2011-2012 JBC Network authors by Naomi Firestone

Jewish Book NETWORK Authors 2011–2012 Jewish Book Council created Jewish Book NETWORK to heighten awareness and promote the reading of quality Jewish interest books. In the past few years, Jewish book fairs and year-round book programs have become a major force in the Jewish community. Below is a preview of some of the “hottest” new authors to hit the Jewish literary scene for the 2011–2012 season. (The book summaries have been compiled from material provided by the respective publishers.)

Lorraine Abramson

Izzeldin Abuelaish

Marc Agronin

MY RACE: A JEWISH GIRL GROWING UP UNDER APARTHEID IN SOUTH AFRICA

I SHALL NOT HATE: A GAZA DOCTOR’S LAST SACRIFICE ON THE ROAD TO PEACE

HOW WE AGE: A DOCTOR’S JOURNEY INTO THE HEART OF GROWING OLD

DBM Press, 2010. $27.95 ISBN: 978-0-9816102-3-8 The memoir of a gifted Jewish athlete growing up under the apartheid system in South Africa.

Walker & Company, 2011. $24.00 ISBN: 9780802779175 The story of a Palestinian doctor who, rather than seek revenge after witnessing his three daughters’ deaths by Israeli tank shells, continues his humanitarian call for the people of the region to come together in understanding, respect, and peace.

Da Capo Lifelong Books, 2011. $25.00 ISBN: 978-0-306-81853-0 Drawing on moving personal experiences and in-depth interviews with pioneers in the field, Agronin looks at what aging means today—how our bodies and brains age, and the very way we understand aging.

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www.jewishbookcouncil.org

Ted Axelrod

Arthur Ainsberg

Jim Axelrod

Ezra Barany

BREAKTHROUGH: ELIZABETH HUGHES, THE DISCOVERY OF INSULIN, AND THE MAKING OF A MEDICAL MIRACLE

IN THE LONG RUN: A FATHER, A SON, AND UNINTENTIONAL LESSONS IN HAPPINESS

THE TORAH CODES

St. Martin’s Press, 2010. $24.99 ISBN: 978-0-312-64870-1 One of the most devastating illnesses affecting the Jewish people is diabetes. Breakthrough tells the fascinating story of the discovery of insulin.

Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011. $26.00 ISBN: 9780374192112 When Jim Axelrod—once among the most watched correspondents on network news— discovers his late father’s decades-old New York Marathon finish times, he sets a defining challenge: “Can I beat him?”Along the way, Jim confronts his listing marriage, a career upset by the television news industry’s seismic changes, excruciatingly painful shin splints, and the worst-timed kidney stone possible.

Dafkah Books, 2011. $12.99 ISBN: 9780983296010 A reclusive atheist computer programmer realizes his name is encoded in the Book of Genesis, and that his landlord is part of a secret society bent on driving him to fulfill a dangerous Biblical prophecy, forcing him to confront a difficult truth: God exists and there’s more to Her than it seems.

Allison Amend Mitchell Bard

Louisiana State University Press, 2010. $18.95 ISBN: 9780807136171 A 2011 Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature finalist, Allison Amend’s first novel, steeped in the history and lore of the Oklahoma Territory, tells an unforgettable multigenerational—and very American—story of Jewish pioneers.

THE ARAB LOBBY: THE INVISIBLE ALLIANCE THAT UNDERMINES AMERICA’S INTERESTS IN THE MIDDLE EAST

Jenny Anderson and Paula Szuchman

STATIONS WEST

Anna Badkhen

PEACE MEALS: CANDY-WRAPPED KALASHNIKOVS AND OTHER WAR STORIES Free Press, 2010. $25.00 ISBN: 9781439166482 The memoir of a young woman who travels as a war correspondent to the most dangerous places of the past decade and brings back with her refreshing, readable memories of the people she met, the strife they faced, and the food she ate with them.

SPOUSONOMICS: USING ECONOMICS TO MASTER LOVE, MARRIAGE, AND DIRTY DISHES

Lisa Baron © Sven Bannuscher

Random House, 2011. $26.00 ISBN: 978-0-385-34394-7 Szuchman and Anderson present a radical new idea: Every marriage is its own little economy, a business of two with a finite number of resources that need to be allocated correctly.

Ken Ballen

TERRORISTS IN LOVE: THE REAL LIVES OF ISLAMIC RADICALS Free Press, 2011. $25.00 ISBN: 9781451609219 A leading terrorism expert profiles six terrorists to offer an astonishing new portrait of our enemies and takes readers behind the headlines and into the minds of Islamic terrorists.

www.jewishbookcouncil.org

HarperCollins, 2011. $27.99 ISBN: 978-0061726019 This is the first book to challenge the idea that an all-powerful Israeli lobby controls U.S. Middle East policy and demonstrate that a countervailing Arab lobby exists and is actually more powerful.

LIFE OF THE PARTY: A POLITICAL PRESS TART BARES ALL Citadel, 2011. $14.95 ISBN: 978-0806534152 A political memoir based on an undereducated, over-dressed, drinking, swearing, Jewish girl’s eight years working side-by-side with Ralph Reed, a Christian icon.

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2011–2012 NETWORK AUTHORS

Mira Bartók

Jeremy Ben-Ami

Marilyn Berger

THE MEMORY PALACE: A MEMOIR

A NEW VOICE FOR ISRAEL: FIGHTING FOR THE SURVIVAL OF THE JEWISH NATION

THIS IS A SOUL: AN AMERICAN DOCTOR’S REMARKABLE MISSION IN ETHIOPIA

Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. $26.00 ISBN: 978-0230112742 Ben-Ami, founder of the new political action committee J Street, explores how our current policies toward Israel are largely based on a handful of assumptions that do not hold up against the current realities. Ben-Ami highlights the urgent need for a pro-Israel agenda that includes compromise and engagement with the opposition.

Harper, 2011. $14.99 ISBN: 978-0-06-175955-0 As a modern Orthodox Jew, Rick Hodes believes that to save one life is to save the entire world and by his example, he demonstrates the joy that comes in giving to others and in creating miracles. One of those miracles occurred when Rick credited the author with saving a life, a story which is threaded through the narrative of a grievously sick street boy from Ethiopia who was cured and now is a healthy nine-year-old living in New York City.

Free Press, 2011. $25.00 ISBN: 9781439183311 The Memory Palace is artist Mira Bartók’s gorgeous, visceral, memoir about the impact of her mother’s schizophrenia on her life.

Judith Baumel

THE KANGAROO GIRL GenPop Books, 2011. $15.00 ISBN: 978-0-9823594-3-3 Starting with a photo, Baumel shows us new ways of understanding family, history and the Jewish family in history. Baumel detects religion at the scene of many crimes: from the great disasters of the past—Edward I’s edict of expulsion of England’s Jews in 1290, the War Between the States, the Shoah, the catastrophes of 20th century Europe—to the small calamities of Jewish American life in the ethnic neighborhoods of New York City.

Avrom Bendavid-Val

THE HEAVENS ARE EMPTY: DISCOVERING THE LOST TOWN OF TROCHENBROD Pegasus Books, 2010. $25.95 ISBN: 978-1-60598-113-0 The Heavens Are Empty tells the story of the life and death of one of the most unusual and unknown shtetls in Eastern Europe. An imagined Trochenbrod was the setting for Jonathan Safran Foer’s novel, Everything is Illuminated.

Karen Bergreen

FOLLOWING POLLY St. Martin’s Press, 2011. $14.99 ISBN: 978-0312573584 When Alice Teakle decides to follow her college dorm mate, Polly, to learn how to be a winner, Polly ends up dead and Alice is accused of her murder. Bergreen, a Harvard-educated lawyer-turned-comedian-turned novelist, uses her fierce intelligence and sharp wit to create an entertaining social satire (and mystery).

Ilene “Gingy” Beckerman Algonquin Books, 2011. $14.95 ISBN: 97815651253773 A story of the author’s grandmother, who, along with her husband, ran a candy/stationery store on Madison Avenue. Beckerman recalls Ettie’s conversations with fancy Upper East Side customers, with FDR’s mother, with God, and with her always difficult husband.

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THE SMARTEST WOMAN I KNOW Peter Bergen

THE LONGEST WAR: THE ENDURING CONFLICT BETWEEN AMERICA AND AL-QAEDA Free Press, 2011. $27.00 ISBN: 978-0-7432-7893-5 Bergen offers an eye-opening, comprehensive history of the war on terror and its evolution from 9/11 to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq to the conflict in Pakistan and beyond—its failures and successes, the major players on both sides, and its likely future, including an analysis of the Obama administration’s current strategy and vision.

William Berkson

PIRKE AVOT: TIMELESS WISDOM FOR MODERN LIFE Jewish Publication Society, 2010. $28.00 ISBN: 978-0-8276-0917-4 In the new JPS commentary on Pirke Avot (Sayings of the Fathers), William Berkson casts a deeply appreciative but critical eye on both the Sages and modern psychology, and reveals insights from both that can help our lives today.

www.jewishbookcouncil.org

2011–2012 NETWORK AUTHORS

David Bezmozgis

Molly Birnbaum

Joseph Braude

THE FREE WORLD

SEASON TO TASTE: HOW I LOST MY SENSE OF SMELL AND FOUND MY WAY

THE HONORED DEAD: STORY OF FRIENDSHIP, MURDER, AND THE SEARCH FOR TRUTH IN THE ARAB WORLD

Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011. $26.00 ISBN: 9780374281403 The Free World follows the Krasnanskys, a family of Russian Jews who, in the summer of 1978, have escaped through a crack in the Iron Curtain. With their story, Bezmozgis illuminates a chapter of Soviet emigration history absent from most diaspora histories— the layover of many Russian Jews in Italy as they waited to learn whether they would be going to the United States, Canada, or Israel.

Ecco, 2011. $24.99 ISBN: 9780061915314 Shortly before starting at the Culinary Institute of America, Birnbaum was hit by a car, an accident that broke many bones, and destroyed her ability to smell. Season to Taste is the story of what came next: how she picked herself up and set off on a grand quest to understand and overcome her condition. Birnbaum explores the science of olfaction, pheromones, and Proust’s madeleine.

Spiegel & Grau, 2011. $26.00 ISBN: 978-0-385-52703-3 Braude, a young American journalist with Iraqi Jewish roots, is granted rare embedded access to a unit of the Moroccan police at the nexus of drug trafficking, terrorism, and organized crime in North Africa. When confronted with a case file that reeks of a coverup—the murder of a night watchman at a warehouse owned by a shadowy Jewish businessman by a member of Morocco’s newest security task force—Braude launches his own investigation, leading him deeper into the shadows of this legendary Arab capital.

Jill Bialosky

HISTORY OF A SUICIDE: MY SISTER’S UNFINISHED LIFE Atria, 2011. $24.00 ISBN: 978-1-4391-0193-3 Bialosky has lived with the grief, guilt, questions, and confusion unleashed by her sister’s suicide. Now, she re-creates with unsparing honesty her sister’s inner life and the events and emotions that led her to take her life on that particular night. Bialosky explores human fragility and strength, through familial relationships and issues of faith in relation to suicide prevention, with attention to how Judiasm and its tenets for honoring the deceased have sustained her through periods of grief.

www.jewishbookcouncil.org

Arthur Boehm and Geila Hocherman

KOSHER REVOLUTION: NEW TECHNIQUES AND GREAT RECIPES FOR UNLIMITED KOSHER COOKING Kyle Books, 2011. $29.95 ISBN: 9781906868536 Kosher Revolution’s unique techniques, based on simple food chemistry and ingenious ingredient substitutions, promise a limitless kosher repertoire while fostering creativity and independence from recipes.

