in the Jewish community and in the cultural diversity of the capital.

Best of Blue

Lionel Blue

Continuum  ISBN 082649045X

A child of poor Jewish parentage, educated in the roughest part of the East End of London, Lionel Blue worked his way through Balliol College, Oxford and the Rabbinate to become a star of radio and stage. His ‘Thought for the Day’ broadcasts enchanted and invigorated millions of listeners. The Rabbi's humour became celebrated, making it even a regular feature of Private Eye, the satirical magazine, and his opening gambit of 'Good morning Peter, good morning Sue and good morning everyone' became famous. This new collection of the best of Lionel Blue’s writings sparkles with his characteristic and idiosyncratic humour. It is through this that his

profound wisdom has touched the hearts and minds of millions of appreciative listeners.

Rabbi Lionel Blue now lives in North London. He continues to appear frequently on radio and television. He is an honorary fellow of Grey College, University of Durham. He was once Chairman of the Beth Din of the RSGB

The Architecture of Happiness
Alain de Botton
Penguin  ISBN 9780241142486

In his extraordinary new book, Alain de Botton explores the importance of buildings in our lives, pondering our attachment to our homes and considering such questions as: Why do people disagree about taste?  Can beautiful surroundings make us good?  Not to mention: What makes a window frame attractive?  Rooted in the idea that architecture has the power to influence how we feel and that we are different people in different buildings, The Beauty of Houses suggests how we might learn to build better, more attractive dwellings, in which we could stand a higher chance of happiness.

Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence

Judith Butler

Verso ISBN 1 84467 544 0

This profound appraisal of post-9/11 America considers the conditions of heightened vulnerability and aggression that followed from the attack on the US, and US retaliation. Judith Butler critiques the use of violence that has emerged as a response to loss, and argues that the dislocation of first-world privilege offers instead a chance to imagine a world in which that violence might be minimized and in which interdependency becomes acknowledged as the basis for a global political community.

Butler considers the means by which some lives become grief-worthy, while others are perceived as undeserving of grief or even incomprehensible as lives. She discusses the political implications of sovereignty in light of the prisoners in Guantánamo Bay. She argues against the anti-intellectual current of contemporary US patriotism and the power of censorship during times of war. Finally, she takes on the question of when and why anti-semitism is leveled as a charge against those who voice criticisms of the Israeli state. She counters that we have a responsibility to speak out against both Israeli injustices and anti-semitism, and argues against the rhetorical use of the charge of anti-semitism to quell public debate.

“If we are interested in arresting cycles of violence to produce less violent outcomes, it is no doubt important to ask what, politically, might be made of grief besides a cry for war.” — Judith Butler

“One of Butler’s most topical and accessible books.” — Women’s Review of Books

The Second Bounce Of The Ball: Turning Risk Into Opportunity

Ronald Cohen

Weidenfeld ISBN 9780297851479

November 2007

In business, everyone can see the first bounce of the ball. It is the second bounce that is uncertain. Ronald Cohen, one of the world's leading private-equity investors, argues that the entrepreneur's aim is to take advantage of that uncertainty: for it is only in situations of uncertainty that significant gains can be made. Putting it another way, successful entrepreneurs know how to turn risk into opportunity.
The Second Bounce of the Ball is the distillation of Cohen's 33-year career building Apax Partners into a firm employing more than 300 people, with offices in eight countries and billions under management. He draws upon Apax's experience of backing entrepreneurial businesses in many countries, among them AOL, Apple, Computacenter, Tommy Hilfiger, Immarsat, Kabel Deutschland, Calvin Klein, Molnlyke, Panrico, Q-Cell, Travelex, Waterstone's, Virgin Radio, Vueling and Yell.
The book is essential reading for entrepreneurs, wannabe entrepreneurs and all those who want to apply entrepreneurial approaches in all walks of life. It provides relevant background on the development of entrepreneurship and of the venture-capital and private-equity industry through the prism of Cohen's experience at Apax.
It provides guidance about how to take advantage of business opportunity: the right people and the right money and the roles played by personality and luck and underlines the importance of ethics.
The Second Bounce of the Ball's insights on entrepreneurial strategy provide a unique insider's guide to turning risk into opportunity.

Sir Ronald Cohen came to Britain from Egypt at the age of eleven; after winning a scholarship to Oxford and becoming president of the Oxford Union he attended Harvard Business School. As well as founding Easdaq, he founded the Apax Group in 1972, of which he is now chairman. He was knighted in 2001.

The Paradox of Anti-Semitism

Dan Cohn-Sherbok

Continuum ISBN 082649403X

The One and the Many: Reading Isaiah Berlin

George Crowder and Henri Hardy (editors)

Prometheus Books ISBN 978-1591024484

April 2007

Isaiah Berlin is widely acknowledged as a major figure in twentieth-century political philosophy and the history of ideas. His famous Oxford inaugural lecture, Two Concepts of Liberty, especially the last, crucial section, entitled "The One and the Many", has provoked a vast secondary literature. So it is surprising that until now there has been no substantial critical reader dedicated to his work. Editors George Crowder and Henry Hardy have admirably filled this need with this stimulating new volume, which provides a systematic and comprehensive treatment of the main aspects of Berlin's work. The essays (all but one of which are newly commissioned) critically examine Berlin's work across its whole range, including his treatment of Marx, Russian thinkers, Jewish themes, liberty, pluralism, the Enlightenment and Counter-Enlightenment, nationalism, history, and religion.

The contributors are: Jonathan Allen (University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign); Shlomo Avineri (Hebrew University, Jerusalem); Terrell Carver (University of Bristol); Joshua Cherniss (Harvard and Oxford Universities); George Crowder (Flinders University); William A. Galston (University of Maryland), Graeme Garrard (Cardiff University); Ryan Hanley (Marquette University); Henry Hardy (Oxford University); Michael Jinkins (Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary); Mario Ricciardi (University of Milan); Yael Tamir (Tel Aviv University); and Andrzej Walicki (University of Notre Dame).

Complete with a valuable bibliography of works about Isaiah Berlin, this outstanding collection of recent scholarship on a seminal thinker shows the continuing relevance and importance of Berlin's many contributions to the understanding of our contemporary predicament.

Identity and Modern Israeli Literature

Risa Domb

Vallentine Mitchell ISBN 9780853036609

This book explores through literature the long and complex evolution of Jewish identity in Israel and the central role that language, ideology, memory, and culture have played in that journey. Language is possibly the most important component of any collective identity. Indeed, any nation can be better understood through its imaginative literature and never more so than in the case of Israeli literature, whose story runs in parallel with that of the State of Israel and with Zionism. The political task of nationalism directed the course of Israeli literature into a distinct national literature and in turn the literature participated in the formation of the nation. Language became inseparable from identity. But whose Hebrew is it? Through key texts by such authors as Y. H. Brenner, S. Y. Agnon, Nathan Shaham, Yoram Kaniuk, Aharon Appelfeld, A. B. Yehoshua, Gabriela Avigur-Rotem and Sami Michael, Risa Domb explores the connections between language, ideology, memory, culture, and identity, and asks whether ideology and identity are on an inescapable collision course.

