Average customer rating:
- Technically well done; lacking in development
- I'm a guy, OK?!
- Great fun
- Very funny book
- Touching...as a parent, I was moved by it.
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Big City Eyes (Ballantine Reader's Circle)
Delia Ephron
Manufacturer: Ballantine Books
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
 Contemporary
| General
| Literature & Fiction
| Subjects
| Books
Literary
| General
| Literature & Fiction
| Subjects
| Books
General
| Contemporary
| Romance
| Subjects
| Books
ASIN: 0345443454
Release Date: 2001-08-28 |
Book Description
To keep her fifteen-year-old son safe from the everyday temptations of New York City–namely sex, drugs, and all-night clubs–single mom Lily Davis decides it’s time she and Sam move to Sakonnet Bay, a picturesque town on the Long Island coast with a much slower pace. Or so she thinks.
For Sam makes a friend who speaks only in Klingon–and before you can say wejpuh, they’re having sex on the kitchen table. Lily lands a great job as a columnist for the local paper, but the folks in town are gossiping about her run-in with a nipping dog and police sergeant Tom McKee. Most disturbing, there’s the undeniable attraction between Lily and the very married McKee. And when she and Tom stumble upon what appears to be a dead woman in a house they’re . . . well . . . trespassing in, Lily’s picture-postcard world begins to peel at the edges. How much passion, guilt, and murder can one woman take?
Customer Reviews:
Technically well done; lacking in development.......2007-09-05
The dialogue is excellent, as one would expect from a screen writer. The prose is lucid and enjoyable. However, the plot tries to deal with a mother-son relationship, a torrid affair with a married man involving questions of morality and a murder mystery.
The result is that we don't care about the murder mystery because we don't know the victim and we feel that something is lacking in the rest of the plot development.
5 stars for technical execution but minus 2 for lacking development. Overall, still enjoyable but could have been much better.
I'm a guy, OK?!.......2003-11-25
Ok, I'm a guy that picks up a western or a Hamish McBeth book to take up my time when it comes to reading..what little there is. I happen across this title, for some reason, bought it. I really liked it. I had to say I drew some looks from family and friends when they heard me chucking and laughing. A joy to read from beginning to end. I could see this as a moviefor some reason with Meg Ryan and Damian Lewis as Lily Davis and Tom McKee.
Great fun.......2003-08-21
I was given this book as a gift, started reading it and couldn't put it down! I finished it in record time. Everything about it was almost perfectly done - character development was awesome..very realistic characters who are as neurotic as most people you come across in your everyday life..including yourself. The storyline is fun and intriguing and I found myself laughing out loud at many parts. Yay Delia Eprhon! :)
Very funny book.......2002-08-08
This is a truly funny look at the world of a single parent and her small town life as viewed through the eyes of a slightly neurotic newspaper columnist raising her teenage son in rural Long Island. I thorougly enjoyed reading this book. It's witty and fun!
Touching...as a parent, I was moved by it........2001-10-30
We all come to a novel with our particular bias; mine is as a parent. I loved Ephron's non-stop rating of her son (normal range, not normal range, etc.)and found it both touching and funny. The book has a winsome quality and rather than see it as Lily Davis growth as a woman, I chose to view the novel as her growth as a parent. At the beginning, I would rate her in the normal range but just barely but as the story plows ahead, she makes it to the very normal range. I also enjoyed the fact that Lily Davis does not give in to her own desires but rather to her son's, at least at the end of the book. Aside from everything else, the columns by Lily Davis were quite well written...if only writing like that appeared in every small town weekly. That's another thing...the book is about a Manhattan woman's radical move to a small town and small town life, aside from "Gilmore Girls," was never more charming. Loved it, recommend it.