Daniel Byman

A HIGH PRICE: THE TRIUMPHS AND FAILURES OF ISRAELI COUNTERTERRORISM Oxford University Press, 2011. $34.95 ISBN: 9780195391824 A High Price reveals Israel’s counterterrorism history, describing important historical events such as the Entebbe raid and offering a comprehensive review of the second intifada and the struggle against Hezbollah.

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Jewish Book World

2011–2012 NETWORK AUTHORS

Thanassis Cambanis

Max and Linda Ciampoli

Felice Cohen

PRIVILEGE TO DIE: INSIDE HEZBOLLAH’S LEGIONS AND THEIR ENDLESS WAR AGAINST ISRAEL

CHURCHILL’S SECRET AGENT

WHAT PAPA TOLD ME

Berkley, 2010. $9.99 ISBN: 9780425229750 Churchill’s Secret Agent recounts Max Ciampoli’s World War II experiences as he barely escapes death while fulfilling dangerous covert missions for Winston Churchill in Nazi-occupied Europe.

Dividends Press, 2010. $10.00 ISBN: 9780615372884 What Papa Told Me is the story of Murray Schwartzbaum, whose courage and sheer will to live as a young Polish Jew helped him survive eight different labor and concentration camps, start a new life in America, and keep a family intact in the aftermath of his wife’s suicide.

Free Press, 2011. $27.00 ISBN: 9781439143612 Cambanis offers the first detailed look at the surprising cross section of people who are willing to die for Hezbollah movement: not just unemployed young men, but middleclass engineers, merchants, even nurses.

Ruchel Louis Coetzee

PULANI

Talia Carner

JERUSALEM MAIDEN HarperCollins, 2011. $14.99 ISBN: 978-0062004376 In 1911, in the ultra-Orthodox Jerusalem under the backward Ottoman rule, a young woman sets out to challenge God, sending her to secretly explore worlds outside her religion, city, and the Holy Land.

Heroides Publishing, 2011. $21.95 ISBN: 978-0-982-98030-9 Pulani’s journey from the princess gates of childhood to teen pregnancy and early adulthood is set against the South African veld with its endless sky, native tribes, a mix of Boer and British cultures—and a growing climate of cultural mistrust, racial injustice, violence, and murder as society falls apart. Pulani must learn very early what it means to be strong.

Linda Cohen

1,000 MITZVAHS: HOW SMALL ACTS OF KINDNESS CAN HEAL, INSPIRE, AND CHANGE YOUR LIFE Seal Press, 2011. $16.00 ISBN: 978-1-58005-365-5 When her father passed away in 2006, Linda Cohen’s busy life as a mother, wife, and entrepreneur came to a screeching halt. She took a spiritual sabbatical to work through her grief, and she came out of it resolved to embark upon a project: perform one thousand acts of kindness—mitzvahs—to honor her father’s memory.

Avner Cohen

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011. $28.00 ISBN: 9780547195612 Jerusalem, Jerusalem uncovers the ways in which the ancient city became a transcendent fantasy that ignites religious fervor unlike anywhere else on earth. Tracing the intertwined threads of Jewish, Christian, and Muslim history, Carroll illuminates the mounting European fixation on a heavenly Jerusalem as spark of both anti-Semitism and racist colonial contempt.

Columbia University Press, 2010. $35.00 ISBN: 978-0-231-13699-0 Israel has created a special “bargain” with the bomb. Israel is the only nuclear-armed state that does not acknowledge its possession of the bomb, even though its existence is common knowledge throughout the world. It only says that it will not be the first to introduce nuclear weapons to the Middle East. Cohen offers a bold and original study of this politically explosive subject.

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James Carroll

JERUSALEM, JERUSALEM: HOW THE ANCIENT CITY IGNITED OUR MODERN WORLD

THE WORST-KEPT SECRET: ISRAEL’S BARGAIN WITH THE BOMB Peter Cole and Adina Hoffman

SACRED TRASH: THE LOST AND FOUND WORLD OF THE CAIRO GENIZA Schocken Books/Nextbook Press, 2011. $26.95 ISBN: 978-0-8052-4258-4 The story of the retrieval from an Egyptian geniza, or repository for worn-out texts, of the most vital cache of Jewish manuscripts ever discovered, weaves together unforgettable portraits of Solomon Schechter and the other heroes of this drama with explorations into the medieval documents themselves.

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2011–2012 NETWORK AUTHORS

Stephanie Coontz

Lawrence Douglas

Evan Fallenberg

A STRANGE STIRRING: THE FEMININE MYSTIQUE AND AMERICAN WOMEN AT THE DAWN OF THE 1960’S

THE VICES

WHEN WE DANCED ON WATER

Other Press, 2011. $15.95 ISBN: 978-1-59051-415-3 When Oliver Vice goes missing, the unnamed narrator launches into an all-consuming investigation into Vice’s life history. Douglas tells a mordantly humorous story of fascination turned obsession, as his narrator peels back the layers of the Vice family’s rich and bizarre history.

Harper Perennial, 2011. $14.99 ISBN: 978-0-06-203332-1 At 85, Teo Levin has had a full life, first as a dancer with the Royal Danish Ballet, later as a student of Balanchine and then, for more than fifty years, as head of the Tel Aviv Ballet and the choreographer of spare, prize-winning ballets that are hailed as some of the finest of the 20th century. But when Vivi, a young waitress at the Tel Aviv café he frequents, enters his life, both he and she are affected in major and unexpected ways.

Basic Books, 2011. $25.95 ISBN: 9780465002009 In A Strange Stirring, social historian Stephanie Coontz describes the legal disabilities and confusing cultural messages that demoralized 1960’s homemakers and working women alike, and why different groups of women did or did not respond to Friedan’s message.

Erika Dreifus Lee Crane

QUIET AMERICANS: STORIES

JEWISH GERMAN REVOLUTION: SAVING CIVILIZATION IN 400

Last Light Studio, 2011. $13.95 ISBN: 9780982708422 A high-ranking Nazi’s wife and a Jewish doctor in prewar Berlin. A Jewish immigrant soldier and the German POWs he is assigned to supervise. These are some of the characters and conflicts that emerge in Quiet Americans, stories that reframe familiar questions about what is right and wrong, remembered and repressed, resolved and unending.

Ken Farbstein

GETTING YOUR BEST HEALTH CARE: REAL-WORLD STORIES FOR PATIENT EMPOWERMENT Dorland Health, 2011. $29.95 ISBN: 978-1-885461-45-2 This illuminating guidebook steers us toward a more collegial, more patientfocused—and undeniably safer—relationship with the system and professionals within it. This book teaches us how to partner with our doctors and nurses and how to stay safe while in their care.

Pavilion Press, 2011. $16.95 ISBN: 978-14145-07200 Jewish principles on consent of the governed, impartiality of judges, and legal procedures powered the Renaissance and Enlightenment. These core beliefs weathered the blistering medieval attack from Imperial Rome, but how? The first and most important of Jewish allies came from German tribes invading and occupying Europe after the year 400.

Katherine Ellison

BUZZ: A YEAR OF PAYING ATTENTION Greg Dawson

HIDING IN THE SPOTLIGHT: A MUSICAL PRODIGY’S STORY OF SURVIVAL, 1941–1946 Pegasus Books, 2010. $15.95 ISBN: 978-1-60598-128-4 Zhanna is a 14-year-old piano prodigy in Ukraine who escapes a Nazi killing field when her father bribes a guard with his gold watch. She changes her identity and tries to hide. Instead she finds herself “hiding in the spotlight” as a prized pianist performing for the Nazis who never knew she was a Jew.

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Hyperion Voice, 2010. $24.99 ISBN: 978-1401340889 Combining wry memoir with a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist’s authoritative reporting, the book tells the story of the year leading up to the writer’s son’s bar mitzvah, after both he and his mother have been diagnosed with Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder.

Leonard Felder

HERE I AM: USING JEWISH SPIRITUAL WISDOM TO BECOME MORE PRESENT, CENTERED, AND AVAILABLE FOR LIFE Trumpeter, 2011. $15.95 ISBN: 978-1-59030-844-8 Dr. Leonard Felder has been testing out eight specific Jewish teachings that can help you and your loved ones be more centered, unflappable, and creative even at the most stressful moments or during the most upsetting situations.

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Jewish Book World

2011–2012 NETWORK AUTHORS

Ellen Feldman

Charles Fishman

Charles Fox

NEXT TO LOVE

THE BIG THIRST: THE SECRET LIFE AND TURBULENT FUTURE OF WATER

KILLING ME SOFTLY: MY LIFE IN MUSIC

Free Press, 2011. $26.99 ISBN: 978-1-4391-0207-7 From the wet moons of Saturn to the water-obsessed hotels of Las Vegas, and from a rice farm in the parched Australian outback to a high-tech IBM plant that makes a breed of pure water found nowhere in nature— Fishman shows that we’ve already left behind a century-long golden age when water was abundant, safe, and cheap, and have entered an age of water scarcity.

Scarecrow Press, 2010. $34.95 ISBN: 978-0-8108-6991-2 In this memoir, Charles Fox, the son of an Israeli mother and a Polish father, and one of the most performed composers in the world, his work includes the Grammy Award-winning song, “Killing Me Softly,” recounts his early musical studies while growing up in the Bronx.

Spiegel & Grau, 2011. $25.00 ISBN: 978-0-8129-9271-7 Ellen Feldman’s Next to Love follows the lives of three young women and their men during the years of World War II and beyond, beginning when the men ship out and ending a generation later, when their children are on the cusp of adulthood.

NAL/Penguin, 2011. $15.00 ISBN: 9780-451-23463-6 Following Ezra is the story of a father and son on a ten-year journey, from Ezra’s autism diagnosis to the day of his one-of-a-kind bar mitzvah. It celebrates Ezra’s evolution from a remote toddler to an extraordinary young man. Unlike other memoirs by parents of children with special needs, Following Ezra focuses not on a “battle” against a “disease,” but rather on the surprisingly rich and textured life one experiences in raising such a child.

Tom Fields-Meyer

FOLLOWING EZRA: WHAT ONE FATHER LEARNED ABOUT GUMBY, OTTERS, AUTISM, AND LOVE FROM HIS EXTRAORDINARY SON

Martin Fletcher

THE LIST Thomas Dunne Books, 2011. $25.95 ISBN: 978-0312606923 A novel based on facts, The List investigates an ignored and painful chapter in the lives of Jewish refugees. It is London, the last three months of 1945. Each day, Austrian refugees Georg and his combative, pregnant wife, Edith, who reached London in 1939, learn of another relative who died in the concentration camps. And they face growing anti-Semitism in London.

Ellen Frankel

SYD ARTHUR Pearlsong Press, 2011. $19.95 ISBN: 978-1597190268 Meet Syd Arthur, a middle-aged Jewish woman who is potentially awake, but starts her day with a strong cup of coffee just in case. Her daughter has left for college and her diet is off track. When East unexpectedly meets West, Syd embarks on a spiritual journey. Soon she’s in over her chakras with her Mah Jongg group insisting it’s a midlife crisis, but nothing’s going to stop Syd’s journey toward Nirvana.

Paula Fredriksen

AUGUSTINE AND THE JEWS: A CHRISTIAN DEFENSE OF JEWS AND JUDAISM Melissa Ford

LIFE FROM SCRATCH Bell Bridge Books, 2010. $14.95 ISBN: 978-1935661986 New Yorker Rachel Goldman is struggling through the first year after her divorce. An ultrasuccessful blog, self-taught cooking lessons, the support of her best friend Arianna, and a sexy Spaniard changes all of that as Rachel finds her voice and learns the art of communication that was lost during her marriage.