I Feel Bad About My Neck: And Other Thoughts on Being a Woman

Nora Ephron

Transworld ISBN-10: 0385610939  1 March 2007

With her disarming, intimate, completely accessible voice, and dry sense of humor, Nora Ephron shares with us her ups and downs in I Feel Bad About My Neck, a candid, hilarious look at women who are getting older and dealing with the tribulations of maintenance, menopause, empty nests, and life itself.

The woman who brought us When Harry Met Sally . . . , Sleepless in Seattle, You’ve Got Mail, and Bewitched, and the author of best sellers Heartburn, Scribble Scribble, and Crazy Salad, discusses everything—from how much she hates her purse to how much time she spends attempting to stop the clock: the hair dye, the treadmill, the lotions and creams that promise to slow the aging process but never do. Oh, and she can’t stand the way her neck looks. But her dermatologist tells her there’s no quick fix for that.

Ephron chronicles her life as an obsessed cook, passionate city dweller, and hapless parent.  She recounts her anything-but-glamorous days as a White House intern during the JFK years (“I am probably the only young woman who ever worked in the Kennedy White House that the President did not make a pass at”) and shares how she fell in and out of love with Bill Clinton—from a distance, of course.  But mostly she speaks frankly and uproariously about life as a woman of a certain age.

Utterly courageous, wickedly funny, and unexpectedly moving in its truth telling, I Feel Bad About My Neck is a book of wisdom, advice, and laugh-out-loud moments, a scrumptious, irresistible treat.

East End 1888

William Fishman

Five Leaves Publications 978-0907123859

June 2005

East End 1888 is essential reading for anyone interested in social history and the history of London. Professor William Fishman shows what life was like for the labouring poor in the year of Jack the Ripper and the Matchgirls’ strike, when poverty, crime, disease and social unrest were at their height.

The communal life of the street, pubs and clubs softened the brutality of the daily grind, where the sweatshop, the ghetto, the poor tenement — and the threat of the workhouse - were ever present in an age of genuine “Victorian values”.

"In the hands of virtually any other historian this would have been a depressing book. But Bill Fishman has a gift, shared with Richard Cobb, of writing about horrible subjects in such a way as to leave you thinking that there is a God in heaven after all."
- Norman Stone, Sunday Times

William (Bill) Fishman is the chronicler of London’s East End. His other books include The Streets of East London and East End Jewish Radicals 1875–1914, recently re-issued by Five Leaves. The author is the son of an immigrant tailor, a visiting professor at Queen Mary College, University of London and former visiting professor at Columbia University and the University of Wisconsin. Now retired, he regularly leads East End walks and lectures in social history.

How Football explains the world
Franklin Foer

Arrow ISBN 0099492261

What in the world has the power to liberate women in Iran while provoking antagonism between Catholics and Protestants in Scotland, to lure Nigerians to the cold of the Ukraine while heating up class warfare in the US heartlands, and both profit local gangsters and create local – and international - celebrities? Foer presents an unexpected, uniquely revealing tour of the politics and culture of football from Milan to Tehran. He examines the game’s role in sustaining ancient hatreds and rivalries (Serbia’s Red Star and Croatia’s Dinamo); in supporting the migration of players and the rise of the football oligarchs (such as Silvio Berlusconi, President of AC Milan – and of Italy); and in defending the virtues and vices of old-fashioned nationalism. As Foer brilliantly illuminates, the Balkan War, anti-Semitism, Jewish identity, racism, social integration, media manipulation, and American patriotism have all been influenced by, as well as have had a dramatic effect on, football. On his travels, Foer encounters a collection of fans that is stranger than fiction: from a British hooligan with a Jewish mother, a Nazi father and a career as a soldier of fortune, to a fan club in Serbia that turns into a brutal anti-Muslim paramilitary unit. The result is an unforgettable parade of uniquely memorable fans – each set into his – or her – unique political and cultural context.

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Jewtopia

Bryan Foger and Sam Wolfson

Little, Brown ISBN 0446579548

You'll kvell. You'll plotz. You'll laugh your head off.

Bryan Fogel and Sam Wolfson, two nice Jewish boys who speak to their mothers an average of 12.6 times a day, deliver the ultimate book of Jewish humour.

Filled with full kosher colour photos, quizzes and illustrations, Jewtopia includes: The Official Jewish babysitter Application, requiring a urine sample; Middle school GPA and 14 non-family references; The Jewish Nursery blueprint, complete with panic room, fireproof wallpaper and guardian ninja; The top-ten list of Jewish 'don'ts' (No. 1: Never be in perfect health); The complete timeline of Jewish expulsion and much more.

Yes, But Is It Good For the Jews?

Jonny Geller

Penguin  ISBN 9780713999594

For the first time, the secrets of the ancient art of Judology are revealed. Think of it as the third cousin of Kabbalah. Yes, but is it Good for the Jews? is a hilarious and indispensable A–Z of world history and popular culture, measuring whether a wide variety of subjects are, in fact, Good for the Jews.

We can reveal to the outside world (yes, Non-Jews are allowed to buy this book), the mathematical formula that determines whether someone or something is Good for the Jews. The Judological Institute of Spiritual Mathematics (or JISM) will show that while Guilt, Google and Star Wars are Good for the Jews, Sudoku and Colonic Irrigation are Not. In a whistlestop tour you’ll also discover just what’s right about Big Brother, what’s wrong about Madonna, what products you should avoid, and which ones you really should rush out and buy.

Bonus features include a list of top Jews to marry (Scarlet Johanssen is Jewish!), a ‘Jew or False’ quiz and ‘Ashamed of Your Name? Jews that Switched’ – which reveals the original name of Kirk Douglas, among others.

For the confused Gentile, a simple questionnaire ‘How Jew are You?’ may help. (Remember, as the first Prime Minister of Israel himself said, ‘Anyone meshugge enough to call himself a Jew, IS a Jew.’)

You can visit Jonny Geller's website and blog at www.isitgoodforthejews.com.

Jonny Geller, Director of JISM, whose international headquarters is in Cockfosters.

