ilana

It was fine. The concept was interesting, but the main character's engagement with her Jewish identity seemed rather superficial, which didn't make a lot of of sense to me for something that was supposed to be a big part of animating her motivation. It's also sort of hard to get behind a character who not only doesn't seem to know what she wants out of life but who doesn't seem to care. We're informed that Luzia is a rebel, an iconoclast, but she is really very passive. I kept waiting for her to make a decision for herself, but things just sort of... happened to her. I was ultimately more interested in what became of her erstwhile employer than what became of the main character herself. As far as the crypto-Jewish elements, it very much read as the author using this framework to explore her own identity and felt shallow.

A pageturner, for sure. A nearly-grown-up malcontent escapé from the Gifted and Talented track makes his way to a magic school and then to not!Narnia? Sign me up!

The prose is tight, fun, unique, and rollicking. The worldbuilding is interesting – it knowingly sacrifices originality for wink-and-nudge callbacks, referencing Harry Potter, Narnia, Lord of the Rings, Earthsea, and (possibly) the film Pan's Labyrinth. The imagery was often extremely vivid, and immersive – I often felt like I was physically there, on the welters court, in a snowfield, cruising at altitude above the world. And I wanted desperately, at all times, to know what would happen next.

In the end, though, I was left feeling cold. Quentin didn't seem to experience much personal growth through the 400-some pages of the book, despite going through incredible numbers of unique and challenging experiences over four or five years in total. However, he seemd to accrue only trauma, and little wisdom, by the end of the book. I found him more difficult to like the more time passed in the story; surely, I kept thinking, now he'll begin to grow as a person. But it never really happened.

The other characters often felt thinly written, too. They were so dynamic that I wanted to know more about their inner lives, but these were only ever hinted at. They seemed to exist mostly as foils to or supports for Quentin, which in the case of Alice was particularly disappointing, given how her story ultimately shook out.

I enjoyed this, but I'm not sure I'd recommend it.

I used to lift weights and was strong. Then I stopped lifting weights for 2+ years, lost a lot of weight and a lot of muscle, and got weak. Then I injured myself trying to do olympic lifting as though the events of the previous 2+ years had not happened. Then I got this book, followed the program, and now am feeling so much better and stronger and more confident and more hopeful than I thought I could – I literally at one point thought I would never be able to lift weights again – and I am very grateful. If you can afford 20 US dollars' worth of anything, and you want to try weightlifting, buy this book/program. It's excellent.

I got about a third of the way through this before a) it was recalled by the library and b) I got bored. I was excited to read this because because so many readers had sung its praises and becauseI remembered liking Circe, but I found the main character dull and the love interest even duller. Maybe I'll give it another go someday, but as it stands I'm not really sure what people like about this book beyond the concept.

I was torn between 3 and 4 stars, but I'll be generous, because there was so much to like about this book. Kay is reliably excellent, and All the Seas of the World is no exception.

Things I liked:

Multiple complex female characters (one of them a main character), each with her own strengths and weaknesses. Kay is one of those rare male writers who a) can reliably write female characters well and believably, and b) patently understands that “strong female character” need not mean that the character in question is physically strong or a good fighter... or that if she is, that need not be the only thing that makes her strong. (In fact, it may not make her strong at all.) Kay's ability to write women has not always been very good, in all honesty, but that fact makes his skill at this now all the more welcome and impressive – many male writers would not have noticed or tried to rectify a weakness in this area. It means a lot to me that Kay has.

Multiple Jewish (well, Kindath, but...) characters, including Raina Vidal, an interpretation of the real-life Doña Gracia Nasi, who I had never imagined I'd get to read about as a fictionalized character in a fantasy novel, let alone get to see her have hot lesbian sex with the book's heroine (it's fade to black, which is just as well. Her appearance in the book as a background player is excellent – I guess we may know little about the real woman's personality, but I really liked how Kay chose to characterize her, incredibly strong-willed, sharp as a tack, and still with a warmth and sensitivity to her, because she was after all a human person, even if she was everything else that she was – businesswoman, humanitarian, philanthropist, political strategist, and community leader.

Rafel ben Natan was a delight. A friend of mine pointed out that his was a rare example in fiction of Jewish ideals of masculinity rather than goyish ones – Rafel is quick-witted, smart, subtle, courageous, creative, and tenacious. His experience of migration under duress continuing to affect his life is one that resonates with many Jews (and others) today.

