“Renounce and Enjoy”

Mohandas Gandhi used the Bhagavad Gita as his go-to source for dealing with life’s daily problems and issues.  A short book of 700 verses, the Gita grounded and inspired Gandhi throughout his life.  Like other …

A Letter from Israel Shahak

    —Israel Shahak performed a vital service for many years with his translations “From the Hebrew Press,” which gave an accurate picture of Israel’s oppression of the Palestinians. A survivor of Bergen-Belsen, he was…

Jew-in-the-Library, Jew-in-the-Streets

Jill Krementz, The Jewish Writer, Henry Holt and Company, 1998 Portraits, bios, occasionally quotations form this coffee table book collection of Jewish writers, poets, novelists, scholars. Wiesel is here, as is his nemesis Hannah Arendt,…

Exemplar of Epistolary Ecstasy

Bill Morgan, ed., The Letters of Allen Ginsberg “Recommending Hare Krishna to one and all” 375 It might have taken me 12 hours to read this book line by line, but it’s more important to…

Reading of Dorothy’s Reading

The Dorothy Day Book, compiled by Margaret Quigley and Michael Garvey,  is a  kind of posthumous commonplace book, that is, a collection of quotations from Dorothy’s decades of reading (largely from her column in the…