East End Chronicles

Ed Glinert

Penguin ISBN 9780141017181

June 2006

The East End:  Roman burial ground, medieval rubbish tip, Victorian hellhole, WW2 bombing target, 21st century gentrification template.  Always a rum place, the industrial revolution replaced rose bushes and hedgerows with metallic roads and iron railways, mudbanks give way to deep-water docks and sweatshops.  East End Chronicles tells the story of this part of London that has always enthralled writers and readers through the bizarre, the unusual, the arcane and the mysterious.  Chapters on the Silk Weavers of Spitalfields; Docks, Dockers and River Pirates; Murder and Mayhem on the Radcliffe Highway; Myths and Mythmakers; The Blitz and Bombs; The Jewish Ghetto and more reveal the real underbelly of the history of the East End.

The Divided Self
Israel and the Jewish Psyche Today
David J. Goldberg
IB Tauris ISBN 184511054

How should Jews respond to an age of militant Zionism and resurgent anti-Semitism? Is insisting on a separate sense of identity anachronistic and dangerous, or is it the only way of preserving the Jewish cultural heritage? Rabbi David Goldberg, one of today's most respected and outspoken Jewish leaders, grapples with the dilemmas of contemporary Jewishness with characteristic candour, and sketches the emerging faultlines in the Jewish sense of identity. He offers up a completely fresh reading of Jewish history, arguing that the narrative of relentless woe and suffering popularised by nineteenth-century writers, such as George Eliot was based on a highly selective reading of the past. Goldberg retraces the history of the Jews, and rejects the mythology of eternal victimhood. Instead, he focuses on the survival strategies that have been pursued throughout the centuries. He contrasts the pragmatic flexibility of the Jewish Diaspora with the military assertiveness of modern Israel. With wit, insight and compassion he highlights the growing gulf between Israeli and Diaspora Jewishness. Following G.B. Shaw's quip about Britain and America, Goldberg argues that Israeli and Diaspora Jews are in danger of becoming divided by a common heritage. This book will stimulate, engage and provoke readers of all beliefs and cultures.

The Book of "Exodus": The Making and Meaning of "Bob Marley and the Wailers'" Album of the Century

Vivien Goldman

Aurum Press ISBN 1845132106

Recorded in London after an assassination attempt sent him into exile from Jamaica, and named by "Time" magazine as the album of the century, "Exodus" is Bob Marley's masterpiece of spiritual exploration. Much more than just a making-of-the-record story, The Book of Exodus takes in the history of Jamaican music, Marley's personal journey from Trench Town ghetto to global superstardom, his political involvement, Rastafarianism, and the biblical roots of the "Exodus" story, culminating in his triumphant return to the stage in Jamaica at the Peace Concert of 1978.

As PR for Island Records, Vivien Goldman was instrumental in introducing white audiences to the Rasta sound of Bob Marley. Here, she provides a unique first-hand account of the album "Exodus", from its conception in Jamaica to the intense, sometimes raucous all-night studio sessions in London. The Book of Exodus is an unforgettable portrait of Marley from a member of his intimate circle and an acutely perceptive appreciation of his musical and spiritual legacy.

Rome and Jerusalem: The Clash of Ancient Civilizations

Martin Goodman

Allen Lane ISBN 9780713994476

   In AD 70, after a war which had flared sporadically for four years, three  Roman legions under the future Emperors Vespasian and his  son Titus, surrounded, laid siege to, and eventually devastated the city of Jerusalem,destroying completely the magnificent Temple which had been built by Herod only 80 years earlier. What brought about this extraordinary conflict, with its extraordinary consequences? This superb book, by one of the world's leading scholars of the ancient Roman and Jewish worlds, narrates and explains this titanic struggle, showing why Rome's interests were served by this policy of brutal hostility, and how the first generation of Christians first distanced themselves from its Jewish origins and then became increasingly hostile to Jews as their influence spread within the empire. The book thus also provides an exceptional and original account of the origins of anti-semitism, whose history has had often cataclysmic reverberations down to our own time.

Shylock Is Shakespeare

Kenneth Gross

University of Chicago Press ISBN 0226309770

Shylock, the Jewish moneylender in The Merchant of Venice who famously demands a pound of flesh as security for a loan to his antisemitic tormentors, is one of Shakespeare’s most complex and idiosyncratic characters. With his unsettling eloquence and his varying voices of protest, play, rage, and refusal, Shylock remains a source of perennial fascination. What explains the strange and enduring force of this character, so unlike that of any other in Shakespeare’s plays? Kenneth Gross posits that the figure of Shylock is so powerful because he is the voice of Shakespeare himself.

Marvelously speculative and articulate, Gross’s book argues that Shylock is a breakthrough for Shakespeare the playwright, an early realization of the Bard’s power to create dramatic voices that speak for hidden, unconscious, even inhuman impulses—characters larger than the plays that contain them and ready to escape the author’s control. Shylock is also a mask for Shakespeare’s own need, rage, vulnerability, and generosity, giving form to Shakespeare’s ambition as an author and his uncertain bond with the audience. Gross’s vision of Shylock as Shakespeare’s covert double leads to a probing analysis of the character’s peculiar isolation, ambivalence, opacity, and dark humor. Addressing the broader resonance of Shylock, both historical and artistic, Gross examines the character’s hold on later readers and writers, including Heinrich Heine and Philip Roth, suggesting that Shylock mirrors the ambiguous states of Jewishness in modernity. 

A bravura critical performance, Shylock Is Shakespeare will fascinate readers with its range of reference, its union of rigor and play, and  its conjectural—even fictive—means of coming to terms with the question of Shylock, ultimately taking readers to the very heart of Shakespeare’s humanizing genius.

Lion’s Honey

David Grossman

Canongate ISBN 1841956562

'There are few other Bible stories with so much drama and action, narrative fireworks and raw emotion, as we find in the tale of Samson: the battle with the lion; the three hundred burning foxes; the women he bedded and the one woman that he loved; his betrayal by all the women in his life, from his mother to Delilah; and, in the end, his murderous suicide, when he brought the house down on himself and three thousand Philistines.

Yet, beyond the wild impulsiveness, the chaos, the din, we can make out a life story that is, at bottom, the tortured journey of a single, lonely and turbulent soul who never found, anywhere, a true home in the world, whose very body was a harsh place of exile.

'For me, this discovery, this recognition, is the point at which the myth - for all its grand images, its larger-than-life adventures - slips silently into the day-to-day existence of each of us, into our most private moments, our buried secrets.'

From David Grossman's Introduction to Lion's Honey

"His journey takes us to the heart of ourselves, in this millennia-old creation of a man like Oedipus whose tragedy was that his own predestined story was too big for his soul to bear."

The Independent

"Taking each element of the Samson story as written in the Bible, Grossman approaches the text with the modern advantage of psychology and historical knowledge... Some might object to a psychological deconstruction of a story never intended to relate to an individual character but Grossman's engaging approach is certainly successful in keeping an ancient myth alive." Metro

The Resurgence of Anti-Semitism: Jews, Israel, and Liberal Opinion

Bernard Harrison

Rowman & Littlefield ISBN 0-7425-5227-6 / 978-0-7425-5227-2

October 2006

Recently, Jewish voices have begun to warn against a "new anti-Semitism" fueled by moral concerns about Israel. Opponents have retorted that opposition to "Zionism" is by no means anti-Semitic. This book, by a non-Jewish analytic philosopher, assesses the relative merits of these opposed views and offers a detailed examination of the moral and intellectual credentials of the widespread current of opinion whose growth underlies both.