Average customer rating:
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Big City Eyes
Delia Ephron
Manufacturer: Recorded Books, LLC
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Audio CD
General
| Literature & Fiction
| Subjects
| Books
| Classics
| Comic
| Contemporary
| Literary
General
| Literature & Fiction
| Books on CD
| Audiobooks
| Formats
| Books
ASIN: 078876179X |
Average customer rating:
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Big City Eyes
Manufacturer: Recorded Books, LLC
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Audio Cassette
ASIN: 0788748556 |
Average customer rating:
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Big City Eyes
Delia Ephron
Manufacturer: Fourth Estate
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
ASIN: B000OIRVE6 |
Product Description
"BIG CITY EYES BY DELIA EPHRON, UNABRIDGED 6 AUDIO CASSETTES, 8.75 HOURS, NARRATED BY C.J. CRITT: With her best-selling novels and blockbuster screenplays, Delia Ephron has a talent for capturing the aspirations and emotions of today's women. The warmth and sensitivity that made hits of Hanging Up (RB# 96169) and the movie You're Got Mail are found in abundance in Big City Eyes. Lily Davis is a successful freelance writer and single mother who loves her life in Manhattan. She knows her teenaged son, Sam, is sneaking out to clubs, but when she finds a knife in his room, she impulsively decides to move to rural Long Island. It is not the picturesque life she imagined. The locals are in a war over what to do about the deer population. Sam shaves his head and starts dating a girl who only speaks Klingon. Lily's job on the local paper draws her into a murder investigation and an affair. Through it all, she writes about the daily trials of small town life as seen through her "Big City Eyes." Narrator C.J. Critt's empathetic reading finds the perfect voice for Lily as she struggles to do what is best for her son and herself. "Big City Eyes is a wry, wacky page turner...Bottom liner: The Eyes have it." ---People magazine [from case]
Book Description
This digital document is an article from Northern Ontario Business, published by Laurentian Business Publishing, Inc. on June 1, 2003. The length of the article is 718 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.
Citation Details
Title: Invest in eye-sores to create icons. (Thinking Big in Small Places).(town planning)
Author: Norman Jaehrling
Publication:
Northern Ontario Business (Magazine/Journal)
Date: June 1, 2003
Publisher: Laurentian Business Publishing, Inc.
Volume: 23
Issue: 8
Page: 24(1)
Distributed by Thomson Gale
Book Description
Despair stalks the streets of Paragon City. Five decades after Statesman and his allies first formed the Freedom Phalanx, that legendary group of heroes is no more and power-mad villains stand poised on the brink of ultimate victory. The fledgling hero Positron has a plan to stop them: rebuild the Freedom Phalanx. But the world's mightiest champions--Statesman, Sister Psyche, Synapse, and Manticore--no longer see the point of battling alongside others, not when they have their own private wars to wage and personal demons to conquer. For Positron to forge a new Freedom Phalanx and save Paragon City from the schemes of the dreaded Tyranny Legion, he must first save the heroes from their greatest enemies--themselves.
Customer Reviews:
Decent superhero novel.......2007-10-08
A decent superhero novel, not great, but pretty good. Based on the in-character history of the City of Heroes roleplaying game, the book seems to go a little too much out of its way to hold fast to some things that happen in game, much like the previous novel, Web of Arachnos, had one hero from each in game class and in game power origin.
A nice read if you're a fan of the game. Though Emo-Statesman gets a little annoying at times.
Surprisingly good!.......2006-07-05
I recently finished reading this surprisingly good novel, ,which featured the "City of Heroes" game universe's main characters. I was very surprised at how good it was. I did not expect it to be such a satisfying read as it was. Well worth reading, especially if you are into comic and heroic fiction. I hope Robin Laws is writing another in the series, his storytelling draws you in and makes you question ask "What happens next?" An EXCELLENT book!
Great reading for my son and myself.......2006-07-05
I haved played the game from beta and when I saw the book I bought it right away and was not disappointed. The characters jumped right off the screen of the game (some are trainers and now in the SF of CoV) into the writing of Mr. Law who filled the 5 superheroes out with back storys and details of there lives and there arch enemies who they have to defeat to take back Paragon city!
