“Zealot”
The more I probed the Bible to arm myself against the doubts of unbelievers, the more distance I discovered between the Jesus of the gospels and the Jesus of history – between Jesus the Christ and Jesus of Nazareth.
Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth by Reza Aslan was given to me to read by a Jewish friend, who told me “you have to read this book.” He had recently attended a gathering where the keynote speaker was Reza Aslan – an American-Iranian writer and academic in religious studies and creative writing – and was mesmerized by both the author and the book. Read more 
Günter Grass: 1927-2015
Günter Grass, the German novelist, poet, playwright, artist, and recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature died yesterday at the age of 87. Last month, a story was posted about Gunter Grass and one of his most controversial poems: What Must Be Said, which is reprinted below:
Grass is best known for his novels including The Tin Drum (1959), Cat and Mouse (1963), Dog Years (1965), and his memoirs: Peeling the Onion (2007), The Box (2010), and Grimm’s Words: A Declaration of Love (2010) but he is also known as the author of the controversial poem What Must Be Said (2012) – which reveals the hypocrisy of the German military when they decided to sell and deliver a submarine that could be used to launch nuclear warheads against Iran. Read more
“The Easter Parade”
I say,….Straight ahead. No Looking back; no looking sideways – ….Straight ahead.
When our nation celebrated it’s bicentennial nearly 40 years ago in 1976, the country was in the midst of a major shift in gender rights. Although the feminist movement began to gain momentum in the 1970’s and the United Nations had just declared the decade 1976 – 1985 as the UN Decade for Women, the reality was that women were still unable to break through the glass ceiling in certain fields and only earned 62% of what men earned making them either dependent upon men or limited economically. Read more
“A Map of Betrayal”
I’ve been left alone to do my own work, to live my own life. ~Ha Jin
Contemporary Chinese literature is a genre that doesn’t occupy a lot of shelf space in bookstores or on Amazon (only 104 books show up on a recent search) which probably has more to do with repression and censorship than with lack of interest. With nearly 20% of the world’s population (1.5 billion people) in China, there should be an abundance of talented writers whose works are translated and available to the public. Instead, we have but a few writers who’ve escaped from China and been given the freedom to pursue their craft and write without fear of censorship or punishment. Read more
“Such Good Girls”
I knew I was Jewish, but I didn’t know I was Jewish.
There are hundreds if not thousands of books in print about the Holocaust, most of which cover the Nazi regime, concentration camps, survivors of the camps, and the political environment but there are very few books about the “hidden children” – the infants, toddlers, and school age children – who were hidden, often in plain sight of the Nazis during World War II, and survived.
These children grew up, often left Europe, and for the most part were silent because they were taught to stay quiet to avoid detection, didn’t know if they could trust their memories, and didn’t have the resources to process what had happened to them. And so, very little has been written about them because so little has been known, until recently. Read more
“Elizabeth Costello”
I say what I mean. I am an old woman. I do not have the time any longer to say things I do not mean.
Elizabeth Costello is an elderly Australian writer who despite having written several novels is primarily known for a book she published decades ago about the wife of a principal character of another novel, Ulysses by James Joyce. Frustrated that her other works are often ignored, she chooses to speak on controversial issues, philosophers, and unrelated topics when asked to give a lecture, conduct a seminar, or interact with those in the literary world. Read more
“The Omnivore’s Dilemma”
Much of our food system depends on our not knowing much about it, beyond the price disclosed by the checkout scanner; cheapness and ignorance are mutually reinforcing. And it’s a short way from not knowing who’s at the other end of your food chain to not caring–to the carelessness of both producers and consumers that characterizes our economy today. Of course, the global economy couldn’t very well function without this wall of ignorance and the indifference it breeds. This is why the American food industry and its international counterparts fight to keep their products from telling even the simplest stories–”dolphin safe,” “humanely slaughtered,” etc.–about how they were produced. The more knowledge people have about the way their food is produced, the more likely it is that their values–and not just “value”–will inform their purchasing decisions.”
Very simply, we subsidize high-fructose corn syrup in this country, but not carrots. While the surgeon general is raising alarms over the epidemic of obesity, the president is signing farm bills designed to keep the river of cheap corn flowing, guaranteeing that the cheapest calories in the supermarket will continue to be the unhealthiest. ~Michael Pollan
“The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry”
A question I’ve thought about a great deal is why it is so much easier to write about the things we dislike/hate/acknowledge to be flawed than the things we love.
In The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry, author Gabrielle Zevin introduces A.J. Fikry, a 39-year old grumpy man whose pleasures in life are few. Recently widowed, A.J. finds himself running Island Books, a 700 square foot independent bookstore in a purple Victorian house on Alice Island, off the Massachusetts coastline (seems vaguely familiar to Oak Bluffs in Martha’s Vineyard), without the warm touch of his wife, Nic, who was killed in a tragic car accident (is there any other kind?). Read more
10 Kitchen Tips for My Younger Self
When I was 23 years old, I was asked to bring a dessert to a pot-luck luncheon at work so I decided to bring a homemade cheesecake. The night before, I got home from work late and didn’t have time to bring the cream cheese to room temperature so I took the 6 bars of Philadelphia Cream Cheese out of the refrigerator and proceeded to make the cake only to be asked the next day what the white clumps in my cheesecake were. Not one of my better baking moments but one I’ve never forgotten because I eventually learned that certain ingredients have to be at room temperature to blend properly. Read more
“Nine Inches”
It’s easy to say you should let a kid follow his heart. But what if his heart takes him places you don’t want to go?
Nine Inches is a collection of short stories written by Tom Perrotta, an American writer, novelist and screenwriter who often writes of high school using all the drama of those years as a metaphor for life. Published in 2014, Nine Inches contains ten short stories written from the perspective of teenagers, adults, and senior citizens and, yet they all share a common theme: high school never really ends. Read more
Paddock Post 