Bernard Harrison is Emeritus E.E. Ericksen Professor of Philosophy at the University of Utah. His recent books include Inconvenient Fictions: Literature and the Limits of Philosophy and (with Patricia Hanna) Word and World: Practice and the Foundations of Language .  

Suburban Shaman – Tales from Medicine’s Frontline

Cecil Helman

Hammersmith Press ISBN: 1-905140-08-8

‘Medicine is not just about science. It’s also all about stories, and about the mingling of narratives among doctors,

and between them and their patients.’

So writes Cecil Helman after 27 years as a family practitioner in and around London interlaced with training and research as a medical anthropologist, comparing a wide variety of medical systems and other forms of healing.This unique combination of frontline health worker and detached academic informs the many stories that make up this fascinating book. It also informs the author’s insights into what human suffering can teach us about ourselves and our own attitudes to health and illness, whether we are deliverers or recipients of health care.

With insight and compassion, Dr Helman’s stories take the reader on a journey from apartheid South Africa, where he did his medical training, to the London of the early 1970s, where for a short time he foreswore medicine to become an anthropologist and poet; from ship’s doctor on a Mediterranean cruise to family practitioner in London; from observing curative trance dances in the favelas of Brazil to interviewing sangomas in South Africa.

While trained in the Western tradition and with many years of practice in that system, Dr Helman’s anthropological insight leads him to view illness in a wider personal, social and

cultural context, considering elements beyond the purely physical. In pleading for this holistic approach he celebrates family medicine which ‘in its quiet and unassuming way, and every day of the week, is still at the very frontline of human suffering’.

Dr Cecil Helman was born in Cape Town, South Africa into a family of doctors. He studied medicine there during the apartheid era before moving to the UK where he studied anthropology at University College London. After a spell as a ship’s doctor he became a family practitioner in London while also developing a distinguished academic career. He has been a Visiting Fellow in Social Medicine and Health Policy at Harvard Medical School and a Visiting Professor in Multi-cultural Health at University of New South Wales. He

retired from clinical practice in 2002 and is currently Professor of Medical Anthropology at Brunel University and Senior Lecturer in the Department of Primary Care & Population Sciences, Royal Free & University College Medical School, London, UK. He is the author of the leading textbook Culture, Health and Illness which has been used in 42 countries, and of a book of essays, and several books of poetry. Suburban Shaman is the story of his experiences.

Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity: Essays

Abraham Joshua Heschel
Edited by Susannah Heschel
Farrar, Straus and Giroux ISBN: 0-374-52495-5

A Faithful Sea: The Religious Cultures of the Mediterranean, 1200-1700
Adnan Husain

One World Publications ISBN 1-85168-496-4

July 2007

Contemporary academia relies upon categorization. One can study Africa or Europe; East or West; the Middle Ages or the Early Modern period. In this innovative collection of essays, the Mediterranean is taken as a whole. Distinctive both in scope and approach, A Faithful Sea addresses a wide array of cases of Mediterranean interreligious tradition and identity in the Medieval and Early Modern periods. With contributions from leading specialists on Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, readers will discover how the birthplace of the three principal monotheistic religions is a distinct cultural space characterized by hybridity, diversity, and cultural dynamism.

Adnan A. Husain is Associate Professor and a Queen’s National Scholar at Queen’s University, Kingston. K.E. Fleming is Director of the Center for European and Mediterranean Studies at New York University, and Associate Director of the Remarque Institute.

The Year of Living Biblically

A. J. Jacobs

Heinemann ISBN 978-0434017119

February 2008

Avoiding shellfish was easy. The stoning of adulterers proved a little more difficult - and potentially controversial. Was it enough to walk up to an adulterer and gently touch them with a stone? Even that could be grounds for accusations of assault, especially with female adulterers in Manhattan. So what's a good Bible-reading boy to do? Raised in a secular family but increasingly interested in the relevance of faith in our modern world, A.J. Jacobs decides to dive in head first and attempt to obey the hundreds of less-publicized rules. The resulting spiritual journey is at once funny and profound, reverent and irreverent, personal and universal, and will make you see history's most influential book with new eyes.Jacobs immerses himself in prayer, tends sheep in the Israeli desert, fights idolatry, and tells the absolute truth in all situations - much to his wife's chagrin. His beard grows so unruly that he is mistaken for a member of ZZ Top. He tours a Kentucky-based Creationist museum, dances with Hasidic Jews in Brooklyn and studies scripture with Jehovah's witnesses. And he wrestles with the seemingly archaic rules that baffle the twenty-first century brain, yielding unexpected ephiphanies and challenges. A book that will charm readers secular and religious, "The Year Of Living Biblically" is part York Notes to the bible, part memoir, and part look into worlds unimaginable. Thou shalt not be able to put it down...

Treasures of Jewish Heritage

The Jewish Museum, London

Scala Publishers  ISBN 1 85759 413 4

The publication of Treasures of Jewish Heritage celebrates in a richly illustrated catalogue the outstanding collections of The Jewish Museum, London.

The history of Jewish people in Britain and the context of religious life, is interweaved with specialist essays by experts on the range of media represented within the collection (Manuscripts, Prints and Drawings, Life Cycle objects, Silver and Textiles). Further essays on the Jewish East End, refugees from Nazism and the diverse patterns of Jewish migration to Britain, are illuminated by fascinating photographs, prints and objects from the Museum's collection.

Contributors to the publication include historians Sir Martin Gilbert and Dr Anne Kershen, as well as authorities such as Dr David Bindman, Professor of Art History at University College London; Anthony Phillips, International Director of Silver and Objects of Vertu at Christie’s; Dr Shalom Sabar, Associate Professor of Jewish and Comparative Folklore at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and Ilana Tahan, Curator of Hebrew Collections at the British Library. The book is introduced with a foreword by Lord Moser.

This is the first major publication of the Jewish Museum in London’s collections for more than 30 years. The Museum has recently undertaken an extensive programme of digital photography which is utilised beautifully in this new publication. Treasures of Jewish Heritage updates the information in RD Barnett’s Catalogue of the Jewish Museum, published in 1974 and now out of print and a collector’s item in its own right, but also includes important new acquisitions of recent decades and essays on the social history collections of the former London Museum of Jewish Life, now amalgamated with the Jewish Museum.  This catalogue publication complements the new online searchable collections, offering a comprehensive view of the collections, while the website www.jewishmuseum.org.uk  allows researchers to search for more than 11,500 individual objects.