Other Kindath characters include Gaelle (another excellent female character, though one that could have used a bit more development), Rafel's absconded gett-refuser brother, Elie the mariner, and Tamir, Raina Vidal's fool of a sister-in-law.

Things I liked a little less:
Not much to complain about! I will say some characters could have used a bit more development (Gaelle, mostly), but insofar as I'm left wanting, it's just because there are so many tertiary characters whose lives I want to know more about... Antenami Sardi, Guidano Cerra, Gaelle again, and Rafel's brother.

The middle section of the book dragged a tiny bit in places.

On reflection, there were some places where the resolution seemed a bit... neat, and there were some allusions to previous books (not in this series) that felt more like Easter eggs than real enhancements.

Final thoughts:
This isn't my favourite Kay book (that probably is still Lions, followed by the Sarantine Mosaic), but it makes a fabulous capstone to the series (preceded by Children of Earth and Sky and A Brightness Long Ago, both of which I loved) of which it is a part. Emotionally resonant, exciting, thought-provoking, and with a satisfying ending.

This can be read as a standalone, but I wouldn't advise it. You'll get much more out of it if you bother to read Children of Earth and Sky and A Brightness Long Ago first.

Some good advice here about how your skin is a whole organ unto itself, and responds to lifestyle factors (look to your stress levels and whether your diet contains vegetables and fruits), but unfortunately an absolute f*ckload of diet-culture garbage where certain foods are demonized, without sufficient evidence of them being “bad for you”. (Guess what else is bad for you and your skin? Eating disorders.) A shallow understanding of epigenetics and how you should look to your ancestors' likely diets to inform what will work for you (and, it's assumed, your skin), with zero acknowledgment of people who have mixed heritage, with ancestors from wildly disparate cultural/geographic regions.

On the plus side, it's extremely accessible and an easy read, introduces the idea of the acid mantle and that your skin doesn't necessarily need products. Basically, this book is, at best, the gateway through which a reader can access better-written, more scientifically-informed writing about skin care. Honestly, just read Jessica DeFino's Substack.

This book stressed me out, and the main character was unlikeable. I felt bad for her because of her babies who apparently literally never slept (only cried), but she wasn't so much “prickly and damaged” as “a miserable asshole”. I felt bad for her husband, tbh. Tasha seemed cool. I was more interested in the centaurs than the humans. Abandoned the book about 100 pages in.

Dynamic and gorgeous art, and an exciting premise. Unfortunately, I felt the plot was a bit predictable and the tension was resolved too quickly and easily. The characters were a little underdeveloped. As well, the character of Bartolomeu essentially was kind of a white saviour, and presented as a “good” white character that can be held up against the villainous one(s) (and with whom a white reader can identify, thereby escaping the unpleasant feelings of guilt by association).

Still, an enjoyable and quick read. It just felt a little simplistic and underdeveloped.

A very quick read, and enjoyable. Like much of Stavans' work, there's nearly as much memoir as there is history, but so long as you like Stavans' personality, this is not a bad thing. I would have liked more information on linguistics, but that's not this book; unfortunately, linguistics and linguistic anthropology coverage is a little thin on the ground. But Stavans is an engaging writer and this book is very accessible. A good read for Shabbat, if you keep it.

Disappointing. Engagingly written, but draws wild conclusions based on limited evidence, often apparently choosing to follow threads that have limited support from actual scholars.

For instance, Kriwaczek cites Arthuer Koestler as a definitive authority on the question of the Jews of Khazaria, when Koestler's The Thirteenth Tribe has been more or less debunked (based, as it is, on extremely thin and limited evidence).

Kriwaczek also seems (for lack of a better word) obsessed with the idea that Ashkenazi Jews are the product of vast numbers of European converts to Judaism, when this is not supported by science or genetics. He goes on at length about veritable legions of Roman, Greek, and other European converts, and to his credit it is true that during the heyday of Rome, there were a great number of “Sabbath-keepers”. But Kriwaczek himself admits that the Greco-Roman converts and their descendents mostly were reabsorbed into the ethnoreligious majority when Rome Christianized fully, and did not remain Jewish.