Better than I expected.......2006-06-29
I normally avoid licensed fiction like the plague, but I picked this up because:
a) I beta-tested and heavily played CoH for a couple of years and had a lot of fun with it before moving on to other things.
b) I like to play /GM superhero roleplaying campaigns (using the HERO System / Champions) and good in-genre fiction is hard to come by these days.
c) I noticed the book is written by Robin Laws, a veteran of the RPG industry that has written for many different game lines and is well regarded so I figured I'd give him the benefit of the doubt.
So I rifled thru the first few pages of the book while browsing to see if it had the same lowbrow writing style as most licensed products, and was pleasantly surprised to discover that the prose is pretty engaging and the story is a fun read.
I particularly like a couple of characters; the hard boiled archer vigilante Manticore (sort of a melange of Batman and Hawkeye), and the speedster / electrical blaster Synapse were a lot of fun to follow.
One of the things that helps elevate the story is that Robin subtly colors the writing based upon the character that currently has focus, and the dialogue is characterful.
All in all, a surprisingly fun and easy read.
Average customer rating:
- John Carpenter's Starman
- Not nearly as good as the movie
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John Carpenter's Starman: A Novel
Raynold Gideon ,
Bruce A. Evans , and
Dean Riesner
Manufacturer: Warner Books
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
Movie Tie-Ins
| Genre Fiction
| Literature & Fiction
| Subjects
| Books
Foster, Alan Dean
| ( F )
| Authors, A-Z
| Science Fiction & Fantasy
| Subjects
| Books
General
| Science Fiction
| Science Fiction & Fantasy
| Subjects
| Books
ASIN: 0446325988 |
Customer Reviews:
John Carpenter's Starman.......2005-08-05
A great read, this little book is becoming more relevant as Man pushes outward into the Universe and longs to find signs of other life. How would we react to an arrival and are we ready?
The Voyager craft were the most successful and cheapest. It's very interesting. The writer seems to sum up the strengths and weaknesses in humanity very well, looking at Man through the eyes of an impartial witness.
Not nearly as good as the movie.......2003-12-29
I expect any day now to hear one of our educated youngsters exclaim, "Look, somebody named Shakespeare wrote a book about the movie ROMEO & JULIET." STARMAN is one of the few books that are not as good as the film. Perhaps it is the terrific, ackward acting by Jeff Bridges or the semi-hysteria of Karen Allen as she slowly becomes aware of this alien. Regardless, it is a quick read and sorta smaltzy - nothing heavy but also nothing really deep.
Book Description
As Israelis and Palestinians negotiate separation and division of their land, Meron Benvenisti, former Deputy Mayor of Jerusalem, maintains that any expectations for "peaceful partition" are doomed. In his brave and controversial new book, he raises the possibility of a confederation of Israel/Palestine, the only solution that he feels will bring lasting peace.
The seven million people in the territory between Jordan and the Mediterranean are mutually dependent regarding employment, water, land use, ecology, transportation, and all other spheres of human activity. Each side, Benvenisti says, must accept the reality that two national entities are living within one geopolitical entity--their conflict is intercommunal and will not be resolved by population transfers or land partition.
A geographer and historian by training, a man passionately rooted in his homeland, Benvenisti skillfully conveys the perspective of both Israeli and Palestinian communities. He recognizes the great political and ideological resistance to a confederation, but argues that there are Israeli Jews and Palestinians who can envision an undivided land, where attachment to a common homeland is stronger than militant tribalism and segregation in national ghettos. Acknowledging that equal coexistence between Israeli and Palestinian may yet be an impossible dream, he insists that such a dream deserves a place in the current negotiations.
"Meron Benvenisti is the Middle East expert to whom Middle East experts go for advice . . . the most oft-quoted and oft-damned analyst in Israel."--from the Foreword by Thomas L. Friedman
Customer Reviews:
Interesting!.......2002-03-03
Having read a book by Edward Said, I wanted to read a book written by an Israeli about the Palestinian problem. Surprisingly, the views weren't that much different. I would appreciate comments from others clarifying whether the views of this author are representative of most moderate Israelis.