Available from The Jewish Museum Shop at 129-131 Albert Street, Camden Town NW1 7NB. Tel: 020 7284 1997. E: shop@jewishmuseum.org.uk. 

Jewish Travel Guide 2007

Vallentine Mitchell  ISBN 9780853037361

For almost fifty years the Jewish Travel Guide has been the essential reference book for all Jewish travellers worldwide, whether travelling on business, for pleasure, or to seek their historical roots. Rigorously edited and up-dated every year, each country has a short commentary including demographic details, emergency numbers, and dialling codes. Other information includes restaurants, mikvaot, synagogues, theatres, embassies, museums, hotels, booksellers, cultural festivals, media, community organisations, groceries, bakeries, kosher food, butchers, delicatessens, libraries, and tourist sites. There's even a guide to kosher fish across the world. The Jewish Travel Guide is universally recognised as the ultimate source of information for the Jew abroad. The Jewish Review says, "It is a must for every traveller" the Jewish Chronicle observes, "The book validates its motto: ‘Don't go without it’" The Jerusalem Post comments, "The Guide offers a well-rounded demographic portrait of world Jewry today, serving as much as a handbook and resource for professionals in the Jewish world, as a travel guide." The Jewish Travel Guide is the essential travelling companion, making your journey even easier and more pleasurable!

Jewish Year Book 2007

Stephen W. Massil

Vallentine Mitchell  ISBN 9780853037354


The Jewish Year Book 2007 provides a comprehensive directory of the communal institutions and organisations that make up the fabric of British Jewish society. It is a guide to the structures and networks of the religious, social, educational, cultural, and welfare organisations of the Jewish community across the British Isles and reports the ever-changing pattern of websites, now such a pervasive feature of communal management and presentation. It also offers an extensive guide to the primary organisations of the Jewish communities of the world and a substantial survey of Israel and its organisations that have associations with British Jewry, including a comprehensive list of Israel’s overseas embassies and missions. It sets out the basic facts of the history of Jewish settlement in Britain and an up-to-date statement of UK legislation specifically concerned with the place of the Jews and Jewish identity in Britain. Updated annually, edited to provide the latest, up-to-date information, it includes contact details for Jewish institutions, local and international organisations, details on leading Jewish personalities, obituaries, and major events as well as principal festivals and fasts. There is also a detailed calendar, including the Jewish calendar for thirty years and evening twilight regional variations.

Loving Every Child: Wisdom for Parents

Janusz Korczak

Edited by Sandra Joseph

Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill ISBN 139781565124899

Born in 1878 in Poland, Janusz Korczak was a doctor, broadcaster, philosopher, and fighter for the rights of the child. A visionary and an activist, he spoke of the need for a Declaration of Children’s Rights long before one was adopted by the League of Nations in 1924.

How to Love a Child makes Korczak’s philosophy available in the United States for the first time. This collection of 150 quotations illuminates the lives of children.As relevant and true as if it had been written today, its simple, basic premise is that understanding our children is the key to being able to take care of them, respect them, and love them.Korczak held strong convictions: A child hungry for advice and direction will absorb it, digest it and assimilate it. Overfed with moral rules the child will suffer from nausea; offered expert advice: If a child trusts you with her secret, be grateful. For her confidence is the highest

prize; and was a candid observer of human nature: Adults are unfair. When they’re in a good mood then everything is allowed, but when they’re cross, every little thing disturbs them.

We hope Korczak’s wisdom, presented in gift-book format, will inspire yet another generation of mothers, fathers, and teachers.

Jewish Heritage in England

Sharman Kadish

English Heritage ISBN 978-1905624287

November 2006

2006 marks the 350th Anniversary of the Resettlement of the Jewish community in England. In 1656, Jews returned to England after an absence of nearly 400 years, since the medieval expulsion under Edward I in 1290. Jews from Amsterdam came back in the wake of Rabbi Menasseh Ben Israel's petition to Oliver Cromwell, during the brief period when England was a republic. The Jewish community has enjoyed a history of continuous settlement in England since 1656, a record unmatched anywhere else in Europe.

Today, Anglo-Jewry, a small community that has never numbered more than about 450,000 people, is the oldest non-Christian minority in Britain.

For the first time, Jewish Heritage in England celebrates in full colour the undiscovered heritage of Anglo-Jewry. It is the first comprehensive guide to historic synagogues and sites in this country dating from before the Second World War, based on an authoritative survey carried out with the support of English Heritage and the Heritage Lottery Fund.

The guide is easy to use, covering more than 300 sites, organised on a region-by-region basis. Each section highlights major Jewish landmarks, ranging from Britain's oldest synagogue, Bevis Marks Synagogue in the City of London, through the Georgian gems of the West Country to the splendid High Victorian "cathedral synagogues" of Birmingham, Brighton and Liverpool. Heritage trails around former Jewish quarters of the major cities are included. Relics of Anglo-Jewry's medieval past are explored in York, Lincoln and Norwich, and venerable burial grounds with Hebrew inscriptions are found in the unlikeliest of places. Curious oddities are not to be missed, including a 19th-century private penthouse synagogue in Brighton and an Egyptian-style Mikveh [ritual bath] in Canterbury. This guide will undoubtedly appeal both to the specialist and the tourist alike.

God's Gold: The Quest for the Lost Temple Treasure of Jerusalem

Sean Kingsley

John Murray 071956803X

God`s Gold charts the fate of the greatest religious treasure in history, the key symbols of the Jewish faith – looted from the Temple of Jerusalem. The golden candelabrum, silver trumpets and bejewelled Table of the Divine Presence were ransacked by the Roman emperor Vespasian and his son, Titus, in AD 70. They were cast adrift in Mediterranean lands, which saw 550 years of turbulent history and the rule of four different civilisations. Now, only an intriguing trail of clues remains as to their whereabouts.

The Temple treasure is an immeasurably precious hoard, but it has yet greater significance as a symbol of man`s communications with God. The gold is central to Israel`s dreams for messianic redemption and it`s discovery could signify the return to an age of biblical sacrifice.

Using untapped historical texts and new archaeological sources, Sean Kingsley reveals the incredible history of this treasure, its composition and religious, political and financial meaning across the ages. Unexpected discoveries send him on a physical pilgrimage to trace the treasure`s destiny, which exposes facts more astonishing than fiction.

Yiddish Civilisation: The Rise and Fall of a Forgotten Nation

Paul Kriwaczek

Phoenix Press ISBN-10: 0753819031

A portrait of a civilisation which flourished within living memory and left an indelible mark on history. In the 13th century Yiddish language and culture began to spread from the Rhineland and Bavaria slowly east into Austria, Bohemia and Moravia, then to Poland and Lithuania and finally to western Russia and the Ukraine, becoming steadily less German and more Slav in the process. In its late-medieval heyday the culturally vibrant, economically successful, intellectually adventurous and largely self-ruling Yiddish society stretched from Riga on the Baltic down to Odessa on the Black Sea.

