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"The Looming Tower" and Other Must Reads
Book Review
MOST NOTABLE: "The Looming Tower" By Lawrence
Wright (Knopf, $27.95, 464 pages) is one of the most important books in
recent years - as timely - or even more so than today's headlines - it
is cogent, clear, comprehensible and compelling - a road map that
focuses brilliantly on al-Qaeda and Osama bin Laden and those who were
in pursuit of him before 9/11.
The book is a history lesson that shocks and illuminates - the war
between Islam and western democracies, how Israel's 1967 triumph in the
six-day-war humiliated and at the same time set in motion more radical
Islamists, the suicide attack on the USS Cole, the unwillingness of the
CIA to share info and on and on to the horrific September day. Lawrence
Wright is an excellent writer and researcher - his book should be
required reading everywhere.
"A Woman in Jersusalem" by A.B. Yehoshua (Harcourt, $25.00, 256 pages)
like "A Looming Tower" is as timely as today's newspaper headlines and
the doings in the world. It is a book that probes away at the fabric
and soul of Israel today. The plot lines focus on a woman's body
unidentified in a morgue in a hospital. She was a victim of a suicide
bombing in Jerusalem. As the plot develops, it becomes clear that the
woman had worked in a bakery as a cleaning woman, that she was an
engineer from the former Soviet Union, that she was in her 40s and
beautiful. "A Woman in Jersusalem" moves along in its narrative of
turns and twists told by a master writer - it is a book to savor, to
think about. HIGHLY
RECOMMENDED.
"Absurdistan" by Gary Shteyngart (Random House, $24.95, 333 pages) is
rollercoaster ride of a book - part slapstick, part political
commentary, part pathetic, part satire and all a hell of a read. Complex
in conception and marvelous in execution, "Absurdistan" takes the reader
along on a Kurt Vonnegut-type trip to a far away land and its madcap
characters including, of course, Misha Vainberg, 325 pounds, son of the
1,238th richest man in Russia. Enjoy!
From Houghton Mifflin comes "Donald Hall's "White Apples and the Taste
of Stone" ($30.00, 431 pages), 226 poems from one of America's favorite
poets, the Poet Laureate of the United States. To read one of the poems
is to crave to read them all. This must have book contains a CD of poems
read by the author.
"The Memory Keeper's Daughter" by Kim Edwards now in paperback (Penguin
Books, $14.00, 401 pages) is the kind of book to be read in one or two
sittings on a long airplane ride or a relaxing weekend at the beach or
in the backyard. This novel will grip you at each turn from the winter
night in 1961 when Dr. David Henry must deliver his own twins because of
a blizzard through its unfolding secrets as the story brilliantly
develops.
About the Authors: Myrna Katz Frommer and Harvey Frommer are a wife and husband
team who successfully bridge the worlds of popular culture and traditional
scholarship. Co-authors of the critically acclaimed interactive oral histories
It Happened in the Catskills, It Happened in Brooklyn, Growing Up Jewish in
America, It Happened on Broadway, It Happened in Manhattan, It Happened in
Miami. They teach what they practice as professors at Dartmouth College.
They are also travel writers who specialize in luxury properties and fine dining
as well as cultural history and Jewish history and heritage in the United
States, Europe, and the Caribbean.
More
about these authors.
You can contact the Frommers at:
Email: myrna.frommer@Dartmouth.EDU
Email: harvey.frommer@Dartmouth.EDU
Web:
http://www.dartmouth.edu/~frommer/travel.htm.
This Article is Copyright © 1995 - 2012 by Harvey and Myrna Frommer. All rights
reserved worldwide.
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