Book Description
In Comrades and Enemies Zachary Lockman explores the mutually formative interactions between the Arab and Jewish working classes, labor movements, and worker-oriented political parties in Palestine just before and during the period of British colonial rule. Unlike most of the historical and sociological literature on Palestine in this period, Comrades and Enemies avoids treating the Arab and Jewish communities as if they developed independently of each other. Instead of focusing on politics, diplomacy, or military history, Lockman draws on detailed archival research in both Arabic and Hebrew, and on interviews with activists, to delve into the country's social, economic, and cultural history, showing how Arab and Jewish societies in Palestine helped to shape each other in significant ways.
Comrades and Enemies presents a narrative of Arab-Jewish relations in Palestine that extends and complicates the conventional story of primordial identities, total separation, and unremitting conflict while going beyond both Zionist and Palestinian nationalist mythologies and paradigms of interpretation.
Book Description
Is there a concept of the enemy? To what discursive sphere would it belong? Or, if there is no concept of the enemy, what are the factors that could have prevented its articulation? Following the reflections of Carl Schmitt and Jacques Derrida on the theologico-political, and reading canonical texts from the Western philosophical, political, and religious traditions, the author seeks to account for the absence of a history of the enemy.
The question of the enemy emerges in this book as contingent on the way Europe has related to both Jew and Arab as concrete enemies. Moreover, the author provocatively argues that the Jew and the Arab constitute the condition of religion and politics. Among the many strengths of the book is the timeliness of its profound study of contemporary actuality: the volume provides a basis for a philosophical understanding of the forces at work that produced and kindled current conflicts in Europe, the U.S., and the Middle East.
Customer Reviews:
Neither history nor literature are Anidjar's strong suits..........2005-10-19
As Hugh Fitzgerald so shrewdly observed: Gil Anidjar is an Assistant Professor at Columbia, with his primary responsibility the teaching of Comparative Literature - but there is a lot of comparison, and very little literature, in his writing. He offers two Comparative Literature courses. One is on Freud and Derrida. The second, a course that is listed as part of Columbia's Middle East offerings, is called, dramatically, "Hate."
The course on "Hate" is not really about the history or literature of the Middle East at all. It is an extended rumination upon two matters. The first is the evil of Europe, which has for its own purposes not merely created "the Other" (or rather, being especially awful, as Europe will be, creating two "the Others" - "Arab" and "Jew"), and subjecting both of them to identical diabolical persecution.
The second is that in creating, and persecuting, these inoffensive Arabs throughout Europe (and those inoffensive Jews) Europe is largely responsible for the otherwise harmonious relations between Arab and Jew, and which were disrupted only by Europe's colonial project, and attempts to separate, and "create difference," as with, for example, the loi Crémieux (1870), which gave French citizenship to Sephardic Jews in Algeria.
Here we have, in full flower, the conception of "the Other" who is created in order for European (or Euro-American Man) to define himself, as against that "Other." Indeed, Gil Anidjar has written a book about this subject called The Jew, the Arab: A History of the Enemy.
"What is Europe such that it has managed to distinguish itself from both Jew and Arab and to render its role in the distinction, in the separation, and the enmity of Jew and Arab invisible - invisible, perhaps, most of all to itself".
In other words, Jew and Arab are equally victims - not of each other, except insofar as each "creates" the other in imitation of the Ur-villain Europe, that has "created" both Jew and Arab as the enemy. In Gil Anidjar's world, European history is replete with hatred - equal hatred - and persecution - equal persecution - of the Jew and of the Arab. This equality in suffering is central to his world view.
Unfortunately, it bears no relation to reality. The Jews of Europe were in fact (see Leon Poliakoff, see Malcolm Hay, see Gavin Langmuir) subjected, first out of theological hatreds, and then out of racism directed at Jews even if they ceased to be Jews, over more than a millennium. They were inoffensive; they had no political or military power. Yet they were driven from country after country, their goods stolen, many of them killed. The history of charges of ritual murder, of massacres, could fill up a book, and indeed, do fill up a book - Simon Wiesenthal's Every Day Remembrance Day, in which murder after murder, massacre after massacre, expulsion after expulsion, is listed.