In the 1650s the Chmielnicki Massacres in the Ukraine by the Cossacks killed 100,000 Jews, forcing those that were left to spread out into the small towns (shtetls) and villages. The break-up of Poland-Lithuania - a safe haven for Jews in previous centuries - in the late 18th century further disrupted Yiddish society, as did the Russian anti-Jewish pogroms from the 1880s onwards, at the very time when Yiddish was producing a rich stream of plays, poems and novels.
Paul Kriwaczek describes the development, over the centuries, of Yiddish language, religion, occupations and social life, art, music and literature. The book ends by describing how the Yiddish way of life became one of the foundation stones of modern American, and therefore of world, culture.

Paul Kriwaczek was born in Vienna in 1937. In London he trained as a dentist, and spent a decade working in Iran and Afghanistan. From there he travelled extensively in Asia and Africa before developing a career in broadcasting and journalism. In 1970 he joined the BBC full-time and wrote, produced and directed for 25 years. He is fluent in six languages, including Farsi and Yiddish.

Nonviolence

Mark Kurlansky

Jonathan Cape ISBN: 0224077910

The conventional history of nations, even continents, is a history of warfare. According to this view, all the important ideas and significant changes of humankind occured as part of an effort to win one violent, bloody conflict or another.

This approach to history is only one of many examples of how societies promote warfare and glorify violence. But there have always been a few who have refused to fight. Governments have long regarded this minority as a danger to society and have imprisoned and abused them and encouraged their persecution.

This was true of those who refused Europe’s wars, who refused to fight for their king, who refused to fight for Napoleon as well as against him. It was true of Virginia Woolf’s sister Vanessa and her husband Clive Bell – outcasts in rural Sussex because they opposed World War I at a time when the British socialist movement described a bayonet as a weapon with a worker on each end.It was true of the first American draft dodger, a Menonite who believed in American independence but believed it was wrong to use violence and rejected the call of his local militia. It was true of the many abolitionists who had dedicated their lives to stopping slavery but refused to fight in the Civil War.

Judaism, Islam, Christianity, Hinduism, Buddhism and, most impressively, the Menonites and the Quakers - all have passages in their major teachings rejecting warfare as immoral. In this brilliant exploration of pacifism, these points of view are discussed alongside such diverse non-violence theorists as Tolstoy, Shelley, Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Aldous Huxley, Erasmus, Confucius and Lao Tse to show how many modern ideas - such as a united Europe, the United Nations, and the abolition of slavery - originated in such non-violence movements.

Web of Deceit: The History of Western Complicity in Iraq, from Churchill to Kennedy to George W. Bush
Barry Lando

The Other Press ISBN-10: 1590512383

An investigative history of Western complicity in Saddam Hussein’s crimes reveals the story his trial never will.

In February 1991, the Shia of southern Iraq rose against Saddam Hussein.
Barry M. Lando, a former investigative producer for 60 Minutes, argues compellingly that this ill-fated uprising represents one instance among many of Western complicity in Saddam Hussein’s crimes against humanity. The Shia were responding to the call for rebellion from President George H.W. Bush that was broadcast repeatedly across Iraq by clandestine CIA stations. But, just as the revolution was on the brink of success, the United States and its allies turned their backs. In the end, tens of thousands were massacred.

Because of restrictions imposed by the Special Tribunal prosecuting Saddam Hussein, the extensive role of the U.S. and its allies in his crimes will never be explored at his trial. But as Web of Deceit demonstrates, the nations that now denounce Saddam most prominently secretly backed the dictator from his rise to power in the 1960s and ‘70s to his offensives in Iran and, despite warnings, took no action to stop his invasion of Kuwait. They also turned their backs when he used chemical weapons against the Iraqi people and persisted in international sanctions long after they had proved ineffective and, for hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians, lethal.

Web of Deceit draws on a wide range of journalism and scholarship to present a complete picture of what really happened in Iraq under Saddam, detailing – for the first time – the complicity of the West in its full and alarming extent.

Female Chauvinist Pigs : Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture
Ariel Levy

Simon and Schuster ISBN 0743249895

Meet the Female Chauvinist Pig--the new brand of "empowered woman" who wears the Playboy bunny as a talisman, bares all for Girls Gone Wild, pursues casual sex as if it were a sport, and embraces "raunch culture" wherever she finds it. If male chauvinist pigs of years past thought of women as pieces of meat, Female Chauvinist Pigs of today are doing them one better, making sex objects of other women--and of themselves. They think they're being brave, they think they're being funny, but in Female Chauvinist Pigs, New York magazine writer Ariel Levy asks if the joke is on them.

In her quest to uncover why this is happening, Levy interviews college women who flash for the cameras on spring break and teens raised on Paris Hilton and breast implants. She examines a culture in which every music video seems to feature a stripper on a pole, the memoirs of porn stars are climbing the best-seller lists, Olympic athletes parade their Brazilian bikini waxes in the pages of Playboy, and thongs are marketed to prepubescent girls. Levy meets the high-powered women who create raunch culture--the new oinking women warriors of the corporate and entertainment worlds who eagerly defend their efforts to be "one of the guys." And she traces the history of this trend back to conflicts between the women's movement and the sexual revolution long left unresolved.

In the tradition of Susan Faludi's Backlash and Naomi Wolf's The Beauty Myth, Levy pulls apart the myth of the Female Chauvinist Pig and argues that what has come to pass for liberating rebellion is actually a kind of limiting conformity. Irresistibly witty and wickedly intelligent, Female Chauvinist Pigs makes the case that the rise of raunch does not represent how far women have come, it only proves how far they have left to go.

Back to the top

The Gibbon's in Decline but the Horse is Stable

Anthropoemorphic Ramblings

Maureen Lipman

Robson Books ISBN 1861059698

An Owl adored a sorceress
But loved a white witch too
Which to wed and which to bed?
To wit: which witch to woo?

From the ostra-cised Ostrich to the dandy Cayote they called Don Quixote, from the fetishistic Zebra to the missing Lynx, here is a delighful menagerie of irreverent, laugh-aloud animal verse from the ever-inventive pen of the wonderful Maureen Lipman. Brilliantly illustrated by Gerald Scarfe, Posy Simmonds,Mac, Jan Pienkowski  and other leading cartoonists, and with all royalties going to the International Myeloma Foundation, here is a book destined for the best-seller lists.     
 
One of Britain's best-loved actresses, Maureen Lipman is currently directing the BBC dramatisation of her late husband Jack Rosenthal's autobiography in which she appears. Her best-selling books include How Was It For You?, and Lip Reading.