Kriwaczek likewise claims that “European Jews are almost without exception the progeny or proselytes”, but cites no sources that validate this claim – a declaration that is at odds with the consensus of population geneticists who have conducted studies of ethnic Jews (particularly of Ashkenazim). He asserts that “there is no gene for Jewishness”, and claims that “after several generations, ethnic Hebrews, descendents of Middle Eastern, Roman and Greek converts, German, Slav and Turkic proselytes would have been so intermingled that even modern DNA analysis would be quite unable to separate the different strands in their genetic inheritance.”

This is not in fact the case, and dozens of genetic studies have proven it. (This is such basic knowledge that I can confidently direct the reader to Wikipedia for further reading.) To bolster this claim, Kriwaczek cites something truly incredible. Not a geneticist, nor an historian – Kriwaczek cites Adolf Hitler's Politisches testament: die Bormann-Diktate, stating that “even Hitler, in spite of his psychotically racist anti-Semitism [sic], wrote that ... ‘we speak of the Jewish race only as a linguistic convenience ... from a genetic standpoint, there is no Jewish race”.

It was at this point that I had to stop reading. Not only is the Kriwaczek obsessed with the (false) notion that European Jewry is the product mostly of non-ethnic Jews, he is either ignorant of, or willing to ignore, the many genetic studies that have repeatedly shown that Ashkenazi Jews show far greater genetic affinity with other Jewish populations than with European non-Jews. This is common knowledge and has been affirmed by many subsequent studies at this point (showing that nearly all Jewish ethnic groups are more closely related to each other than to their surrounding non-Jewish populations). It's bizarre and alarming that Kriwaczek is so determined to obfuscate this, particularly since he doesn't cite anything that actually negates it. It's just his repeated assertions of something that has been credibly refuted, again and again and again, as though that constitutes scholarship.

I understand that for many Jews of his generation, particularly those who have personally brushed against the Shoah, acknowledging anything about Jewishness that is tied to genetic inheritance triggers the echoes of Nazi “race science”. I am sympathetic to this, but that sympathy goes only so far, and I cannot extend much sympathy to someone who has written a book, and supposedly done research to support his claims.

I can't even say this is poor scholarship or poorly researched; it is essentially a polemic being presented as popular academic-adjacent writing supported by research, which – to be clear – it is not. I am willing to countenance someone making claims I disagree with, provided they can cite material that supports their arguments. But Kriwaczek appears to have hardly tried.

Critics tend to agree with me:
Review in Jewish Book Council: “a fas­ci­nat­ing and ener­getic, but sig­nif­i­cant­ly flawed, effort . . . The book is pecu­liar­ly doc­u­ment­ed . . . and there are numer­ous mis­spellings and mis­trans­la­tions . . . Sad­ly, one can­not rec­om­mend this book.”

Review in Publisher's Weekly: “Charming but frustratingly rambling . . . the book [is] more of a rumination on a number of related issues than a concise examination of a culture and a language.”

Review in Literary Review : “Indeed, it is hard to see the point of [this] book. [Kriwaczek] opens with some recollections about his post-war childhood in north London and intersperses his narrative with half baked travelogues, yet the bulk is a straightforward, if poorly researched, history of the Jews in Europe.”

I would say this book is “important” more than I would say it is “good”. It's a seminal text in studies of Jewish ethnicity and racial assignment, but it's missing important information and is pretty dated at this point.

Firstly, as others have (correctly) noted, the book is almost solely about the Ashkenazi American experience, and does not acknowledge or discuss non-Ashkenazi culture. This is an enormous missed opportunity for several reasons; it fails to consider the cultural distinctiveness of other Jewish ethnic groups, which has major implications for the construction and assignment of identity.

Sephardic Jews from Western Europe (Spain, Portugal, and the Netherlands) were among the earliest Jews to come to the US in the 18th and early 19th centuries, and many of them had an important roles in the building of the country. Brodkin also doesn't consider the fact that a not-insignificant number of non-Ashkenazi Jews (Sepharadim and others) very much do pass as white.

Brodkin likewise doesn't take American “Jews of colour” into account, whether these are ethnic Jews of non-Ashkenazi ancestry who are not white in appearance, or non-white American converts to Judaism. These people are also American Jews, and they play a role in Jews' construction of racial identity, and in the racial assignment of Jews.

Secondly, the book is now dated (it was first published in 1998, and one chapter was published in 1994). It's simply no longer current in terms of discourses around Jewishness and race/ethnicity, or discourses around race/ethnicity in general in the 2010s and 2020s.