But the Arabs? The Arabs, or rather the Muslims, though stopped by Charles Martel and the Franks at Poitiers in the West in 732, continued to fight in Spain until finally Muslim power came to an end in 1492; in the East, the Muslims seized much of Eastern Europe and the Balkans, and were besieging Vienna as late as 1683. And meanwhile, for a thousand years, Arab raiders went up and down the coasts, not only on the Mediterranean, but as far north as Ireland and Iceland, and razed and looted whole villages, and kidnapped, historians estimate, about 1 million white Europeans (and killed many more) who were taken back to North Africa, enslaved, and forcibly converted. The historian Giles Milton has just written White Gold about this forgotten part of European history, focusing on one Thomas Pellow.
Anidjar is not a historian. He fails to understand the threat that Muslims continued to pose, for roughly a thousand years, through these raiding and slaving expeditions. If Europeans regarded Muslims as "the enemy," it was not out of some need, like a small child with an imaginary friend, but because the Muslims, impelled by the doctrine of jihad-conquest that is in Qur'an, hadith, and sira, were militarily threatening. Those Muslim raids came to an end only in the 19th century, first with the American attacks on the Barbary Pirates, and then, in 1830, with the French conquest of Algeria.
But why read Bat Ye'or, or Bernard Lewis or even the great actor and Shakespeare scholar Harley Granville-Barker, when you can quote philosophers like Emmanuel Levinas and Franz Rosenzweig, and "critics" like Derrida, Foucault, and Said, e tutti quanti.. It would not do to subject the belief-system of Islam, or the history of Jihad-conquest, to critical or historical examination, not when you are in the business of symmetrically reducing "Jew" and "Arab" to the identical status of victims. Why bother investigating the belief-system of Islam, with its Manichaean division of the world between Believer and Infidel with which the canonical texts of Islam are full, instinct with hatred for all who are not Muslim all hates are equally ill-founded.
But Anidjar thinks of himself as a literary scholar, and that fatally vitiates all of his musing, and all of his cobbling-together of the oddest kinds of "evidence" or quasi-evidence. When, for example, he suggests that Shylock is the Jew, and Othello the Muslim, he reveals that he simply is no Shakespearean scholar; phrases such as "the distinction between Shylock and Othello, between Jew and Moor, is already breaking down as the image of the black ram begins to loom." He completely fails to realize that throughout the play, Othello is depicted as a Moor, but a Christian, in the service of Venice against the Turk.
Neither history nor literature are Anidjar's strong suits. He is a philosophizer, and "the Jew, the Arab" is filled to the brim with such portentous meditations as:
The Jew, the Arab, that is to say, the enemy, constitutes the theologico-politicial. It is through "them" that it becomes what it is. As a philosophical problem, the massive absence of the metaphysical question ....
This goes on for hundreds for pages.
And once he leaves Europe, he no longer maintains the fiction of "equal victimhood." When it comes to the Middle East, he knows nothing of the treatment of the Jews of the Middle East. His denunciation of the loi Crémieux shows that he does not understand what the Jews endured under Muslim rule. He even begins to invent a new kind of being- "c'est bien ... l'Arabe, de l'être juif arabe qu'il faudra parler et au nom duquel il faudra lutter." What is this "être juif arabe" - this "Jew-Arab creature" in whose name one must continue to struggle? It is a fiction, an ideological hippogriff, created only so that "the Arab" may claim for himself, at the hands of Europe, a false victimhood, based on the real victimhood of Jews.
The only conceivable reason for this course being offered is that it attempts to present the Arab as victim, at the hands of Europe, and later, at the hands of the "Zionists." If his treatment of Europe and Islam is a travesty, one should not be surprised to see that his view of Israel is similarly loaded. Not realizing that not all Jews were from Europe, that many never left the Middle East, and unaware, it seems, both of the demography and the land-ownership in what became Mandatory Palestine (where nearly 90 percent of the land was owned by the Ottoman state, and then passed to the mandatory authority, and then to the successor state, Israel), and unaware of the true definition of "colonialism,"
Here is how he discusses Israel:
The argument I want to make is that it is absolutely essential to continue to insist on the colonial dimension of Zionism, and colonial in the strict sense, absolutely. The claim that there was no colonial basis for Israel is ludicrous. People were citizens of countries and were acting on behalf of Western powers, and Western powers understood this very well. As did Herzl, of course, and others. So Israel is absolutely a colonial enterprise, a colonial settler state, to be precise.