Jewish Book World

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Yale University Press, 2010. $20.00 ISBN: 978-0-300-16628-6 Christianity was born within Judaism; yet Christianity ultimately became the West’s most abiding source of anti-Judaism. Fredriksen traces this tangled history while relating the story of one man’s astonishing response to it. Augustine’s struggle to read the Bible, Fredriksen shows, led him to a new theological vision, one that countered the antiJudaism not only of his heretical opponents, but also of his own church.

www.jewishbookcouncil.org

2011–2012 NETWORK AUTHORS

Nanci Freedberg and Wendy Pein

Bruce Jay Friedman

Allison Gilbert

THE JEWISH PATH: A CONCISE GUIDE & DVD, BRINGING JUDAISM TO LIFE

LUCKY BRUCE: A LITERARY MEMOIR

PARENTLESS PARENTS: HOW THE LOSS OF OUR MOTHERS AND FATHERS IMPACTS THE WAY WE RAISE OUR CHILDREN

The Jewish Path LLC, 2011. $36.00 ISBN: 978-0-9759427-2-7 The Jewish Path presents overall Jewish concepts in a non-daunting manner and is designed to stimulate thoughts and discussions about how Judaism is relevant in contemporary society.

Biblioasis, 2011. $29.95 ISBN: 978-1-926845-31-9 Bruce Jay Friedman is one of the few American writers to successfully straddle the worlds of American publishing, theatre and film between the 60’s and 90’s. His memoir, Lucky Bruce, is a charming detour through post-World War II American cultural life.

Danyelle Freeman

Laura Furman

TRY THIS: TRAVELING THE GLOBE WITHOUT LEAVING THE TABLE

THE MOTHER WHO STAYED: STORIES Free Press, 2011. $15.00 ISBN: 978-1-4391-9465-2 Laura Furman showcases her stunning collection of nine brilliantly intertwined tales about the tragedies and exaltations of motherhood, written in a concerto-inspired form.

Ecco, 2011. $16.99 ISBN: 9780061881787 From Banh Mi to Bocadillos, Spotted Dick to Soup Dumplings, Meze to Ma Po Tofu, Try This travels the restaurant globe as it demystifies unfamiliar foods in sparkling prose that will leave stomachs growling.

Hyperion, 2011. $23.99 ISBN: 978-1-4013-2351-6 Gilbert reveals how the loss of our parents impacts everything about the way we raise our children—from everyday parenting decisions to the relationships we have with our spouses and in-laws.

Kenneth Ginsburg

LETTING GO WITH LOVE AND CONFIDENCE: RAISING RESPONSIBLE, RESILIENT, SELF-SUFFICIENT TEENS IN THE 21ST CENTURY Avery, 2011. $18.00 ISBN: 9781583334294 Letting Go with Love and Confidence offers practical advice on the challenging everyday situations that arise with teens and addresses how to talk about the tough stuff.

Anne Germanacos Stephen Fried

APPETITE FOR AMERICA: FRED HARVEY AND THE BUSINESS OF CIVILIZING THE WILD WEST— ONE MEAL AT A TIME Bantam, 2011. $18.00 ISBN: 978-0553383485 This is a biography of visionary entrepreneur Fred Harvey, the founding father of the American hospitality industry and foodie culture. His revolutionary family business—running restaurants and hotels between Chicago and California along the Santa Fe railroad and later Route 66, including historic inns still in use at the Grand Canyon—changed how we eat, drink, travel, and see our country.

www.jewishbookcouncil.org

BOA Editions, 2010. $14.00 ISBN: 978-1-934414-38-5 Anne Germanacos, an American Jew, fashioned a contemporary exile situation by leaving her home in San Francisco at age 17 to live on a small Greek island. Her stories reflect this chosen exile: while the majority of them are not autobiographical, the dilemma of identity is explicit in each.

IN THE TIME OF THE GIRLS

Brooke Gladstone

THE INFLUENCING MACHINE: BROOKE GLADSTONE ON THE MEDIA W. W. Norton & Company, 2011. $23.95 ISBN: 978-0393077797 NPR’s Brooke Gladstone now bursts onto the page as an illustrated character in vivid comics. The cartoon of Brooke conducts the reader through two millennia of history—from the newspapers in Caesar’s Rome to the penny press of the American Revolution and the manipulations of contemporary journalism.

Fall 5771/2011

Jewish Book World

2011–2012 NETWORK AUTHORS

David Glenwick

Brigitte Goldstein

Eitan Gonen

A PHYSICIAN UNDER THE NAZIS: MEMOIRS OF HENRY GLENWICK

DINA’S LOST TRIBE

FROM JERUSALEM TO BEVERLY HILLS: MEMOIR OF A PALESTINIAN JEW AuthorHouse, 2010. $17.75 ISBN: 9781452092942 Eitan Gonen’s memoir begins in Jerusalem as the British Empire crumbles and follows his journey as a traveller, a construction laborer, shepherd in a kibbutz, “Top Gun” fighter pilot in Israel Air Force, engineer for the Space Shuttle and eventually a businessman in Beverly Hills.

Hamilton Books, 2011. $17.99 ISBN: 978-0-7618-5136-3 A Physician Under the Nazis focuses on Glenwick’s experiences as a physician in Russian-occupied Ukraine after the outbreak of World War II, his return to the Warsaw ghetto, and his subsequent journey through labor and concentration camps in Poland and Germany.

iUniverse, 2010. $22.95 ISBN: 9781450251082/5 An American historian’s search for the mythical place of her birth in the Pyrenees, as her parents fled Nazi persecution, leads her to a mountaintop utopia arrested in time, a mysterious codex composed in Hebrew letters, and the passionate world of a medieval Jewess at the time of the expulsion of the Jews from France, who herself had fallen victim to the sexual intrigues of a fiendish priest.

Mary Glickman Shawn Green

HOME IN THE MORNING Phyllis Goldstein

HISTORY OF A CONVENIENT HATRED: CONFRONTING ANTISEMITISM Facing History and Ourselves, 2011. $18.95 ISBN: 978-0-9819543-8-7 Through powerful stories and an approachable, well-researched narrative of the world’s oldest consistent hatred and its implications for the moral choices we make, Goldstein allows readers to see themselves in the tarnished mirror of history.

GIRL UNWRAPPED

THE FALSE FRIEND

Arsenal Pulp Press, 2011 $15.95 ISBN: 978-1-55152-375-0 Toni Goldblatt’s awakening to a taboo desire conflicts with the expectations of her Holocaust-scarred parents and with the conservatism of Jewish Montreal in the 1960’s. Girl Unwrapped explores the post-Holocaust Jewish immigrant experience through the lens of an outsider within her own community.

Anchor, 2011. $14.95 ISBN: 978-0-307-39070-7 From the bestselling author of Bee Season comes an astonishingly complex psychological drama with a simple setup: two elevenyear-old girls, best friends and fierce rivals, go into the woods. Only one comes out...

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Simon & Schuster, 2011. $24.00 ISBN: 9781439191194 Two-time All Star Shawn Green, whose glorious Major League baseball career spanned nearly fourteen years, shares the lessons the game has taught him about being present and finding stillness—even with a ball hurtling toward him at ninety-five mph.

Melissa Fay Greene Gabriella Goliger

Myla Goldberg

THE WAY OF BASEBALL: FINDING STILLNESS AT 95 MPH

Open Road Integrated Media, 2010. $24.99 ISBN: 978-1-4532-1033-8 Home in the Morning is the story of Jackson Sassaport, a nice Southern Jewish boy caught between three women. The novel illuminates two themes: One contrasts the Southern Jewish experience against the Northern one, a theme rarely tackled in fiction, while the other provides a portrait of the transition from Old South to New as it looks at Jackson’s life from his childhood in the 50’s through the turbulent 60’s and into the transformed 90’s.

Fall 5771/2011

NO BIKING IN THE HOUSE WITHOUT A HELMET Sarah Crichton Books, 2011. $26.00 ISBN: 978-0-374-22306-9 After raising four of their own children, Greene and her husband didn’t want to stop. When the clock started to run down on the home team, they brought in ringers and adopted five older children from foreign orphanages. This book is a loving portrait of a unique 21st century family as it wobbles between disaster and joy.

www.jewishbookcouncil.org

2011–2012 NETWORK AUTHORS

Eric Greitens

Ted Gup

Ursula Hegi

THE HEART AND THE FIST: THE EDUCATION OF A HUMANITARIAN, THE MAKING OF A NAVY SEAL

A SECRET GIFT

CHILDREN AND FIRE

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011. $27.00 ISBN: 978-0-547-42485-9 As a Rhodes Scholar and Navy SEAL, Greitens worked alongside volunteers who taught art to street children in Bolivia and led U.S. Marines who hunted terrorists in Iraq. He offers us a new way of thinking about living a meaningful life.

Penguin Press, 2010. $25.95 ISBN: 978-1-59420-270-4 When Sam Stone discovers that his grandfather was the anonymous donor who, in the depths of the Great Depression, wrote 150 checks for $5 each to those who were in need ($100 each in today’s dollars), he embarks on a journey to track down the descendants of those who received the checks to find out what has become of them.

Scribner, 2011. $25.00 ISBN: 9781451608298 Set in the fictional town of Burgdorf, Germany in the early days of the Third Reich Children and Fire tells the story of a young schoolteacher who finds her teaching position threatened by Nazis intent on encroaching on many of her cherished freedoms. In order to keep teaching, she begins to make moral compromises she never thought she’d make.

Jennifer Griffin and Greg Myre

David Halperin

Rachel Heller and Amir Levine

THIS BURNING LAND: LESSONS FROM THE FRONT LINES OF THE TRANSFORMED ISRAELI-PALESTINIAN CONFLICT

JOURNAL OF A UFO INVESTIGATOR

ATTACHED: THE NEW SCIENCE OF ADULT ATTACHMENT AND HOW IT CAN HELP YOU FIND— AND KEEP—LOVE Tarcher, 2010. $24.95 ISBN: 978-1585428489 In Attached, psychiatrist and neuroscientist Drs. Amir Levine and Rachel Heller reveal how an understanding of adult attachment can help us find and sustain love.

John Wiley & Sons, 2011. $25.95 ISBN: 978-0-470-55090-8 Greg Myre and Jennifer Griffin, journalists who are husband and wife, arrived in Jerusalem in 1999 and began a family there. With vivid accounts, Myre, a New York Times reporter, and Griffin, a Fox News correspondent, show readers how the conflict has changed dramatically over the past decade.

Viking, 2011. $25.95 ISBN: 978-0-670-02245-8 Journal of a UFO Investigator is the story of Danny Shapiro, a teenager with a sick mother and a hostile father, who pursues UFOs in order to help him cope with the strains of his reality. He feels set apart from his friends, yet estranged also from his religion and its past. As the story unfolds, Judaism takes on a new role for Danny, giving him the courage he needs.

Michael Hiltzik

THE NEW DEAL: A TRUE HISTORY David Lee Hanna Andrew Gross

REVENANT

EYES WIDE OPEN

CreateSpace, 2011. $ 13.99 ISBN: 978-1456593940 Revenant is a tale of sudden flight, mysterious vanishings, and unforeseen reunions. It carries the reader from 19th century Europe to America at the brink of World War I; from the grandeur of imperial Berlin to the slums of London; from Warsaw in the midst of violent insurrection to an impoverished Polish shtetl.

William Morrow, 2011. $25.99 ISBN: 9780061655968 Drawing on his own shock and grief after the sudden suicide of his young nephew, Gross delivers a break-out novel that tells the story of a family haunted by a secret past.

www.jewishbookcouncil.org

Free Press, 2011. $30.00 ISBN: 978-1439154489 In his latest book, Hiltzik tells the epic story of the New Deal through the outsized personalities of the people who fought for it, opposed it, and benefited from it, rendering vital lessons for our own time.

