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| January
2005 |
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An
Hour in Paradise by Joan Leegant
A former drug dealer turned
yeshiva student faces his past while visiting a dying
AIDS patient. A disaffected young American in the ancient
city of Safed ventures in Kabbalist mysticism and gets
more than he bargained for. Three sisters - one a Hindu,
one an Orthodox Jew, and one a struggling actress just
trying to get by - find unexpected happiness with the
help of an unseen, yet beloved, hand. Interspersed with
these are tales of love lost and found - between fathers
and sons, old childhood sweethearts past their prime,
and strangers thrown together by circumstance and chance. |
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Joan
Leegant Recommends: |
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 The
Complete Stories by Bernard Malamud
In all his work, Malamud was
concerned to identify and dramatize a quality he spoke
of as "the human." This quality is found in the way
his characters cling to hope against all reason, in
their capacity for sudden deep feeling and their awareness
of the world's comic indifference to their aspirations. |
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| February
2005 |
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1968:
The Year that Rocked the World by Mark Kurlansky
This book brings to teeming
life the cultural and political history of that world-changing
year of social upheaval. People think of it as the
year of sex, drugs, and rock and roll. Yet it was
also the year of the Martin Luther King Jr. and Bobby
Kennedy assassinations; the riots at the Democratic
National Convention in Chicago; Prague Spring; the
antiwar movement and the Tet Offensive; Black Power;
the generation gap, avant-garde theater, the birth
of the women's movement, and the beginning of the
end for the Soviet Union.
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Alternative
Reading: |
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 Prague
by Arthur Phillips
A first novel of startling
scope and ambition, Prague depicts an intentionally
Lost Generation as it follows five American expats who
come to Budapest in the early 1990s to seek their fortune—financial,
romantic, and spiritual—in an exotic city newly
opened to the West. |
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