And "why," Anidjar asks in an interview, "did the Western powers want and agree with the destruction of Palestine for the benefit of Israel? Why to the `Holy Land'? For Anidjar the answer always goes back to Europe, or at least its "Christian, Western powers":
The question must be asked and the answer must engage "the Muslim question." For to ignore this question is to renew and increase the invisibility of the Christian role in the pre-history and the history of colonialism and post-colonialism...There is rather an extreme investment in the continuation of the war of Israel against Palestine, that is to say, in maintaining the conditions that make this war possible.
And finally, Anidjar asks:
There is, in fact, a level at which I simply lack all understanding. Can anyone seriously claim that the problem with Islamic countries is Islam?
And the answer to that rhetorical question, I'm afraid, is obvious - and it is not the answer that Gil Anidjar was expecting.
Who is the enemy ?.......2005-03-05
This is a remarkable book, complex and impossible to grasp fully at first reading. It is well worth perservering. Anidjar writes well and lucidly, but the ideas with which he is working are difficult and often intractable. His extraordinary skill is to bring together concepts rarely connected, and makes sense of the connection.
The book is part philosophy, part literary analysis, and embroidered with a very small element of 'history', as traditionally conceived. Although his subtitle is 'a history of the enemy' his whole work is to destabilise any clear idea of who the enemy actually is. Is he (or she) the enemy of the nation; or my brother or sister, or -even- am I my own enemy. Who knows better the dark secrets of the heart, the invisible fears, the unknown dark deeds ? Enemy, as Anidjar reveals, is so loaded with deeper connections and meanings, that we should not use it carelessly.
So, the title The Jew, the Arab, indicates another kind of enmity, and one we need to think about. One of the most tantalising elements of this book, and one of its greatest strengths is that the author never imposes himself on the reader, tells you what conclusions you need to draw. This is one reason to come back to it again and again. I am now reading it for the fifth time, disagreeing with much of it, but constantly stimulated and re-thinking what I thought before. This is the antidote to sound-bite culture, a book that is hard, provocative, thrilling, and above all, worth reading
Research of dubious value.......2005-02-28
This is a very sophisticated book, with plenty of references. But there are statements in it that we can all relate to.
At one point, Anidjar compares the Arab-Israeli dispute to the Hutu genocide against the Tutsi. He wisely asks who in Israel "are the Hutu and who the Tutsi?" That's not a bad question. I'm tempted to answer by pointing out that French support has been for both the Hutu and Arab sides. But more seriously, I think there is no question about genocidal propaganda and acts. In Israel, the Jews are the Tutsi. That is true even though the Jews are the majority in Israel, given the huge number of Arabs in countries bordering Israel. It's not a tough question after all, and Anidjar could have said so, clearly and simply.
At another point, Anidjar makes a clear statement of his own. Namely, "without this enemy par excellance that is Islam, Europe, Christian Europe, would not exist or would no longer exist."
Now that may be a profound point. But it seems to me that for the past two centuries, the existence of Europe has in no way depended on Islam. Had Islam collapsed at the end of 1804, Europe would not have fallen apart as a result. Nor would Christian Europe. As a matter of fact, if Islam is to cause the end of Christian Europe, it is far more likely to do so by defeating it than by losing to it.
Nor do I think there is anything profound about the enmity between Jew and Arab. Even a dog knows the difference between being tripped over and kicked. If you keep getting kicked, or insist on kicking, you'll wind up with an enemy. Jews were treated as dhimmis by Arabs for quite a while. When many Jews became emancipated, some Arabs felt humiliated by their liberation and decided to do plenty of kicking. On the other side, plenty of Jews decided how to deal with being kicked. Now, was that tough to say?