Fall 5771/2011

Jewish Book World

Wayne Hoffman

Alick Isaacs

Al Jaffee and Mary-Lou Weisman

SWEET LIKE SUGAR

A PROPHETIC PEACE: JUDAISM, RELIGION, AND POLITICS

AL JAFFEE’S MAD LIFE

Kensington Books, 2011. $15.00 ISBN: 978-0758265623 Benji Steiner, a 20-something graphic designer with a muddled Jewish identity, meets Jacob Zuckerman, a recently widowed Orthodox rabbi; they develop an unusual bond as they gradually open up to each other. When an ugly confrontation ruptures their unlikely friendship, Benji walks away, until he meets a woman who reveals that the rabbi has devastating secrets of his own.

Indiana University Press, 2011. $27.95 ISBN: 978-0253356840 Alick Isaacs’s combat experience in the second Lebanon war provoked him to search for a way of reconciling the belligerence of religion with its messages of peace. His book challenges deeply held convictions about Judaism, Zionism, war, and peace.

2011–2012 NETWORK AUTHORS

IT Books, 2011. $16.99 ISBN: 9780061864490 Al Jaffee’s chaotic childhood and gifts for writing and cartooning have led him to satire and MAD magazine, to which he has contributed for over 50 years.

Pam Jenoff

THE THINGS WE CHERISHED Jill Jacobs

FEED ME BUBBE: RECIPES AND WISDOM FROM AMERICA’S FAVORITE ONLINE GRANDMOTHER Running Press, 2011. $16.00 ISBN: 9780762441884 Feed Me Bubbe is a collection of 100 of the best kosher recipes made popular through the online cooking show of the same name. Bubbe’s wisdom and insight comes through in these pages with informative headnotes and detailed directions that teach you timetested methods that only an 83-year-old Bubbe could know.

WHERE JUSTICE DWELLS: A HANDS-ON GUIDE TO DOING SOCIAL JUSTICE IN YOUR JEWISH COMMUNITY Jewish Lights, 2011. $24.99 ISBN: 978-1-58023-453-5 In this important and practical look at social justice work from a Jewish perspective, Rabbi Jill Jacobs examines the ideological basis for organizing explicitly Jewish responses to social justice issues in our communities.

Avrom Honig

Russell Jacoby

BLOODLUST: ON THE ROOTS OF VIOLENCE FROM CAIN AND ABEL TO THE PRESENT Judith Brin Ingber

SEEING ISRAELI AND JEWISH DANCE Wayne State University Press, 2011. $34.95 ISBN: 9780814333303 In Seeing Israeli and Jewish Dance, choreographer, dancer, and dance scholar Judith Brin Ingber collects wide-ranging essays and remarkable photographs to explore the evolution of Jewish dance through 2,000 years of Diaspora, in communities of amazing variety and amid changing traditions.

Jewish Book World

Fall 5771/2011

Free Press, 2011. $24.00 ISBN: 9781439100240 Citizens and scholars alike believe that strange enemies lurk in the street and beyond the street, but the truth is more unsettling. It is not so much the unknown that threatens us, but the known.

Doubleday, 2011. $24.95 ISBN: 978-0-385-53420-8 Spanning decades and continents, The Things We Cherished tells the story of Charlotte and Jack, two fiercely independent attorneys who find themselves slowly falling for one another while working to defend Roger Dykmans against allegations that he betrayed his Holocaust hero brother and the Jews he tried to save from the Nazis.

Erica Jong

SUGAR IN MY BOWL: REAL WOMEN WRITE ABOUT REAL SEX Ecco, 2011. $21.99 ISBN: 978-0061875762 Poet, novelist, and essayist Erica Jong has been writing about women’s sexual expression for much of her career. In her first anthology, Sugar in My Bowl, she collects frank essays and short stories by contemporary writers like Gail Collins, Fay Weldon, Eve Ensler, Jennifer Weiner, and many more.

www.jewishbookcouncil.org

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2011–2012 NETWORK AUTHORS

Kathy Kacer

Jodi Kantor

Charles King

RESTITUTION: A FAMILY’S FIGHT FOR THEIR HERITAGE LOST IN THE HOLOCAUST

THE OBAMAS

ODESSA: GENIUS AND DEATH IN A CITY OF DREAMS W. W. Norton & Company, 2011. $27.95 ISBN: 9780393070842 Here a dream of cosmopolitan freedom inspired geniuses and innovators, from Alexander Pushkin and Isaac Babel to Zionist activist Vladimir Jabotinsky and immunologist Ilya Mechnikov. Yet here too was death on a staggering scale: not only the insidious plagues common to seaports but also the mass murder of Jews carried out by the Romanian occupation during World War II.

Second Story Press, 2010. $19.95 ISBN: 978-1-897187-75-3 The Reesers make a daring escape from under the watchful eyes of the Gestapo, fleeing their comfortable home in Czechoslovakia to safety in Canada. Their lives are saved, but all else is lost, including four beautiful and valuable paintings. The search to reclaim these pieces of their lost legacy spans more than fifty years of war and political upheaval.

Little, Brown and Company, 2011. $29.99 ISBN: 978-0-316-09875-5 In The Obamas, Jodi Kantor takes us deep inside the White House as the Obamas try to grapple with their new roles, change the country, raise children, maintain friendships, and figure out what it means to be the first black President and First Lady.

N.M. Kelby

WHITE TRUFFLES IN WINTER Roberta Kalechofsky

FOUR WOMEN FROM RAVENSBRUCK: 5 STORIES FROM THE SHOA Micah Books, 2011. $18.00 ISBN: 978-0-916288-57-0 The title story, “Four Women From Ravensbruck,” is riveting in its detailed description of the infamous women’s camp, but its reach is beyond description as it follows the lives of four specific women from the camp who are chosen for a special experiment. Several of the other stories expand the idea of the Shoah to people and places beyond the concentration camps.

W. W. Norton & Company, 2011. $24.95 ISBN: 9780393079999 White Truffles in Winter imagines the world of the remarkable French chef Auguste Escoffier (1846–1935), who changed how we eat through his legendary restaurants at The Savoy and The Ritz.

David King

DEATH IN THE CITY OF LIGHT Crown, 2011. $26.00 ISBN: 978-0-307-45289-4 Death in the City of Light is the true story of the hunt for Marcel Petiot, a respectable physician by day and a brutal serial killer by night in Nazi-occupied Paris.

Kostya Kennedy

56: JOE DIMAGGIO AND THE LAST MAGIC NUMBER IN SPORTS

Nadia Kalman

THE COSMOPOLITANS Livingston Press, 2010. $17.95 ISBN: 978-1604890679 A finalist for the 2011 Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature, this warm and exuberantly comic debut tells the story of the Molochniks, Russian-Jewish immigrants in suburban Connecticut.

www.jewishbookcouncil.org

Time Home Entertainment, 2011. $26.95 ISBN: 978-1603201773 It was the summer of 1941. At this fragile time, 26-year-old New York Yankee Joe DiMaggio captured the nation with his extraordinary streak of a hit each day for 56 games. In 56, DiMaggio emerges in a new light—a conflicted husband and a mercurial star—during the event that transformed him into an American icon.

J.D. Kleinke

CATCHING BABIES Fourth Chapter Books, 2011. $15.95 ISBN: 978-09826639-0-5 In the halls of a busy metropolitan teaching hospital, a group of OB/GYN doctors complete their residencies and embark on ambitious careers, all while trying to hold their lives together at the seams.

Fall 5771/2011

Jewish Book World

2011–2012 NETWORK AUTHORS

Lisa Kogan

Jamie Korngold

Lee Kravitz

SOMEONE WILL BE WITH YOU SHORTLY: NOTES FROM A PERFECTLY IMPERFECT LIFE

THE GOD UPGRADE: FINDING YOUR 21ST-CENTURY SPIRITUALITY IN JUDAISM’S 5000-YEAR-OLD TRADITION

UNFINISHED BUSINESS: ONE MAN’S EXTRAORDINARY YEAR OF TRYING TO DO THE RIGHT THINGS

William Kolbrener

OPEN MINDED TORAH: OF IRONY, FUNDAMENTALISM AND LOVE Continuum, 2011. $19.95 ISBN: 978-1441118660 On topics ranging from parenting a son with Down’s Syndrome to Biblical criticism to Talmudic interpretation of dreams—Kolbrener presents a perspective on Judaism that emphasizes skepticism, pluralism and the need to embrace difference. Kolbrener offers a compelling new vision where being open minded allows for a non-dogmatic and committed Judaism.

Jewish Lights Publishing, 2011. $14.99 ISBN: 978-1-58023-443-6 In this provocative look at the many faces of God, “Adventure Rabbi” Jamie Korngold examines how our concept of God has changed over the centuries and how these changes have shaped every aspect of Judaism.

Bloomsbury, 2011. $16.00 ISBN: 9781608194636 After losing his job, Lee Kravitz—a man who had always worked too hard and too much—took stock of his life and decided to spend an entire year making amends and reconnecting with the people and parts of himself he had neglected.

Harper, 2011. $14.99 ISBN: 978-0-06-173503-5 Lisa Kogan is a 49-year-old single mother who maintains that every human being deserves a great mattress, a comfortable pair of shoes, and a very smart shrink, and that no one has grown a decent tomato since 1963. Someone Will Be with You Shortly is a book for anyone who has ever been unnerved by leather pants, lunch meat, or ambivalent men (not necessarily in that order), and believes that life is a fragile bit of luck in a world based on chance.

Iris Krasnow

James Kugel

THE SECRET LIVES OF WIVES: WOMEN SHARE WHAT IT REALLY TAKES TO STAY MARRIED

IN THE VALLEY OF THE SHADOW: ON THE FOUNDATIONS OF RELIGIOUS BELIEF

Gotham, 2011 $25.00. ISBN: 978-1-59240680-7 Bestselling author Iris Krasnow interviewed more than 200 wives whose marriages have survived 15 to 70 years to discover the secrets to staying married.

Free Press, 2011. $26.00 ISBN: 978-1-4391-3009-4 Ten years ago, Harvard professor emeritus James Kugel was diagnosed with an aggressive, likely fatal, form of cancer. In this wide-ranging exploration of different aspects of religion—interspersed with his personal reflections on the course of his own illness (which thankfully took a turn for the better)—Kugel seeks to uncover what he calls “the starting point of religious consciousness.”

Michael Krasny

New World Library, 2010. $22.95 ISBN: 978-1-57731-912-2 In Spiritual Envy, Krasny helps believers and nonbelievers alike to understand their own questions about faith and religion, about God and human responsibility.

Cynthia Kolko

FRUIT OF THE VINE Charles River Press, 2011. $14.95 ISBN: 978-1-936185-27-6 When Jem inherits a historic farm that a brash entrepreneur has in his sights for development, he befriends a woman who forces him to question the circumstances of his upbringing and the responsibilities thrust upon him.