A Reading Diary

Alberto Manguel

Canongate ISBN 1841958212

While travelling in Calgary, Alberto Manguel was struck by how the novel he was reading (Goethe's Elective Affinities) seemed to reflect the social chaos of the world he was living in. An article in the daily paper would be suddenly illuminated by a passage in the novel; a long reflection would be prompted by a single word.

He decided to keep a record of these moments, rereading a book a month, and formed A Reading Diary: a volume of notes, impressions of travel, of friends, of public and private events, all elicited by his reading.

From Don Quixote (January) to The Sign of Four (October) to The Wind in the Willows (December), Manguel leads us on an enthralling adventure in literature and life, and demonstrates how, for the passionate reader, one is utterly inextricable from the other.

The Great Escape: Nine Jews Who Fled Hitler and Changed the World

Kati Marton

Simon & Schuster Ltd  ISBN 978-0743261159

May 2007

Author Kati Marton follows these nine over the decades as they flee fascism and anti-Semitism, seek sanctuary in England and America, and set out to make their mark. The scientists Leo Szilard, Edward Teller, and Eugene Wigner enlist Albert Einstein to get Franklin Roosevelt to initiate the development of the atomic bomb. Along with John von Neuman, who pioneers the computer, they succeed in achieving that goal before Nazi Germany, ending the Second World War, and opening a new age. Arthur Koestler writes the most important anti-Communist novel of the century, Darkness at Noon. Robert Capa is the first photographer ashore on D-Day. He virtually invents photojournalism and gives us some of the century's most enduring records of modern warfare. Andre Kertesz pioneers modern photojournalism, and Alexander Korda, who makes wartime propaganda films for Churchill, leaves a stark portrait of post war Europe with The Third Man, as his fellow filmmaker, Michael Curtiz, leaves us the immortal Casablanca, a call to arms and the most famous romantic film of all time. Marton brings passion and breadth to these dramatic lives as they help invent the twentieth century.

In Their Own Image: New York Jews in Jazz Age Popular Culture
Ted Merwin
Rutgers University Press ISBN 0-8135-3809-2

The Jazz Age of the 1920s is an era remembered for illegal liquor, innovative music and dance styles, and burgeoning ideas of social equality. It was also the period during which second-generation Jews began to emerge as a significant demographic in New York City. In Their Own Image examines the growing cultural visibility of Jewish life amid this vibrant scene.

From the vaudeville routines of Fanny Brice, Eddie Cantor, George Jessel, and Sophie Tucker, to the slew of Broadway comedies about Jewish life and the silent films that showed immigrant families struggling to leave the ghetto, images and representations of Jews became staples of interwar popular culture. Through the performing arts, Jews expressed highly ambivalent feelings about their identification with Jewish and American cultures. Ted Merwin shows how they became American by producing and consuming not images of another group, but images of themselves. As a result, they humanized Jewish stereotypes, softened anti-Semitic attitudes, and laid the groundwork for today's Jewish comedians.

An entertaining look at the role popular culture plays in promoting the acculturation of an ethnic group, In Their Own Image enhances our understanding of American Jewish history and provides a model for the study of other groups and their integration into mainstream society.

Ted Merwin teaches Religion and Judaic Studies at Dickinson College (Carlisle, PA) where he also directs the Milton B. Asbell Center for Jewish Life. For the last six years, he has served as chief theater critic of the New York Jewish Week, the largest-circulation Jewish newspaper in the United States. His articles appear in newspapers throughout the country..

365 Ways to Change the World

Michael Norton

Harper Perennial ISBN 978-0-00-724230-6

Londonistan

Melanie Phillips

Gibson Square ISBN 1903933765

The suicide bombings carried out in London in 2005 by British Muslims revealed an alarming network of Islamist terrorists and their sympathizers. Under the noses of British intelligence, London became the European hub for the promotion, recruitment and financing of Islamist terror and extremism - so much so that it has been mockingly dubbed 'Londonistan'. In this ground-breaking book, Melanie Phillips pieces together the story of how Londonistan developed as a result of the collapse of British self-confidence and national identity and its resulting paralysis by multiculturalism and appeasement. The result is an ugly climate in Britain of irrationality and defeatism, which now threatens to undermine the alliance with America and imperil the defence of the free world.

"Melanie Phillips’s Londonistan is a last-minute warning for Britain and for much of the free world ... This book is powerful and frightening, but also courageous. In dictatorships, you need courage to fight evil; in the free world, you need courage to see the evil."  Natan Sharansky

What I Do: More True Tales of Everyday Craziness

Jon Ronson

Picador ISBN 9780330453738 
November 2007

In What I Do: More True Tales of Everyday Craziness, the second volume of Jon Ronson’s collected Guardian journalism, he hilariously demonstrates how our everyday lives are determined by the craziest thoughts and obsessions; how we spend our time believing in and getting worked up by complete nonsense. But also, as he chillingly demonstrates, there are clever people working in the highest echelons of business who are employed to spot, nurture and exploit the irrationalities of those among us who can barely cope as it is.

In part one, read about the time Jon inadvertently made a lewd gesture to a passing fourteen-year-old girl late at night in the lobby of a country-house hotel. And about his burgeoning obsession with a new neighbour who refused to ask him what he did for a living, despite Jon’s constant dropping of intriguing hints. And about the embarrassment of being caught recycling small talk at a party.

In part two, read some of Jon’s longer stories, which explore manifestations of insanity in the wider world: the tiny town of North Pole, Alaska, where it’s Christmas 365 days of the year; behind the scenes at Deal or No Deal, which Jon likens to a cult with Noel Edmonds as its high priest; a meeting with TV hypnotist Paul McKenna, who has joined forces with a self-help guru who once stood trial for murder – but can they cure Jon of his one big phobia?

As hilarious as it is perturbing, Jon Ronson’s new collection is a treat for everyone who has ever suspected themselves to be at the mercy of forces they can barely comprehend.

The Home We Build Together: Recreating Society

Jonathan Sacks

Continuum ISBN 978-0826480705

October 2007

This is Jonathan Sacks' new book on the future of British society and the dangers facing liberal democracy. A counterweight to his earlier book, "The Dignity of Difference", Sacks makes the case for "integrated diversity" within a framework of shared political values. Arguing that global communications have fragmented national cultures and that multiculturalism, intended to reduce social friction, is today reinforcing it, Sacks calls for a new approach to national identity. He envisions a responsibility-based rather than rights-based model of citizenship that connects the ideas of giving and belonging. We should see society as "the home we build together", bringing the distinctive gifts of different groups to the common good. Sacks warns of the hazards free and open societies face in the 21st century, and offers an unusual religious defence of liberal democracy and the nation state. This logical sequel to Sacks' award-winning "The Dignity of Difference" (Continuum), "The Home We Build Together" makes a compelling case for "integrated diversity" within a framework of shared political values.