We also get to think about the extent to which Jews learned to kick from the Nazis. After all, Jews learned plenty about how the Nazis behaved. In spite of having been victims, did the Jews simply decide to do unto the totally innocent Arabs what the Nazis had done to the Jews? What can we learn from this?
Anidjar actually should have explained that there is something we can learn. The Jews, having been terribly mistreated by the Nazis, have shown a great aversion to doing anything that looks like what the Nazis did. Knowing this, enemies of the Jews tend to taunt them by pretending that Jewish behavior is similar to Nazi behavior (as well as by pretending that Arab behavior is somehow similar to how Jews behaved in Nazi Europe). Of course, the author didn't say all this.
This book is awfully weak and uninspiring.
Book Description
This digital document is an article from Canadian Journal of History, published by University of Saskatchewan on December 1, 2004. The length of the article is 1115 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.
Citation Details
Title: The Jew, the Arab: a History of the Enemy.(Israel, the impossible Land)(Book Review)
Author: George R. Wilkes
Publication:
Canadian Journal of History (Refereed)
Date: December 1, 2004
Publisher: University of Saskatchewan
Volume: 39
Issue: 3
Page: 640(3)
Article Type: Book Review
Distributed by Thomson Gale
Customer Reviews:
Vague, confusing, and not informative enough.......2006-01-06
This article is a review of two books, "Israel, the Impossible Land" and "The Jew, the Arab."
I hoped for better reviews than these.
"The Jew, the Arab" is a study of the "history of the enemy." Okay. Are these enemies stereotyped beyond recognition? Or not? After all, Arab aggression against the Jews of Israel has been going on for decades. Do most Jewish Israelis see this fairly realistically, or not? And do most Arabs see the Israeli Jews as weird monsters or as people that are under siege? I think the author ought to be telling us what Gil Anadjar says about all this, and whether what Anadjar says appears to be both accurate and insightful. But he doesn't. Still, one does get the idea from this review that Anidjar doesn't have much of value to offer here.
I admit that Anidjar's book is not easy to review. But I think there is something fundamentally wrong with the book. I've read this book, and you may want to look at my own review of it. I think it will tell you at least as much as Wilkes does.
From Wilkes' review, I would not have guessed at the extent to which Anidjar tries to show that the existence of some "enemy par excellence" is needed for one's group to maintain an identity at all. Nor would I have guessed about the way Anidjar discusses the topic of people learning to mimic the behavior of their enemies. And I do think Wilkes ought to have said something about whether Anidjar thinks the Israeli Jews have learned to behave like their European oppressors in World War Two, as well as whether he agrees with Anidjar on this topic.
This article continues by saying that "Israel, the Impossible Land" is insightful. And that it discusses Jewish religious attachment to Israel and the Jewish experience of the land. Well, I haven't read that book. But still, that's valuable information. Wilkes also worries about the extent to which various minority viewpoints are represented. And he says that the discussion of anti-Zionist views may be misleading. But he doesn't say just what information he thinks the readers are being deprived of. If I read this book, find problems of this sort, and review it on Amazon, I promise I'll tell you just what viewpoints you are missing, and why they may be important.
Books:
- Buddha Da: A Novel
- Charles Dickens Four Complete Novels (Great Expectations, Hard Times, A Christmas Carol, A Tale of Two Cities)
- Cien Anos De Soledad / 100 Years of Solitude (Contemporanea)
- Dancing with Ghosts: A Critical Biography of Arturo Islas
- Daring to Dream; Holding the Dream; Finding the Dream: Three Complete Novels (Dream)
- Death in Venice: And Seven Other Stories
- Descubre La Selva Tropical/ Discover the Rain Forest (Yellow Umbrella Books. Science. Spanish.)
- Dr. Heidenhoff's Process
- Drama of the English Renaissance: Volume 1, The Tudor Period
- El Sindrome De Ulises/the Sindrome of Ulises 5 Edicion
Books Index
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