Jewish Book World

Fall 5771/2011

SPIRITUAL ENVY: AN AGNOSTIC’S QUEST Mark Kurlansky

HANK GREENBERG: THE HERO WHO DIDN’T WANT TO BE ONE Yale University Press, 2011. $25.00 ISBN: 978-0-300-13660-9 Hank Greenberg, the son of Orthodox, Yiddish-speaking immigrants, lived in the Bronx and grew up in a Jewish world, but to him it was a kind of shtetl that he dreamed of leaving. Baseball was his way out; he became a superstar, and one of the most visible Jews in America during the 1930’s—the most antiSemitic period in American history.

www.jewishbookcouncil.org

2011–2012 NETWORK AUTHORS

Eric Lamet

Liel Leibovitz

DOCTOR, YOUR PATIENT WILL SEE YOU NOW: GAINING THE UPPER HAND IN YOUR MEDICAL CARE

A CHILD AL CONFINO: THE TRUE STORY OF A JEWISH BOY AND HIS MOTHER IN MUSSOLINI’S ITALY

Rowman & Littlefield, 2011. $34.95 ISBN: 978-1-4422-1059-2 Using a physician-insider’s perspective of the medical system across its entire landscape, Kussin promotes the reader’s independence, health literacy, consumerism, and self advocacy and provides an attitude to back it all up. He teaches patients how to create a personal culture of safety when facing their doctors.

Adams Media, 2010. $21.95 ISBN: 978-1440509971 A story about finding positivity and hope in the most unlikely of places, Eric Lamet’s A Child al Confino addresses the plight of Jews sent into internal exile in Mussolini’s Italy, as very few Holocaust memoirs have.

FORTUNATE SONS: THE 120 CHINESE BOYS WHO CAME TO AMERICA, WENT TO SCHOOL, AND REVOLUTIONIZED AN ANCIENT CIVILIZATION

Steven Kussin

Lucette Lagnado

THE ARROGANT YEARS: ONE GIRL’S SEARCH FOR HER LOST YOUTH, FROM CAIRO TO BROOKLYN

Israel Meir Lau

OUT OF THE DEPTHS: THE STORY OF A CHILD OF BUCHENWALD WHO RETURNED HOME AT LAST Sterling Publishing, 2011. $24.95 ISBN: 978-1-4027-8631-0 Israel Meir Lau, one of the youngest survivors of Buchenwald, was just eight years old when the camp was liberated in 1945. Descended from a 1,000-year unbroken chain of rabbis, he grew up to become Chief Rabbi of Israel—and like many of the great rabbis, a master storyteller. Out of the Depths is his harrowing, miraculous, and inspiring account of life in one of the Nazis’ deadliest concentration camps, and how he managed to survive against all odds.

Ecco, 2011. $25.99 ISBN: 9780061803673 In this much-anticipated new memoir, Lucette Lagnado revisits her first years in America, first in Brooklyn, then at Vassar and Columbia, revealing a coming-of-age interrupted by a bout with cancer at age 16. Lagnado looks to the women sequestered behind the wooden screen at her childhood synagogue, to the young co-eds at Vassar in the 1970’s, to her own mother and the women of their past in Cairo, and reflects on their stories as she struggles to heal, to make the leap from girl to woman without the grace and strength of her “arrogant years.”

Michael Levin

GUTENBERG TO GOOGLE: THE RISE AND FALL OF BOOKS Brown Books, 2011. $24.95 Gutenberg to Google explains the coming collapse of the traditional book publishing model and what it means for book lovers and society at large. It tells the inside story that people in the New York publishing industry cannot tell without risking their job.

Ilana Levinsky

Joan Leegant

THE DIARY OF A WRINKLE

WHEREVER YOU GO

CreateSpace, 2010. $12.95 ISBN: 978-1450539432 Isla Lawson has just discovered a deep, ugly, and crooked wrinkle stretched across her forehead. In a desperate attempt to escape plastic surgery hell, Isla pours her emotions into a diary that slowly becomes her vehicle into the past—a life that has spanned three countries: England, Israel, and the United States, and experiences rich with themes of religion, culture, and morality.

W. W. Norton & Company, 2011. $14.95 ISBN: 9780393339895 Set in Jerusalem, New York, and the hardline settlements in the West Bank, Wherever You Go tells the story of three Americans in Israel and shines a light on one of the most disturbing elements in Israeli society today: Jewish religious and political extremists and their threat to the modern democratic state.

www.jewishbookcouncil.org

W. W. Norton & Company, 2011. $26.95 ISBN: 9780393070040 At the twilight of the 19th century, China sent a detachment of boys to America in order to learn the ways of the West, modernize the antiquated empire, and defend it from foreigners invading its shores. After spending a decade in New England’s finest schools, the boys returned home. Fortunate Sons weaves together the dramas of personal lives with the momentous thrust of a nation reborn, shedding light on a crucial yet largely unknown period in China’s history.

Fall 5771/2011

Jewish Book World

2011–2012 NETWORK AUTHORS

David Levinson

Steven Levy

Robert Lipsyte

EVERYONE HELPS, EVERYONE WINS: HOW ABSOLUTELY ANYONE CAN PITCH IN, HELP OUT, GIVE BACK AND MAKE THE WORLD A BETTER PLACE

IN THE PLEX: HOW GOOGLE THINKS, WORKS, AND SHAPES OUR LIVES

AN ACCIDENTAL SPORTSWRITER: A MEMOIR

Simon & Schuster, 2011. $26.00 ISBN: 9781416596585 Veteran technology reporter Steven Levy was granted unprecedented access to Google, and in this revelatory book takes readers inside Google headquarters—the Googleplex—to show how Google works.

Ecco, 2011. $25.99 ISBN: 978-0-06-176913-9 Robert Lipsyte stumbled into sports by accident; needing a summer job after Columbia and before going west to graduate school, he answered an ad for copy boy at The New York Times. Over the next 50 years he became one of the country’s most respected and controversial sportswriters.

Hudson Street Press, 2011. $24.95 ISBN: 978-1-59463-072-9 In 1999, David Levinson, at the request of his rabbi, backed into starting the Temple Israel of Hollywood Mitzvah Day. By 2010, this had grown into Big Sunday, an incorporated nonprofit. Everyone Helps, Everyone Wins provides a road map for anyone looking to get involved.

Ron Liebman

JERSEY LAW

BABY BARBELLS: THE DAD’S GUIDE TO FITNESS AND FATHERING Running Press, 2011. $13.95 ISBN: 978-0-7624-4055-9 Baby Barbells is a chunky, funky, full color illustrated board book for new dads. Inside, Dr. Levitt doles out parenting wit and wisdom in the form of a series of playful exercises that gives new meaning to the term “raising children.”

Joshua Levitt

Simon & Schuster, 2011. $25.00 ISBN: 9781416569770 The sequel to Death By Rodrigo, Jersey Law is a cinematic legal thriller, full of dark humor, unexpected twists, and the wild characters that populate the streets and courtrooms of Camden, New Jersey.

Peter Lovenheim

IN THE NEIGHBORHOOD: THE SEARCH FOR COMMUNITY ON AN AMERICAN STREET, ONE SLEEPOVER AT A TIME Perigee, 2011. $13.95 ISBN: 978-0-399-53647-2 With a distinctly Jewish sensibility, In the Neighborhood is a work of narrative non-fiction that—following a brutal murder-suicide on the author’s own suburban street— explores how Americans live as neighbors today, and what we lose by living as strangers to each other.

Deborah Lipstadt

Michael Levy

KOSHER CHINESE: LIVING, TEACHING, AND EATING WITH CHINA’S OTHER BILLION Henry Holt, 2011. $15.00 ISBN: 9780805091960 As the lone Jewish Peace Corps volunteer in Guiyang, China, Michael Levy learned about a China that Americans rarely see, and his students learned about an American they could not previously imagine. During his time in Guiyang, Levy hosted a Passover seder in China’s poorest province, played Santa Claus in the Guiyang Walmart, and hosted a weekly Shabbat cooking club.

Jewish Book World

Fall 5771/2011

Schocken Books/Nextbook Press, 2011. $24.95 ISBN: 978-0-8052-4260-7 Award-winning historian Deborah E. Lipstadt gives us an overview of the trial and analyzes the dramatic effect that the survivors’ courtroom testimony—which was itself not without controversy—had on a world that had until then regularly commemorated the Holocaust but never fully understood what the millions who died and the hundreds of thousands who managed to survive had actually experienced.

THE EICHMANN TRIAL

Michael David Lukas

THE ORACLE OF STAMBOUL HarperCollins, 2011. $24.99 ISBN: 9780062012098 Set in the heart of the Ottoman Empire during the first years of its chaotic decline, Michael David Lukas’s elegantly crafted, utterly enchanting debut novel follows a gifted young Jewish girl who dares to charm a sultan—and change the course of history, for the empire and the world.

www.jewishbookcouncil.org

2011–2012 NETWORK AUTHORS

Ze’ev Maghen

Inette Miller

Stuart Nadler

JOHN LENNON AND THE JEWS: A PHILOSOPHICAL RAMPAGE

GRANDMOTHERS WHISPER: ANCIENT VOICES, TIMELESS WISDOM, A MODERN LOVE STORY

THE BOOK OF LIFE

CreateSpace, 2011. $12.00 ISBN: 978-1453643815 John Lennon and the Jews is a roller coaster journey through centuries, states, philosophies, and beliefs. It is a zany, wild, hilarious and pulverizing polemic on behalf of being Jewish.

Infinity Publishing, 2010. 34.95 ISBN: 987-0-7414-6286-2 Inette Miller, a Jewish woman, a writer, a level-headed single mother, agreed to a rite of passage that demanded she walk naked in someone else’s homeland. This is the story of the human possibilities of spirit.

Reagan Arthur Books/Back Bay Books, 2011. $13.99 ISBN: 9780316126472 These seven stories present Jewish men and women, bound by issues of faith and doubt, dealing with their sins and failings, their infidelities, their grief, their missed opportunities at love, and ultimately, their hopes for redemption.

Randy Susan Meyers John Nathan

THE MURDERER’S DAUGHTERS Lisa Miller

A BINTEL BRIF

HEAVEN: OUR ENDURING FASCINATION WITH THE AFTERLIFE

Xlibris, 2011. $19.99 ISBN: 978-1-4568-5748-6 The struggle of a man renowned for rectitude to preserve his righteousness against an assault of primal lust. Against the background of the labor movement and Jewish intellectual life on the Lower East Side, A Bintel Brif vividly renders the age-old Jewish struggle between reason and passion.

HarperCollins, 2011. $25.99 ISBN: 978-0060554767 Heaven puts believers to the test: what do they think about heaven and why? By exploring the idea of afterlife in the three Western monotheisms, Heaven offers, through history, theology, and personal reflection, ways even for skeptics to think seriously about eternity.

Griffin, 2011. $14.99 ISBN: 978-0-312-67443-4 Meyers weaves a compelling story about two Jewish sisters on a journey to overcome the collateral damage of family violence. When Lulu and Merry Zachariah are left orphaned after witnessing their father kill their mother, the girls suffer at the hands of uncaring relatives, a tough-as-nails orphanage and, finally, a foster family ill-equipped to nurture them.

A. Robert Neurath

Jay Michaelson

GOD VS. GAY?: THE RELIGIOUS CASE FOR EQUALITY Beacon Press, 2011. $25.95 ISBN: 978-0-8070-0159-2 The myth that the Bible forbids homosexuality—the myth of “God versus Gay”—is behind the most divisive and painful conflicts of our time. In this book, Jewish scholar and activist Jay Michaelson shows that not only does the Bible not prohibit same-sex intimacy—but it also honors the values of love, justice, diversity, and compassion that equality for sexual minorities brings about.

www.jewishbookcouncil.org

Andrea Myers

THE CHOOSING: A RABBI’S JOURNEY FROM SILENT NIGHTS TO HIGH HOLY DAYS Rutgers University Press, 2011. $19.95 ISBN: 978-0813549576 A young Lutheran girl grows up on Long Island, N.Y. She aspires to be a doctor, and is on the fast track to marriage and the conventional happily-ever-after. But, as the Yiddish saying goes, “Man plans, and God laughs.” Meet Andrea Myers, whose coming-of-age at Brandeis, conversion to Judaism, and awakening sexual identity make for a rich and welltimed life in the rabbinate.

