arts & entertainment

People Of The Books

Our annual roundup of new titles for Chanukah gift giving.

Gail Zimmerman
Arts Editor

their clothes and their lives. Halbreich
also works with costume designers for
film and television, including Sex and the
City and this year's Gotham.

FOR THE YIDDISHE MAMA
In her tender and funny novel Jewish
Mothers Never Die (Arcade), French
screenwriter Natalie David-Weill follows
the mothers of Albert Einstein, Marcel
Proust, Sigmund Freud, Woody Allen, the
Marx Brothers and more, all chatting in
heaven about their respective sons and
their sons' undying love for their mothers,
as well as the roles these mothers played in
their sons' lives.

FOR THE BIBLE SCHOLAR
The Jewish Study Bible: Second Edition
(Oxford University Press), edited by Adele
Berlin and Marc Zvi Brettler, combines
the text of the entire Jewish Bible (in the
Tanakh translation) with annotations,
introductory materials and pieces written
by top biblical scholars. This new edition
includes two dozen new and updated
essays, revised commentary, verse and
chapter differences between Hebrew text
and many English translations, and a glos-
sary of technical terms.
In Short Stories by Jesus: The
Enigmatic Parables of a Controversial
Rabbi (HarperOne), a Jewish professor of
New Testament studies, Amy-Jill Levine,
takes a fresh look at Jesus' most popular
stories, exposing how they have been
misinterpreted and misused over the last
2,000 years and also revealing the deeper
meaning of his teaching and the Jewish
scriptures that shaped his messages.

FOR THE HEBRAIST
In the coffee-table volume People of the
Book: Five Hundred Years of the Hebrew
Book from the Beginning of Printing
Until the Twentieth Century (Feldheim
Publishers), Akiva Aaronson takes readers
through five centuries of Hebrew print-
ing, from 1450-1950, introducing the first
printed editions of the most well-known
and classic Hebrew books, famous Hebrew
printers from generations past and the
Jewish communities where Hebrew print-
ing took place. More than 200 photographs
accompany the text.

FOR THE NATURE LOVER
For her book Sunrise, Sunset: 52 Weeks
of Awe and Gratitude (HCI Books), Kim
Weiss began documenting nature with
glorious color photographs of different
suns on different days, captured from the
very same vantage point. The uniqueness
of each week's landscape is accompanied
by a reflective passage from such authors
as Marci Shimoff, Judith Orloff, Roger
Kamenetz and more.

FOR THE HISTORY BUFF
Nixonland author Rick Perlstein fol-
lows up that tome with The Invisible
Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise
of Reagan (Simon and Schuster), a por-
trait of America on the verge of a nervous
breakdown in the tumultuous political
and economic times of the 1970s, which,
Perlstein asserts, led to today's charged
political climate.

FOR THE POLITICO
In Citizens of the Green Room: Profiles
in Courage and Self-Destruction (Blue
Rider Press), New York Times chief nation-
al correspondent Mark Leibovich follows
up 2013's very revealing This Town with
more portraits of Washington elites and
wannabe elites.

FOR THE DESIGN MAVEN
In conjunction with a show she's curated
for the Cooper-Hewitt Design Museum,
author-illustrator Maira Kalman, in My
Favorite Things (Harper Design), employs
her signature handwritten prose and art-
work for meditations on love, memory,
pleasure, sorrow and more, suffusing
everyday objects and mundane acts with
poetry.

FOR THE MATHEMATICIAN
In How Not To Be Wrong: The Power of
Mathematical Thinking (Penguin Press),
Harvard-trained professor and researcher
in number theory Jordan Ellenberg
explains how mathematics provides a
method for understanding fundamental
issues that arise in our everyday lives —
from interpreting medical studies to politi-
cal polls, to understanding why Google
works so well or even how early one
should get to the airport.

FOR THE MYSTERY LOVER
In Assault with a Deadly Lie: A Nick
Hoffman Novel of Suspense (University
of Wisconsin Press), Okemos-based writer

Lev Raphael writes the eighth volume

(and the first since 2007) in the series
about a professor at a fictional Michigan
university, whose life is forever changed
when he and his partner survive a night-
marish encounter with the police and an
escalating series of threats that lead to a
brutal confrontation.

FOR THE FASHIONISTA
In The Woman I Wanted to Be (Simon
and Schuster), wrap-dress maven Diane
von Furstenberg traces her path to fash-
ion stardom; she begins this memoir with
the story of her Auschwitz-survivor mom,
Lily.
Betty Halbreich's I'll Drink to That:
A Life in Style with a Twist (Penguin
Press), another memoir, tells the story of
the 86-year-old's trajectory from privi-
leged daughter of a secular, well-to-do
Jewish family in the Hyde Park section
of Chicago to Park Avenue wife of an
unfaithful New York City real estate mag-
nate to the legendary director of personal
shopping at Bergdorf Goodman, where
she helps her clients — from the not
famous to the very famous — sort out

FOR THE COMPUTER GEEK
Walter Isaacson, biographer of such
geniuses as Albert Einstein and Steve Jobs,
takes on the many masters who laid out
the digital foundation for computers and
the Internet in The Innovators: How a
Group of Hackers, Geniuses and Geeks
Created the Digital Revolution (Simon
and Schuster).

FOR THE LITERARY ONE
Obsessed with the troubled and shame-
ful period of the Occupation in France,
during which his Jewish father hid his
background and allegedly engaged in
some shady dealings, newly anointed
Nobel Prize winner in Literature Patrick
Modiano — lauded for "the art of mem-
ory with which he has evoked the most
ungraspable human destinies and uncov-
ered the life-world of the Occupation"
— returns to this theme in Suspended
Sentences (Yale), comprising three novel-
las (Afterimage, Suspended Sentences
and Flowers of Ruin), translated by Mark
Polizzotti and originally released separate-
ly, which form a single, compelling whole.
Modiano draws on his own experiences,
blended with the real or invented stories of
others, to present a dreamlike autobiogra-
phy of a place.
Chanukah Books on page 68

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December 11 • 2014

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