While I wouldn't not recommend this book, it's best read in concert with/alongside other texts on Jewishness and race/ethnicity, particularly alongside David Schraub's paper “White Jews: An Intersectional Approach” (AJS Review, vol. 43, no. 2, 2019). Other recommended readings on this subject are listed here: Bibliography: readings on Jewish race/ethnicity, whiteness, and antisemitism

A third problem with this book is that it tries to be autoethnography, history, and historiography simultaneously, and doesn't excel at any of those – the personal elements of Brodkin's narrative are scant (but present enough to be noteworthy and to make the reader wonder how much this book is an attempt at self-exculpation), and the historiography is limited to a few criticisms of other, earlier writers' paternalism and racism (in the latter chapters). The history is relatively scholarly and well-researched, but the writing is unbelievably dry.

A quick and accessible read, with a tone both breezy and deeply sardonic, redolent of the particular pain to which most progressive and left-leaning Jews can relate: one of being continually obscured, erased, occluded, dismissed, and gaslit about our experiences, while also doing our utmost to stay on the “right side of history” where progressive values are concerned. A good book, though one whose readership I feel relatively sure will be 95% Jewish. I fear that those who really need to hear what this book is saying – non-Jewish progressives who are more or less ignorant about antisemitism – will mostly dismiss it out of hand, which is a shame.

Baddiel does an excellent job of deconstructing and making plain the very complex layers of racism, xenophobia, anti-Judaism, conspiratorial thinking, and general anxiety that comprise antisemitism as a phenomenon, and does his level best to explain to the reader why they should bother to care about it, as they (presumably, hopefully) care about other types of bigotry.

I can't say this is a perfect book (hence my rating); other reviews have discussed its rhetorical and narrative shortcomings (the remark about it reading like a transcribed voice memo was a bit harsh, but honestly? Not far off the mark). Nevertheless, in a dearth of easily accessibly writing on the subject, I'd say it's still definitely worth reading.

A gorgeous catalogue with dozens of high-quality photographs of beautiful - and beautifully preserved - extant garments from throughout the Jewish world. It doesn't skimp on explanatory writing, either. I only wish there was more coverage of clothing from the Ashkenazi world, as this area was treated minimally relative to rest of the Jewish world. I believe this was in large part due to the paucity of extant Ashkenazi garments from Europe in general and especially in the Museum's collection, whereas the Museum has in its collection any number of stunning articles of clothing from SWANA (Southwest Asia and North Africa). Still, the disparity was noticeable. Rights to images notwithstanding, the dearth of Ashkenazi costume in the collection could have been allayed by the use of paintings - Maurycy Gottlieb, Maurycy Minkowski, and other artists who created genre paintings of Jewish life are great resources for those of us interested in, for example, the shterntikhl.

I understand that this is something of a reversal of the usual in the Jewish world, where Ashkenazi lifeways are (unfairly) presumed to be some sort of universal or default, and given undue privileged treatment. Nevertheless, historical injustices can't be righted by deliberate sidelining (not that this was what the book intended to do by any means - as mentioned, I believe it's a limitation of the collection), so I feel entirely comfortable mentioning my disappointment here. My hope is that with time, more information about the Ashkenazi wardrobe (beyond taleysim and shtreimels) will emerge and be valued by lovers of historical costume and the anthropology of dress.

This was an engaging read - clearly a work of scholarly ethnographic writing, but not at all inaccessible. There were (and are) aspects of the culinary milieu in Israel that were not touched upon that I feel are integral to the larger story of the topic, but understandably Avieli cannot reasonably be expected to cover everything, and the subjects he discussed were fascinating and revealing examples of power dynamics between different interest groups and communities within Israel. I appreciated, also, that while Avieli is (rightfully) extremely critical of the many social problems that exist in Israeli society, he resists the temptation to use these realities as fodder for any kind of anti-Zionist polemic (nor does he, thankfully, indulge in any overtly Zionist defences of the state). While I wouldn't generally expect an anthropologist of any integrity to indulge in polemics of that nature, this is unfortunately something one comes to expect in writing on Israel and Palestine, and it's to Avieli's credit and the book's benefit that his autoethnography manages to remain as impartial and observational (and therefore useful) as it does.

An excellent book and an amazing resource, since no comprehensive studies of Ashkenazi herbal medicine practices existed in prior to its publication. I would have preferred more ethnography and narrative, and was a bit disappointed that fully two thirds of the book comprises the materia medica, which is a wonderful resource but not as interesting a read. Perhaps this book will inspire future writing along those lines.