BRATISLAVA PRESSBURG POZSONY: JEWISH SECULAR ENDEAVORS 1867–1938 Xlibris, 2011. $22.99 ISBN: 978-1-4535-9613-5 Unknown to many, Bratislava, presently the capital of Slovakia was once a multinational city. Having lived in this city for 31 years, Neurath, valiantly attempts to capture the story of the emancipated Bratislava Jews and their vital contributions to the city’s economy, culture, education, and political life.

Fall 5771/2011

Jewish Book World

2011–2012 NETWORK AUTHORS

Alicia Oltuski

Peter Orner

Zara Phillips

PRECIOUS OBJECTS: A STORY OF DIAMONDS, FAMILY, AND A WAY OF LIFE

LOVE AND SHAME AND LOVE

MOTHER ME: AN ADOPTED WOMAN’S JOURNEY TO MOTHERHOOD

Scribner, 2011. $24.00 ISBN: 9781416545125 Precious Objects limns Oltuski’s own family’s diamond-paved move from Communist Siberia to a displaced persons camp in postwar Germany to New York’s diamond district, revealing the connection between Jews and the industry, the diamond and its lore, and the denizens of this exotic world.

Little, Brown and Company, 2011. $24.99 ISBN: 9780316129398 Love and Shame and Love chronicles three generations of one Jewish family in Chicago and revisits the same family Orner wrote about in Esther Stories, which won the Goldberg Prize for Jewish Fiction.

Gemma Media, 2011. $14.95 ISBN: 978-1934848364 The adopted daughter of loving parents, Zara Phillips felt out of place since childhood. Although cherished, she grew up deeply insecure, consumed by a void she found impossible to fill. Zara’s birth mother was Jewish, but not knowing the truth of her identity made it difficult for her to fully embrace who she was. In the end, it was Zara’s experience of becoming a mother that revealed what being adopted really meant.

Julie Orringer

Mark Oppenheimer

WISENHEIMER: A CHILDHOOD SUBJECT TO DEBATE

Free Press, 2011. $16.00 ISBN: 9781451611915 Wisenheimer chronicles the travails of a hyperarticulate child who finds salvation in the heady world of competitive oratory.

Vintage Books, 2011. $15.95 ISBN: 978-1-4000-3437-6 A 2011 finalist for the Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature, The Invisible Bridge tells the story of Andras Lévi, a Hungarian-Jewish architecture student, who arrives from Budapest with a scholarship, a single suitcase, and a mysterious letter he promised to deliver. But when he falls into a complicated relationship with the letter’s recipient, he becomes privy to a secret that will alter the course of his—and his family’s—history.

Susan Orlean

THE INVISIBLE BRIDGE

Alison Pick

FAR TO GO Harper Perennial, 2011. $14.99 ISBN: 9780062034625 Inspired by Pick’s grandparents’ harrowing escape from Nazi-occupied Europe, Far to Go tells the story of a Czech Jewish family during the lead-up to the Second World War. When Pick’s grandparents arrived in Canada, they renounced their Judaism: Alison was raised not knowing her family’s past. While researching Far to Go, the author discovered this secret, and studied for conversion.

RIN TIN TIN: THE LIFE AND THE LEGEND Simon & Schuster, 2010. $26.99 ISBN: 978-1-4391-9013-5 Born in 1918, Rin Tin Tin’s journey from an abandoned French World War I battlefield near Verdun to movie star and icon is the story of twentieth century entertainment and entrepreneurship, and a survey of American popular culture spanning nearly a century and countless human lives.

Jewish Book World

Fall 5771/2011

Lisa Paul

SWIMMING IN THE DAYLIGHT: AN AMERICAN STUDENT, A SOVIET JEWISH DISSIDENT, AND THE GIFT OF HOPE Skyhorse Publishing, 2011. $24.95 ISBN: 978-1-61608-203-1 While working in Moscow as a nanny for an American family in 1984, Lisa C. Paul, a college student and Catholic from Wisconsin, studied Russian with Inna Meiman—a Soviet-Jewish dissident and refusenik—and both their lives would forever change.

www.jewishbookcouncil.org

2011–2012 NETWORK AUTHORS

John Pollack

Jane and Marshall Portnoy

Mark Ribowsky

THE PUN ALSO RISES: HOW THE HUMBLE PUN REVOLUTIONIZED LANGUAGE, CHANGED HISTORY AND MADE WORDPLAY MORE THAN SOME ANTICS

A JEWISH CALENDAR OF FESTIVE FOODS

HOWARD COSELL: THE MAN, THE MYTH, AND THE TRANSFORMATION OF AMERICAN SPORTS

Gotham Books, 2011. $22.50 ISBN: 978-1-592-40623-4 In The Pun Also Rises, John Pollack—a former Presidential Speechwriter for Bill Clinton and winner of the world pun championship—explains how punning revolutionized language and made the rise of modern civilization possible.

Janelle International, 2010. $29.95 ISBN: 978-0-615-33631-2 This unique volume presents not only treasured holiday recipes but, also, a delightful exploration of the Jewish calendar.

W. W. Norton & Company, 2011. $29.95 ISBN: 9780393080179 Howard Cosell was one of the most recognizable and controversial figures in American sports history. With more than forty interviews, Mark Ribowsky presents Cosell’s life as part of an American panorama, examining racism, anti-Semitism, and alcoholism, among other sensitive themes.

Phoebe Potts

GOOD EGGS: A MEMOIR

Wendy Dubow Polins

FARE FORWARD Hamilton Hall Press, 2011. $16.00 ISBN: 978-0-9837488-0-9 Gabriella Vogel’s destiny is tied up in the connection between her parent’s assassination, Albert Einstein’s theories, and a mountain in the Judean Desert. Grounded in the ancient teachings of Kabbalah, and echoing Einstein’s prophetic insistence to “consider the future and past with an equal mind,” Gabriella learns that things are not always what they seem.

HarperCollins, 2010. $23.99 ISBN: 9780061711466 Like other talented women comic artists who came before her, Potts tells her story in Good Eggs with equal parts humor and sadness. And while the book’s chief narrative revolves around the couple’s efforts to have a child, Potts peppers her account with tales of her time organizing unions in Texas, her once-crippling depression, her return to Judaism and her attempt at becoming a rabbi.

Alyson Richman

THE LOST WIFE Berkley, 2011. $15.00 ISBN: 978-0-425-24413-5 From the glamor of pre-war Prague before the Occupation, to the ensuing horrors of Nazi Europe, and to the struggles of refugees to adapt to a contemporary America, The Lost Wife explores the endurance of first love, the resilience of the human spirit, and the power of memory.

Austin Ratner

THE JUMP ARTIST

Sharon Pomerantz

RICH BOY Twelve, 2011. $14.99 ISBN: 9780446563192 After leaving his working-class home in Philadelphia, Robert Vishniak crafts a new identity and befriends the son of one of the country’s wealthiest families, until a chance encounter with a girl from his old neighborhood threatens to unravel everything.

www.jewishbookcouncil.org

Bellevue Literary Press, 2009. $14.95 ISBN: 978-1-934137-15-4 Winner of the 2011 Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature, The Jump Artist is based on the true, and largely unknown, story of the renowned photographer Philippe Halsman, a man Adolph Hitler knew by name, who Sigmund Freud wrote about in 1930, and who put Marilyn Monroe on the cover of Life magazine.

Ashley Rindsberg

TEL AVIV STORIES: LIFE, DEATH, AND LOVE IN ISRAEL’S UNHOLY CITY Midnight Oil Publishing, 2011. $14.95 ISBN: 978-0615422435 Tel Aviv is a place of contradiction, an urban dream of the Middle East where sleek European cafes sit beneath stone minarets; where Berlin-style hipsters sip coffee next to black-hatted rabbis; where charity, sex, conflict and controversy overflow the streets. In Tel Aviv Stories, Israel’s “White City” is revealed.

Fall 5771/2011

Jewish Book World

2011–2012 NETWORK AUTHORS

Nancy Rips

Avi Roseman

Tina Rosenberg

HIGH HOLIDAY STORIES

SECRETS OF SHIKSA APPEAL: 8 STEPS TO ATTRACT YOUR SHUL-MATE

JOIN THE CLUB: HOW PEER PRESSURE CAN TRANSFORM THE WORLD

iUniverse, 2011. $11.95 ISBN: 9781450289993 This sultry, no-holds barred book is a guide to Jewish dating in a post-shtetl society. Ms. Avi, the ultimate yenta, will show her naughty tactics to attract your shul-mate before that blonde chick with no knowledge of a kugel gets him first.

W. W. Norton & Company, 2011. $25.95 ISBN: 9780393068580 In Join the Club, Rosenberg identifies a brewing social revolution that is changing the way people live, based on harnessing the positive force of peer pressure. She tells how creative social entrepreneurs are starting to use peer pressure to accomplish goals as personal as losing weight and as global as fighting terrorism.

Frederick Fell, 2010. $16.95 ISBN: 978-0-88391-191-4 High Holiday Stories is filled with 101 heartfelt holiday remembrances from famous people and those known only in their own circle of family and friends.

Cokie and Steve Roberts

OUR HAGGADAH: UNITING TRADITIONS FOR INTERFAITH FAMILIES HarperCollins, 2011. $19.99 ISBN: 978-0062018106 New York Times bestselling authors and journalists Cokie and Steve Roberts share their Passover traditions in this engaging version of the Haggadah.

Leonard Rosen

ALL CRY CHAOS

Rebecca Rosenblum

The Permanent Press, 2011. $29.00 ISBN: 978-1-57962-222-0 All Cry Chaos is a debut thriller with a deeply Jewish theme: the connectedness of creation. After the murder of a mathematician who studies patterns in nature, Interpol agent Henri Poincaré crosses continents in search of the killer.

THE BIG DREAM

Ronda Robinson

Mazo Publishers, 2011. $17.95 ISBN: 978-1-936778-91-1 Beyond Politics: Inspirational People of Israel features 18 amazing souls, such as the plucky “Chicken Lady of Jerusalem,” Clara Hammer, who started a charity fund out of her own pocket to give poor Jews a proper chicken dinner on the Sabbath. Beyond Politics is designed to show life in Israel behind the headlines. It offers a welcome balance to the way Israel often is presented in the news.

Jewish Book World

Fall 5771/2011

BEYOND POLITICS: INSPIRATIONAL PEOPLE OF ISRAEL

Biblioasis, 2011. $19.95 ISBN: 978-1-926845-28-9 The Big Dream is a collection of short stories about life at the offices of Dream Inc., a lifestyle-magazine publisher. It’s about how the “dream job” and dream life that is supposed to accompany it do not necessarily happen, but the joys and sorrows and sandwiches of waking life are more than enough to occupy our hearts and minds.

Ron Rosenbaum

HOW THE END BEGINS: THE ROAD TO A NUCLEAR WORLD WAR III Simon & Schuster, 2011. $28.00 ISBN: 978-1-4165-9421-5 In this startling new book, bestselling author Ron Rosenbaum gives us a wake-up call about this new age of peril and delivers a provocative analysis of how close—and how often—the world has come to nuclear annihilation and why we are once again on the brink.

Norma E. Roth

PINK RIBBON JOURNEY: STORIES FROM THE HEART Norma E. Roth, 2010. $25.00 ISBN: 978-0-578-06431-4 Pink Ribbon Journey: Stories From the Heart, is an intimate glimpse into the lives of women with breast cancer, their families, and the medical professionals who care for them.

www.jewishbookcouncil.org

2011–2012 NETWORK AUTHORS

Barry Rubin

David Schmahmann

Adam Schwartz

ISRAEL: AN INTRODUCTION

THE DOUBLE LIFE OF ALFRED BUBER

A STRANGER ON THE PLANET

Yale University Press, 2011. $30.00 ISBN: 978-0300162301 Israel is a comprehensive book about the Jewish state which covers its society, history, people, land, culture, and economics with dozens of rich displays, maps, and photographs cover to cover.

