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. Joan Leegant Recommends:
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.
February
2005
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. Alternative Reading:
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.