Musicophilia

Oliver Sacks

Picador ISBN 9780330418379 
November 2007

Oliver Sacks has been hailed by the New York Times as ‘one of the great clinical writers of the twentieth century’. In this eagerly awaited new book, the subject of his uniquely literate scrutiny is music: our relationship with it, our facility for it, and what this most universal of passions says about us.

In chapters examining savants and synaesthetics, depressives and musical dreamers, Sacks succeeds not only in articulating the musical experience but in locating it in the human brain. He shows that music is not simply about sound, but also movement, visualization, and silence. He follows the experiences of patients suddenly drawn to or suddenly divorced from music. And in so doing he shows, as only he can, both the extraordinary spectrum of human expression and the capacity of music to heal.

Wise, compassionate and compellingly readable, Musicophilia promises, like all the best writing, to alter our conception of who we are and how we function, to lend a fascinating insight into the mysteries of the mind, and to show us what it is to be human.

Let's Schmooze: Jewish Words Today

Julian Sinclair

Continuum ISBN 082649711X

Can you tell Kol Nidre from kneidlach? Gushpankas from Gematrias? Naches from nachos? At last here is the book for you. With the belated entry of schlepp, shalom, spiel and scores of other Hebrew and Yiddish words into the melting pot of mainstream usage, English speakers today need to know what these words mean, where they come from and how they are used. Julian Sinclair's book fills this need and much more. As entertaining as it is erudite, "Let's Schmooze," traces the trajectory of 150 Jewish words from the Bible and Talmud to Yiddish slang, yeshivish creole and youth movement patois. Spanning a plethora of Jewish situations and subcultures, including food, magic, lifecycle events, the Joys of Yinglish, surviving synagogue and the Kabbalah craze, Let's Schmooze uses the lens of language to provide a snapshot of Jewish society and spirituality today. With a light touch it also raises critical questions about the acculturation of minorities in a post-multicultural world.

Making Globalization Work 

 Joseph Stiglitz 

Allen Lane ISBN 0713999098

From the million-copy selling author of Globalization and its Discontents, the book that lays out the next stage in our understanding of a globalized world

Joseph Stiglitz's Globalization and its Discontents, which has now sold one million copies worldwide, looked at the problems of globalization; Making Globalization Work looks at solutions and to the future. Drawing on many examples from real life, and from his experiences travelling around the world in the last four years, Stiglitz argues that not only is there now recognition that there are problems with globalization as it has been managed, but that the forces for reform are already at work. The international community must make many difficult choices and there is no single set of policies which works for everyone. Stiglitz is cautiously optimistic that another world is possible, and that we can indeed make globalization work.

Joseph Stiglitz was Chief Economist at the World Bank until January 2000. Before that he was Chairman of President Clinton’s Council of Economic Advisors. He is currently Professor of Finance and Economics at Columbia University. He won the Nobel Prize for Economics in 2001.

You're Wearing That? 

Deborah Tannen

Virago ISBN 1-84408-406-X

Deborah Tannen's No. 1 New York Times bestseller You Just Don't Understand revolutionized communication between women and men. Mothers and daughters often misunderstand each other as they struggle to find the right balance between closeness and independence. They both want to be seen for who they really are, but tend to see the other as failing short of who she should be. Each overestimates the other's power and underestimates her own. Deborah Tannen examines every aspect of this complex dynamic, from the dark side that can shadow a woman throughout her life, to the new technologies like e-mail and Instant Messaging that are transforming mother-daughter communication. With groundbreaking insights, pitch-perfect dialogues, and deeply moving memories of her own mother, Tannen untangles the knots daughters and mothers can get tied up in. Eye-opening and heart-felt, You're Wearing THAT? illuminates and enriches one of the most important relationships in our lives.

Miss Herbert

Adam Thirlwell

Jonathan Cape ISBN 9780224081399

October 2007

The secret history of novelists is often a history of exile and tourism – a history of language learning.
Like the story of Gustave Flaubert and Juliet Herbert, it is a history of loss and mistakes.

Flaubert’s niece was taught by an English governess: Juliet Herbert. As Flaubert finished Madame Bovary, Miss Herbert translated his novel into English. But this translation has since been lost. No photographs of Miss Herbert survive, either.

Translation, and emigration, is the way into a new history of the novel – a history of loss, of mistakes. We assume that we can read novels in translation. We also assume that style does not translate. But the history of the novel is the history of style.

Miss Herbert solves this conundrum.

The book travels from Rio de Janeiro to Prague, from Moscow to London, from Trieste to Paris, from Warsaw to New York. On its zigzagging flight, it reinvents our ideas of style, and translation – introducing new theories of jet lag, of the time difference. Miss Herbert finds problems with accurate translations, and praises imperfect ones. It dismisses history and politics, replacing them with the fun of literary games.

This is not a novel, but an inside-out novel – with novelists as characters.

But Miss Herbert is not just a book. It demonstrates a new way of reading internationally. It is a project, a book of tricks ­– complete with maps, illustrations, and a variety of helpful diagrams. And it comes with a companion, a slim appendix: ‘Mademoiselle O’, a story by Vladimir Nabokov, written in French, about his own governess, never before fully translated into English.

Miss Herbert is a bedside travel book, a comprehensive city break: the most original and most stylish beach read.

Adam Thirlwell is twenty-four years old. He is the deputy editor of Areté, and lives in Oxford. In January 2003 he was chosen by Granta as one of the Best of Young British Novelists.

Just Say Nu: Yiddish for Every Occasion (When English Just Won't Do)
Michael Wex

St. Martin's Press ISBN 978-0312364625

October 2007

A cross between Henry Beard's Latin for All Occasions and Ben Schott's Schott's Original Miscellany, JUST SAY NU is a practical guide to using Yiddish words and expressions in day-to-day situations. Along with enough grammar to enable readers to put together a comprehensible sentence and avoid embarrassing mistakes, Wex also explains the five most useful Yiddish words–shoyn, nu, epes, takeh,and nebakh–what they mean, how and when to use them, and how they can be used to conduct an entire conversation without anybody ever suspecting that the reader doesn’t have the vaguest idea of what anyone is actually saying. Readers will learn how to shmooze their way through such activities as meeting and greeting; eating and drinking; praising and finding fault; maintaining personal hygiene; going to the doctor; driving; parenting; getting horoscopes; committing crimes; going to singles bars; having sex; talking politics and talking trash. Now that Stephen Colbert, a Catholic from South Carolina and host of the "Colbert Report," is using Yiddish to wish viewers a bright and happy Chanukah, people have finally started to realize that there’s nothing in the world that can’t be improved by translating it into Yiddish. Wex’s JUST SAY NU is the book that’s going to show them how.