Permanent Press, 2011. $28.00 ISBN: 978-1-57962-218-3 To all appearances, Alfred Buber, lawyer, and non-practicing Jew, is a pillar of society. But he has a secret, and a secret life, even if it exists largely in his imagination: he’s in love with a girl he barely knows. How he met her, well, it’s not for polite company, and it happened far away.

Soho Press, 2011. $25.00 ISBN: 9781569478691 When the novel opens in 1969, Seth Shapiro is twelve years old and the tumultuous behavior of his New Jersey Jewish family plays out against the backdrop of the moon landing and Woodstock. Seth and his two siblings live with their unstable mother, Ruth. One responds by becoming Orhtodox, the other attempts to maintain the peace, and Seth just wants to escape.

Ariel Sabar

HEART OF THE CITY David Schmahmann

IVORY FROM PARADISE Academy Chicago, 2011. $24.95 ISBN: 9780897336123 Ivory from Paradise, a companion novel to the award-winning Empire Settings, is the story of an emigrant South African family’s fight for ownership of priceless African artifacts collected years before by their long-dead father.

CLEOPATRA: A LIFE Back Bay Books, 2011. $16.99 ISBN: 9780316001946 In a masterly return to the classical sources, Stacy Schiff boldly separates fact from fiction to rescue the magnetic queen whose death ushered in a new world order.

www.jewishbookcouncil.org

William Morrow, 2011. $14.99 ISBN: 9780061881909 The tale of four Polish Jews, following three distinct periods in their lives: from their first meeting in the Bergen-Belsen displaced persons camp, to their early attempts at family normalcy in the United States, to their later-in-life project of memorializing their own histories.

Stacy Schiff

Ghita Schwarz

DISPLACED PERSONS

Philip Schultz

MY DYSLEXIA W. W. Norton & Company, 2011. $21.95 ISBN: 9780393079647 In his moving memoir, Schultz traces his difficult childhood and his new understanding of his early years. In doing so, he shows how a boy who did not learn to read until he was eleven went on to become a prize-winning poet by sheer force of determination.

Da Capo Press, 2011. $24.00 ISBN: 9780738213798 Heart of the City tells the remarkable true stories of nine ordinary couples—from the 1940’s to the present—whose matchmaker was the City of New York.

Galit Seliktar

FARM 54 Ponent Mon, 2011. $25.00 ISBN: 978-1-908007-00-1 This unique graphic novel weaves together three semi-autobiographical stories from the childhood and puberty as well as early adulthood and military service years of Noga, its female protagonist. The stories take place in Israel’s rural periphery in the 1970’s and 1980’s.

Fall 5771/2011

Jewish Book World

2011–2012 NETWORK AUTHORS

Steve Sem-Sandberg

Joseph Skibell

Diana Spechler

THE EMPEROR OF LIES

A CURABLE ROMANTIC

SKINNY

Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2011. $30.00 ISBN: 978-0-374-13964-3 The Emperor of Lies takes place during the Holocaust in Lodz, the second-largest Jewish ghetto. Sem-Sandberg chronicles the story of Mordechai Chaim Rumkowski, the Jewish businessman who ruled over the ghetto’s quarter-million Jews and strove to make the ghetto an industrial complex that was indispensible to the Nazi regime.

Algonquin Books, 2010. $24.95 ISBN: 978-1-56512-929-0 2011 Sami Rohr Prize Choice Award Winner Joseph Skibell has come up with a brilliantly original look at the Jewish condition through the eyes of one man, Dr. Jakov Sammelsohn, a relentless seeker of love. Being pursued by an amorous dybbuk (the ghost of his first wife), does not make his life any easier.

Harper Perennial, 2011. $14.99 ISBN: 978-0062020369 In the aftermath of her father’s death, Gray Lachmann begins to unravel her father’s lies, while tackling her own self-deceptions and taking control of her body and her life.

Jonathan Spyer

THE TRANSFORMING FIRE: THE RISE OF THE ISRAEL-ISLAMIST CONFLICT Joan Sohn Dani Shapiro

36 LETTERS, ONE FAMILY’S STORY

DEVOTION

Jewish Publication Society, 2011. $18.00 ISBN: 978-0-8276-0926-6 36 Letters, One Family’s Story is the story of one Jewish family a powerful portrait of the immigrant Jewish experience itself, and the journey of European Jewry to America.

Harper Perennial, 2011. $14.99 ISBN: 978-0-06-162835-1 Shapiro, raised in an Orthodox home, left the rules and rituals of her childhood, but when her young son began to question her about what she believed, she realized she no longer knew, setting her on a spiritual detective story.

Anna Solomon

THE LITTLE BRIDE Donna Siegel

ON THE DOORPOSTS OF ALL OUR HOUSES (AND WHAT WENT ON INSIDE) iUniverse, 2010. $20.95 ISBN: 978-1-4502-5948-4 Donna Siegel offers a whimsical account of growing up in the American heartland with her talented immigrant Jewish family and how that experience shaped her identity.

Jewish Book World

Fall 5771/2011

Penguin Group/Riverhead Books, 2011. $16.00 ISBN: 9781594485356 The Little Bride follows 16-year-old Jewish maidservant Minna Losk as she tries to escape the poverty and violence of Odessa by journeying to America as a mail-order bride. As a brutal South Dakota winter closes in, Minna, drawing on strengths she barely knows she has, is forced to confront despair as well as forbidden desire.

Continuum, 2011. $18.99 ISBN: 978-1-4411-6663-0 The Transforming Fire combines personal experience, interview and analysis to tell the story of the rise of the Israel-Islamist conflict in the period 2000–2010.

Dale Stanten

THE HOOKER’S DAUGHTER: A BOSTON FAMILY’S SAGA Infinity Publishing, 2011. $14.95 ISBN: 978-0741464026 In 1950’s Boston, Stanten’s mother established business as a prostitute to provide for her family. The Hooker’s Daughter is a story of survival, driven by a strong will and an ability to extract positive qualities from a dysfunctional life.

www.jewishbookcouncil.org

2011–2012 NETWORK AUTHORS

Douglas Stark

Jeremi Suri

Haley Tanner

THE SPHAS: THE LIFE AND TIMES OF BASKETBALL’S GREATEST JEWISH TEAM

LIBERTY’S SUREST GUARDIAN: AMERICAN NATION-BUILDING FROM WASHINGTON TO OBAMA

VACLAV AND LENA

Temple University Press, 2011. $29.50 ISBN: 978-59213-633-9 South Philadelphia Hebrew Association’s basketball team was a top squad in the American Basketball League, capturing seven championships in thirteen seasons. This book chronicles its history, showing how players fought racial stereotypes of weakness and inferiority while spreading the game’s popularity.

Free Press, 2011. $28.00 ISBN: 9781439119129 Jeremi Suri looks to recent history to see what our country has to offer to failed states around the world, explains where America has erred and where it succeeded, and offers a plan for how to move forward.

Dial Press, 2011. $25.00 ISBN: 978-1-4000-6931-6 Vaclav & Lena is the story of two ten-yearold emigrants from radically different worlds, the best of friends, who help fulfill each other’s dreams.

John Thorn

BASEBALL IN THE GARDEN OF EDEN: THE SECRET HISTORY OF THE EARLY GAME

Sonia Taitz

IN THE KING’S ARMS

Oxford University Press, 2011. $34.95 ISBN: 9780199576869 In Nazis on the Run, historian Gerald Steinacher provides the little-known story of how (and how many) Nazis fled from Europe at the end of World War II.

Darin Strauss

HALF A LIFE: A MEMOIR Random House Trade Paperbacks, 2011. $13.00 ISBN: 978-0-8129-8253-4 In Half a Life, we follow Darin Strauss as he explores his startling past—a car crash, a friend’s funeral, the queasy drama of a highstakes court case. What starts as a personal tale opens into the story of how to live with a very hard fact: we can try our best in the crucial moment, and it might not be good enough.

www.jewishbookcouncil.org

Simon & Schuster, 2011. $26.00 ISBN: 9780743294034 In this book, the Official Baseball Historian of Major League Baseball reveals the true, unknown, and wonderfully entertaining story of baseball’s origins. Dispelling baseball’s creation myth, Thorn gives a colorful and compelling account of where the sport began, who deserves credit, and how it evolved into America’s pastime.

NAZIS ON THE RUN: HOW HITLER’S HENCHMEN FLED JUSTICE

McWitty Press, 2011. $13.95 ISBN: 978-0-9755618-6-7 Seeking relief from her Holocaust survivor parents’ traumatized world, Lily Taub escapes to Oxford, and to forbidden love. Lily must find a way to embrace her heritage as well as the consequences of her flight from it.

Gerald Steinacher

Leora Tanenbaum

TAKING BACK GOD: AMERICAN WOMEN RISING UP FOR RELIGIOUS EQUALITY Counterpoint, 2011. $16.95 ISBN: 978-1-58243-708-8 In liberal houses of worship across the country, women have achieved feminist success. But when you enter Catholic and evangelical Protestant churches, Orthodox Jewish synagogues, and Muslim mosques, you enter a gender time warp. Leora Tanenbaum reports on the daring, exciting reform movements led by devout women who are sick of being treated like second-class citizens within their faith.

Micah Toub

GROWING UP JUNG: COMING OF AGE AS THE SON OF TWO SHRINKS W. W. Norton & Company, 2011. $15.95 ISBN: 9780393340266 As the son of two Jungian psychologists, the young Micah Toub got a double dose of insight, ranging from the flaky to the profound. This self-analysis is interwoven with Toub’s present-day investigation into Jungian and Freudian concepts.

Fall 5771/2011

Jewish Book World

2011–2012 NETWORK AUTHORS

Evelyn Toynton

David Unger

Fran Walfish

THE ORIENTAL WIFE

THE PRICE OF ESCAPE

Other Press, 2011. $15.95 ISBN: 978-1-59051-441-2 The Oriental Wife tells the story of two Jewish children who flee Germany separately in the 1930’s, meet again in New York, and fall in love, exploring the cost of Americanization and the clash between American and Old World ideas and virtues.

Akashic Books, 2011. $15.95 ISBN: 9781936070923 The Price of Escape depicts three days in the life of a Jew who leaves Nazi Germany by boat in 1938 to Guatemala, where he stumbles to get his footing in a hostile setting. It’s only when he commits an act he never thought he was capable of that he starts the slow journey to become the man he needs to be.

THE SELF-AWARE PARENT: RESOLVING CONFLICT AND BUILDING A BETTER BOND WITH YOUR CHILD

Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. $17.00 ISBN: 978-0-230-10256-9 As our children grow, they reveal distinct personalities that can clash with our own. In this book I show parents the importance of knowing yourself and how to turn that knowledge into a healthy relationship with your child.

Alina Tugend

BETTER BY MISTAKE: THE UNEXPECTED BENEFITS OF BEING WRONG Riverhead Books, 2011. $25.95 ISBN: 978-1-59448-785-9 This book delivers an eye-opening big idea: embracing mistakes—at work and at home— can improve every facet of our lives.

Jerome Verlin

ISRAEL 3000 YEARS: THE JEWISH PEOPLE’S 3000 YEAR PRESENCE IN ISRAEL Pavilion Press, 2011. $24.95 ISBN: 978-1414507170 Israel 3000 Years traces the Jews’ continuous homeland presence from the biblical kingdoms and Second Temple times, followed by the post-revolt eras of RomanByzantine, Muslim, Crusader, Mamluk and finally Turk foreign rule, and sovereign modern Israel.