This was an absorbing, accessible, inspiring, and disturbing book. It was a very quick read; I finished it in three days. This is a point in its favour, for me; it was so engrossing that it was effectively a page-turner. I didn't know it had been recommended by Michelle Obama or Oprah or whoever else until I came to review it here; I found it on a friend's bookshelf while housesitting and picked it up by chance.

As with many memoirs that include elements of abuse, and lifestyle choices that some readers are incapable of comprehending or accepting, there are those (well-represented in the reviews here) who doubt Westover's narrative and suspect that she embellished or invented this story. It's true that there are known cases of putative memoirs that turned out to be made up out of whole cloth. We really have no way of knowing how much (if any) of this story is true, but the fact is that all of it is plausible. Some readers are incapable of understanding that there are communities whose mores and norms diverge sharply from theirs; perhaps they are especially disturbed by some details and prefer to indulge their doubts rather than accept that in some communities, in some families, truly horrific abuse occurs. We see this in some fundamentalist religious communities, and in many cults; it shouldn't surprise anyone at this point that things like this happen. Just because most religious people – even very conservative religious people – don't experience of perpetrate abuses of this nature or degree doesn't mean they don't nevertheless happen: we have only to look at the example of the FLDS Mormon church, the Lev Tahor sect of Haredi Judaism (a tiny sect repudiated by virtually all other Jews), the experience of women and children involved in ISIS, Al-Shabaab, or Boko Haram, and so on. Even outside of religious fundamentalism, the kinds of emotional abuse and manipulation that are depicted in this story happen more often that we'd like to think. The question “why do abused women return to their husbands?” comes to mind; the psychology of people who have endured abuse of this kind is complex, but very real. I've seen it.

Again, there is simply no way of validating the veracity of this story; given that I have no evidence to disprove it, I choose to believe it. Ultimately I found it a very moving story and an engaging read. Westover is truly a very good writer, with some of the best prose I've read recently. If you like this sort of fast-moving melodrama, you will enjoy this book. Don't read it if you are inclined to doubt survivors of abuse and pick apart their testimonies, because the book will likely aggravate you.

I have been re-reading this book on a yearly or twice-yearly basis since probably 2008. Few things are sadder for me than knowing there's no more writing to be had from this author – I wish him well, wherever he is!

I can't really say more about how good this story is, but the fact that I've returned to it time and time and time again indicates to me that this is a story that's held up year or over year and has stood the test of time.

Go and read it yesterday!

The TL;DR: Caste is an excellent overview of the US's unspoken but everpresent caste system. It's written in an engaging and accessible style, but is rigourously researched. I would recommend it as an introductory text on the subject.

Caste is an excellent and apt framework for viewing the United States' many problems with equity and equality, but one that many likely haven't thought to apply to this country, believing it to be something only seen in other, older societies, like India, or in the case of Nazi Germany. But Wilkinson makes an excellent case for why caste (in addition to race or class) is a superior lens through which to view, and thereby to understand, the US. This is an excellent book for those who believe the United States to be a meritocracy that has transcended the “bad old days”, and who aren't yet wise to the very deliberate steps taken in the US to prevent Black Americans from exercising self-determination as a community/communities or achieving self-actualization as individuals.

While I would unreservedly recommend the book (especially to American readers who aren't Black themselves, and most especially to white Americans), there are a few aspects of it that weaken this recommendation slightly. The first is Wilkinson's implicit privileging of social class: Goodreads user Lois addresses this more substantially in their review, but Wilkinson's treatment of socioeconomic class both within and between different ethnic groups is sparse to say the least, and throughout the book, her focus on professional and educational accomplishments within the American and European higher education system seems to imply that these accomplishments confer more inherent worth to those people who achieve them than to those who don't or can't.

