Missing the punch line Missing from James Robert Parish's biography of one of the funniest post-war American humorists is the sheer pleasure of encountering Mel Brooks' irreverent, fertile and frequently unrestrained wit.
By Paul Lewis
How to make money - or at least be happy He's made millions with his venture-capital fund, but Jacob Burak is convinced that money isn't everything. In a new book, he looks at the philosophy and psychology that are behind success in business.
By Shiri Lev-Ari
Europe and the 'barbarians' Nancy Bisaha's book on the dawn of East-West relations is particularly relevant at a time when Turkey is seeking admittance into the EU and encountering objections at every turn.
By Yaacov Shavit
Spectator / Library diatribe Though it's unlikely to become a best-seller, 'The Reparations Controversy' may be the best way to learn about the most dramatic, incisive, painful public discussion ever held here.
By Yossi Sarid
Spectator / Library diatribe I was returning 'The Inheritance of Loss,' by Kiran Desai, and when the librarian saw it, she wrinkled her nose in disgust. 'I really disliked that book,' she exclaimed. 'More than disliked - it made me angry. Angry!'
By Carol Cook
Home Libraries / The Jerusalem Rape Crisis Center There are 500 books in the professional library. Alongside that is a smaller library, with about 100 books, mostly prose. The collection includes, among other things, works by Ram Oren, Orwell, Goethe and Guenter Grass.
By Vered Lee
Paradise Lost Esther Ettinger's biography of Zelda suffers from a paucity of documentary material. The truth of the matter is, until new research unearths previously unknown details, her life does not merit a biography.
By Oren Kakun
Going cold turkey In his full-frontal assault on the world's religions - all of them - author and journalist Christopher Hitchens compares the need for faith to an addiction, but doesn't propose a reasonable alternative.
By Rinat Harash
A thousand kinds of separation 'Mother tongue' - Maya Kuperman's unbearably beautiful book of poetry - is imaginative in a way only children are. It demands answers to questions that have none, and explores the addictive experience of leavetaking.
By Shira Stav
Questionnaire / Searching for the godly in the prosaic Iraqi-born Yossi Alfi is a poet and a man of the theater, radio and television. He has been a pioneer of community theater and founded the Storytellers Festival. The author of 20 books, his latest volume of poetry is "Mother's Fingerprints" (Carmel Publishing).
Four friends, three wishes While the World Cup and other major soccer games have the effect of dividing time and marking the enormous changes that the four friends in Eshkol Nevo's new novel will undergo, this is definitely not a book for soccer fans only.
By Neri Livneh
A crack in the earth Part travelogue, part autobiography, part rough draft for future scientific articles, Haim Watzman's book takes place along Route 90 - the road that parallels Israel's eastern border, stretching along the Syrian-African Rift Valley.
By Daniel Orenstein
'Prof. Leibowitz, does man have a soul?' A new anthology offers insights into philosopher Yeshayahu Leibowitz's often-strident positions on a host of subjects, including religion and ethics, freedom and duty, philosophy and science, faith and practice, and society and state.
By Miron C. Izakson
Are you in this family, or against it? To write successfully about a narcissistic family requires writing that allows the reader to both sneer at and care about them at the same time. British writer Charlotte Mendelson, in her third novel, pulls off this complex task quite well.
By Yael Goldstein
Harry Potter and the Internet pirates A brand new Web site, run by teenagers, publishes Hebrew translations of the last installment in J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter series. An educational summer project or an infringement of copyright?
By Ronit Roccas
Young Stalin, Up Close and Personal In following up on an earlier book about Stalin's adult life, this new biography on the early years of the 'Red Czar' reverses the temporal rules of biography, but it does not provide anything new.
By Eli Shaltiel
In and out of the political 'box' Zeev Jabotinsky sometimes acted like a spoilt child and David Ben-Gurion stepped on bodies on his way up. Zeev Tzahor offers up an illuminating analysis of two formative Israeli and Zionist leaders.
By Yechiam Weitz
Forging a golden age A Boston Jewish leader sets out to bolster the community worldwide. Shrage has returned to Boston with the chapter outlines for a new book that is essentially a program for the future of American Jewry - and the rest of the Diaspora.
By Anshel Pfeffer
Lost without translation At $12,000 a book, few are translated into Arabic and Kurdish. Only 1,000 books were translated in Egypt in the last decade; 330 books a year are translated in Arab states, a fifth of the number of books translated in Greece.
By Zvi Bar'el
The Holocaust scholar who was hard on the Jews Raul Hilberg, author of 'The Destruction of the European Jews,' died earlier this month. While he was one of the world's most influential scholars in Holocaust research, his relationship with Israeli Holocaust research was ambivalent.
By Dan Michman
Tales of a British ghetto Harry Bernstein, now 96, recounts his childhood in 1920s England, where Jews and the Christians lived on the same street, but maintained their separation both socially and professionally.
By Esther Solomon
His father, himself In his search for a new Jewish and Israeli agenda, Avraham Burg offers half-baked ideology combined with the story of some childhood traumas. Burg drank aplenty from the Zionist well in his day. Now he is spitting into it.
By Tom Segev
Letter from Berlin: The anti-anti-Zionists Germany's political media is a good place to look for signs of a phenomenon that seems to be unique to that nation: a branch of the left that is vehemently pro-Israel.
By Benjamin Weinthal
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