Barbara Unell

Priscilla Warner

LEARNING TO BREATHE: MY YEAR-LONG QUEST TO BRING CALM TO MY LIFE Free Press, 2011. $23.00 ISBN: 9781439181072 In Learning to Breathe, Priscilla Warner embarks on a journey to find inner peace. Having battled debilitating panic attacks for decades, she begins meditating every day, hoping to change her brain, body, and life as she samples other spiritual and alternative health practices.

Perigee, 2011. $14.00 ISBN: 9780399536779 This book provides parents and teachers with life lessons and action steps that will encourage children to recognize and to practice good habits in the course of everyday living.

Jewish Book World

Fall 5771/2011

UNCLE DAN’S REPORT CARD

Amy Waldman

THE SUBMISSION

Sam Wasson

Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011. $27.00 ISBN: 978-0-374-27156-5 The Submission is populated with journalists, activists, mourners, and bureaucrats who struggle for advantage and fight for their ideals in a city—and a country—fractured by old hatreds and new struggles.

FIFTH AVENUE, 5 A.M.: AUDREY HEPBURN, BREAKFAST AT TIFFANY’S, AND THE DAWN OF THE MODERN WOMAN HarperCollins, 2011. $13.99 ISBN: 9780061774164 Fifth Avenue, 5 A.M. is the complete account of the making of the cinema classic, Breakfast at Tiffany’s, which changed fashion, film, and sex for good.

www.jewishbookcouncil.org

2011–2012 NETWORK AUTHORS

Katharine Weber

Sharyn Wolf

THE MEMORY OF ALL THAT: GEORGE GERSHWIN, KAY SWIFT, AND MY FAMILY’S LEGACY OF INFIDELITIES

LOVE SHRINKS: A MEMOIR OF A MARRIAGE COUNSELOR’S DIVORCE

Ellen Bari

JUMPING JENNY Kar-Ben Publishing, 2011. $17.95 ISBN: 978-0-7613-5141-2 When Jenny discovers that her skill for jumping can be used for her school’s annual mitzvah project, her life is changed forever.

Crown Publishing Group, 2011. $24.00 ISBN: 978-0-307-39588-7 Katharine Weber creates an intriguing, intimate portrait of the eccentric Warburg family, and describes its renown and great influence.

Soho Press, 2011. $20.00 ISBN: 9781569479360 In Love Shrinks, the author confesses the startling truth of her own failed marriage, and the turmoil she endured while writing bestselling advice books and yet failing to heed her own.

CHILDRENS BOOKS

Michael Wex

Joe Black

THE FRUMKISS FAMILY BUSINESS

Mary Zamore

AFIKOMEN MAMBO

Vintage Canada, 2010. $17.95 ISBN: 9780307397775 The Frumkiss family doesn’t look much different from any of the others in Bathurst Manor. As far as they know, all that distinguishes them from anybody else is that Grandpa is a famous Yiddish writer who ended up working for the radio. But Grandpa’s death changes all that.

THE SACRED TABLE: CREATING A JEWISH FOOD ETHIC

Kar-Ben Publishing, 2011. $17.95 ISBN: 978-0-7613-5638-7 Popular children’s songster Rabbi Joe Black (“Boker Tov”) returns with a catchy rhyming song and accompanying story book to enliven the afikomen hunt at your seder. With lively pictures and a sing-along CD.

CCAR Press, 2011. $19.95 ISBN: 978-0-88123-170-0 This anthology of diverse essays serves up a rich dialogue about the intersection of Judaism and food, exploring the questions and challenges of navigating the personal and communal choices about eating.

Steve Wick

Alexi Zentner

THE LONG NIGHT: WILLIAM L. SHIRER AND THE RISE AND FALL OF THE THIRD REICH

TOUCH

Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. $27.00 ISBN: 978-0230623187 The Long Night fleshes out the details of maverick journalist William L. Shirer’s adventures in 1930’s Europe, where he redefined the importance of journalism by fighting against Nazi censorship.

www.jewishbookcouncil.org

W. W. Norton & Company, 2011. $24.95 ISBN: 9780393079876 Touch introduces you to a world where monsters and witches oppose singing dogs and golden caribou, where the living and the dead part and meet again in the crippling beauty of winter and the surreal haze of summer.

Julie Chibbaro

DEADLY Simon & Schuster Children’s, 2011. $16.99 ISBN: 978-0689857386 A mysterious outbreak of typhoid fever is sweeping New York City in 1906. Every week more families fall ill, and there’s no cause in sight. When the city’s most unlikely scientist— 16-year-old Prudence Galewski, a Jewish girl from the Lower East Side—begins to assist in the investigation at the Department of Health, evidence of the cause starts to fall into place.

Fall 5771/2011

Jewish Book World

2011–2012 NETWORK AUTHORS

Myriam Halberstam

Amy Meltzer

Nancy Cote

A HORSE FOR HANUKKAH

THE SHABBAT PRINCESS

A HORSE FOR HANUKKAH

Ariella Books, 2010. $16.95 ISBN: 978-3-9813825-1-8 Hannah desperately wants a horse of her own. Miraculously her wish comes true for Hanukkah, but Hannah cannot rejoice for very long as Golda, the horse, wreaks havoc in a hilarious unfolding of the Rosenbaum Family s Hanukkah celebration.

Kar-Ben Publishing, 2011. $16.95 ISBN: 978-0-7613-5142-9 One Shabbat eve, Rosie persuades her parents to invite the Shabbat Princess to their home. As the family prepares for their royal visitor, they are reminded that adding beauty to a mitzvah only increases its worth.

Richard Michelson Ann Koffsky

LIPMAN PIKE: AMERICA’S FIRST HOME RUN KING

Karen Fisman

NOAH’S SWIM-A-THON

PROBLEMS IN PURIMVILLE: A PURIM STORY Jora Books, 2010. $13.50 ISBN: 9780981265018 In this delightful tale full of tasty hamantashen, marvelous costumes and very noisy graggers, Jacob and Sarah must draw on their wits and courage in order to solve the Problems in Purimville.

URJ Pres, 2011. $14.95 ISBN: 978-0-8074-1078-3 Noah won’t go in the pool. That is until he learns about the camp swim-a-thon and how he can help other kids enjoy the camp he loves so much. Ann Koffsky’s joyful text and bright illustrations teach young children about the values of tzedakah and perseverance, while sharing the magic of Jewish summer camp.

Leora Freedman

Linda Elovitz Marshall

THE INQUISITOR’S APPRENTICE

PARACHUTING

TALIA AND THE RUDE VEGETABLES

Sumach Press, 2010. $14.95 ISBN: 978-1-89454-986-8 Leora Freedman’s Parachuting offers rare insights into growing up at a time when political awareness and the rock-and-roll drug culture pervaded youth in suburban Jewish communities.

Kar-Ben Publishing, 2011. $16.95 ISBN: 978-0-7613-5217-4 “How can a vegetable be ‘rude’?” Talia wonders, when she mishears her grandmother asking her to gather “root” vegetables for a Rosh Hashanah stew. As Talia digs in the garden, she collects the twisted, ornery carrots and parsnips that she thinks her grandmother wants, and finds a good home for the rest.

Harcourt Children’s Books, 2011. $16.99 ISBN: 9780547581354 Being an Inquisitor is no job for a nice Jewish boy. But when the police learn that Sacha Kessler can see magic, life on Hester Street turns upside down, and he’s apprenticed to the NYPD’s top Inquisitor, Maximillian Wolf.

Sleeping Bear Press, 2011. $16.95 ISBN: 978-1585364657 In the mid 1800’s the sport of baseball was working its way across the United States. Amateur teams were springing up and in 1858 the National Association of Base Ball Players was formed. How will the players on the newly formed teams react to a Jewish teammate?

Chris Moriarty

Jewish Book World

Fall 5771/2011

www.jewishbookcouncil.org

2011–2012 NETWORK AUTHORS

Erica Perl

Vicky Alvear Shecter

Lesley Simpson

WHEN LIFE GIVES YOU O.J.

CLEOPATRA’S MOON

YUVI’S CANDY TREE

Knopf, 2011. $15.99 ISBN: 978-037585924-3 For years, ten-year-old Zelda “Zelly” Fried has tried to convince her parents to let her have a dog. But when her unconventional, Yiddish-spouting grandfather, Abraham “Ace” Diamond, hatches a ridiculous scheme involving a practice dog named O.J., Zelly’s not so sure how far she’s willing to go to win a dog of her own.

Arthur A. Levine Books, 2011. $18.99 ISBN: 978-0-545-22130-6 Cleopatra’s Moon is a YA historical fiction novel about the only surviving child of Cleopatra VII and the Roman general, Mark Antony. Introduced to the Jewish concept of free will (versus a fate-controlled destiny) by a rabbi in Alexandria, the daughter of the last queen of Egypt wrestles with the idea—both intellectually and emotionally—as tragedy unfolds around her.

Kar-Ben Publishing, 2011. $17.95 ISBN: 978-0-7613-5651-6 Yuvi’s pluck helps her survive an extraordinary exodus from Ethiopia to Israel.

Shirley Vernick

BLOOD LIE

Michael J. Rosen Myrna Gelman Shanker

Candlewick, 2011. $34.99 ISBN: 9780763655334 Open this beautiful gift book and follow the Festival of Lights through place and time—from Herod’s temple to a shtetl in Russia; from a refugee ship bound for the New World to an Israeli kibbutz. Inspired by Michael J. Rosen’s reverent poem, Robert Sabuda’s striking pop-ups depict each night’s menorah in a different scene.

LAZAR, THE GOOD DEED DOG: GIVING LOVE AND RESPECT TO OUR ELDERLY

CHANUKAH LIGHTS

Susan Goldman Rubin

MUSIC WAS IT: YOUNG LEONARD BERNSTEIN Charlesbridge, 2011. $19.95 ISBN: 978-1-58089-344-2 The book tells of Leonard Bernstein’s musical apprenticeship, from toddlerhood to his conducting debut with the New York Philharmonic at age 25.

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Myrna Gelman Shanker, 2010. $12.95 ISBN: 978-0-9829273-0-4 Lazar, a golden retriever rescue dog, lives at the Fleischman Residence/Blumberg Plaza, a Jewish senior residence in West Bloomfield, Michigan. With illustrations and rhymes, readers travel from room to room with Lazar, as he visits and celebrates the rich lives of his elderly friends. Lazar inspires good deeds and serves as a positive role model for children to do their part in making the world a better place.

Cinco Puntos Press, 2011. $15.95 ISBN: 978-1-933693-84-2 Jack Pool has been restless, especially during this season of more-times-at-the-synagogue than you can shake a stick at. But Temple’s good for some things. It gives him time to daydream about a beautiful but inaccessible Gentile girl named Emaline, until Emaline’s little sister Daisy goes missing and he and his family are accused of killing her for a blood sacrifice. Blood Lie was inspired by a real blood libel that took place when a small girl disappeared from Massena, New York in 1928, and an innocent Jewish boy was called a murderer.

Dori Weinstein

SLIDING INTO THE NEW YEAR Yaldah Publishing, March, 2011. $8.95 ISBN: 978-1-59287-301-2 Thrill-loving fifth grader Ellie Silver (YaYa) has been waiting all summer to visit the brand new indoor water park in town. She is ecstatic when her best friend, Megan, invites her to go—that is until her twin brother, Joel (YoYo), points out that Megan is going on Rosh Hashanah. Sure, Rosh Hashanah is a big deal, but so is Splash World! What will Ellie do?

Fall 5771/2011

Jewish Book World