The second issue is with the treatment of Jews. While I understand that the book is first and foremost about the experience of Black people in the United States (and I take no issue with that receiving the book's primary attention), I feel within my rights as a Jewish reader to critique this aspect of the book, because Wilkinson uses Jews as a case study. More specifically, Wilkinson uses the Nazi regime and the Holocaust as a rhetorical tool, in the same way that she uses the Indian Hindu caste system as a comparator. While the experience of European Jewry during the Holocaust is a logical comparison (though I am a bit tired of the worst episode in my people's history being used as a rhetorical prop), Wilkinson's treatment elides, for the most part, the fact that Jews had already been part of an extant European caste system for hundreds of years, most notably as part of the feudal system, where an aristocratic caste ruled over the peasant or serf caste. Having been displaced from their ancestral homeland and being outside of the Church's governing structure, Jews were outside of this system, and were not allowed to own land or even to rent and farm others' land. They were subject to higher taxes than ordinary peasants, and were barred from virtually all guilds and trade associations. They were therefore forced to perform the role of moneylender and/or tax collector - this in particular was a missed opportunity for an example during Wilkinson's otherwise excellent discussion of one of the pillars of caste (occupational hierarchy).

Wilkinson's treatment of Jews only in the context of subjugation and genocide in Nazi Europe, and not their experience in the US, was a secondary missed opportunity. Many Jews have white skin and therefore are generally afforded white privilege in the US, something American Jews are increasingly aware of and grappling with. However, Jews were not always “allowed” to be white in the US, and generally their whiteness has been conditional. Eric K. Ward, a scholar of white supremacy, has written an excellent article on this subject, Skin in the Game: How Antisemitism Animates White Nationalism, in which he explains that Jews have unwittingly served as white supremacy's buffer group. (For whatever it may be worth, Ward is not Jewish, and he is Black.) Jews occupy a particularly interesting place in the US's racial hierarchy, because they comprise not a race but an ethnoreligious group that is itself composed of several ethnic subgroups, some of which are generally (though not universally) afforded white privilege and some of which rarely, if ever, are seen as white. However, a full discussion of that issue is far beyond the scope of this book and therefore I didn't expect Wilkinson to delve into it. But a paragraph's worth clearly stating the fact that antisemitism neither began nor ended with the Holocaust, that it is far from limited to Europe (see also the lynching of Leo Frank as one example), and that antisemitic hate crimes are not isolated events in the US but are themselves systemic, would have been welcome and would not have detracted from the book's message.

Finally, Wilkinson's apparent readiness to believe that Germany has truly reckoned with its genocide of Jews and Roma/Sinti people comes across as naive. While the official position of the German state may be one of contrition and reconciliation, the reality on the ground for German Jews (yes, they still exist) is rather different. A 2019 article on the subject from the New York Times provides a good illustration of the tenuous position in which Jews of German nationality today find themselves.

All this said, I think this is a great book and Wilkinson has done many readers a service in writing it. If you read this entire review, thank you for taking the time to do so and I hope it has been useful.

An absorbing and compelling read. It was absolutely incredible to see my culture on the pages of a science fiction novel set in the future; each sly reference tickled me and the use of the Golem of Prague legend as allegory was effective. I especially liked that certain references or terms were not spelled out for the reader, at least not right away or in so many terms - the reader is simply expected to be literate in Jewish culture, religion, and history.

I enjoyed that each character was complex, that the sympathetic characters were not actually always sympathetic, but rather had their own warts. It would have been easy for an author to make Shira Shipman a Mary Sue, but no - Shira is prickly, more than a bit self-centred, and anxious. I suspect Malkah was a bit of an avatar for the author, but this is actually fun for the reader.

Since the book was published in 1991, there are a few bits of terminology that haven't aged well - the use of the word “autistic” is an example. It comes up a few times and betrays the author's belief (at that time) that autistic people are incapable of emotion or expression, and have minimal quality of life. This isn't a theme of the book, so it doesn't mean I won't recommend this title, but it jumped out at me as a reader in 2021.

A moving account of Michael Twitty's personal journey to explore his ancestry through culinary history, genealogy, population genetics, travel, and his own memories. The book is studded with fascinating (and often disturbing) details about the ingenuity required of enslaved people in the United States to survive, and thrive. The narrative underscored for me and enlightened me in a new way about just how much culture and language from West and Central Africa survived the ravages of persecution and time to remain vital and present in the lives of the descendents of enslaved people today - and the descendents of their ancestors' enslavers - especially in Southern foodways.

A few quibbles: perhaps it's because I bought a mass-market edition, but there were multiple issues that a copyeditor should have caught (creative uses of em-dashes made the structure of some sentences unclear, and required me to re-read them multiple times). The book also could have benefited from an index, but my guess is that the publisher/editor wasn't willing to pay for an indexer.

Still, I absolutely recommend this to anyone interested in culinary history (especially of southern American, West African, and/or Central African cuisines), African American history, and genealogy. Michael Twitty is an excellent writer who goes above and beyond in his efforts to get at a personal truth, and is generous enough to give the reader a window into it.

An excruciating read. Martínez spares no detail in terms of the horrors perpetrated on the bodies and souls of migrants and their loved ones. His writing, as reviewers have said, is reminiscent of war reporting, evoking deep exhaustion that approaches but stays short of cynicism, retaining a sense of urgency but also the fear and grief that so many efforts to stay the endemic violence and corruption have thus far borne less fruit than so many have hoped. Martínez's writing may be among the most important work to lay bare the degree and depth of this system, with the hope that sunlight may present a disinfectant.

It sounds trite, but this is the most important book I've read recently (maybe ever). It sounds even more trite to say this, but it changed my life. I've spent 10 years increasingly addicted to or hypnotized by social media (Facebook in particular) and my anxiety was through the roof. I found I was so much happier and more at peace when I took long breaks from it, but felt I couldn't possibly stop using it altogether, or even minimize my use to the degree necessary. After reading this book, I know why I experienced this misery, and how I can make digital minimalism an ongoing practice. I want to recommend this book to everyone I know - it's that critical.

This is an accessible and quick read, but its content is of the utmost importance to anyone who uses the internet in general, and social media in particular.

A fast-paced read, which was a change of pace from my experience of Le Guin's other writing, which tends to be very measured (even, sometimes, ponderous). As usual, a real sense of immersion into a place and time and culture, though less anthropologically-minded than some of her other work (e.g., The Dispossessed, Always Coming Home). You can read this in a weekend if you do nothing else; in a week if you have more going on in your life. And it's well worth the time.

I did not expect to like this book. My grandmother, like innumerable North American Jewish grandmothers, recommends books to me and the rest of the family ceaselessly, especially books about Jewish history (or fictionalized history). But frankly I rarely like her recommendations; often I sense that they're going to be sort of saccharine, shallow treatments. (Whether this is fair of me is another thing entirely.) This book, I'm happy to say, was none of those things.

This is a complex story by an author who is deeply ambivalent about his family's history, especially the Jewish part of his family. I, being the descendent of poor and classless Ostjüden from Galicia and even further east, can't relate to the tale of vast intergenerational wealth and the great Jewish families of France and Germany. And in part because those stories have nothing to do with my personal family history, I've had little interest in hearing them, little interest in learning about the fabulously wealthy and privileged few whose hypervisible lifestyles provided (and, sadly, continue to provide) ample ammunition for antisemites. But this book made me understand why someone might care.

This is not a story about objets d'art. It's not even really necessary for the reader to have an interest in the history of Western fine art, or in Japanese traditional crafts and fine art. But the use of art as a framework for exploring the lives of de Waal's ancestors, and the netsuke as a sort of personified motif, work beautifully as entry points into what is really a story about relating to something much bigger, much older, and much more complex than you, and something to which you had not managed to give much thought prior to the entrance of 264 tiny plot devices.

It's simultaneously a bit disappointing, deeply moving, and totally inevitable that the book effectively finds its climax in the Shoah (Holocaust). It's difficult for anyone writing after 1947 to see the events of the 20th century prior to WWII as anything but a prelude to it, especially for Jews and even more so for Jews whose family history is in Europe. So the story of a Great Family, undone by a hopeless faith in assimilation, by antisemitism, and by war, is nothing new. But I was moved nonetheless, by de Waal's prickly ambivalence over the ostentatiousness of the lives of wealth lived by his ancestors (how very un-English! how stereotypically Jewish!) which melted into a deep empathy for and identification with Charles Efrussi, the Parisian art obsessive, via the albatross of his (de Waal's) inheritance.

Anyway, before this gets any more longwinded and pretentious, I'll end this by saying that I couldn't care less about the trials and tribulations of the scions of the wealthy Jewish families of Mitteleuropa in the 19th and early 20th centuries. But this book humanized this family, and gave me an insight into what this period looked like from the perspective of that proverbial Other Half, and why that matters. The simple fact that assimilation ultimately makes no difference when the chips are down was lesson enough, but the beauty of this story is that it was so much more than that. It gave voice to a part of history that's totally gone, present now only in archives and libraries full of the meticulous detritus of the Nazi regime, and through the stories related by those few descendants who care about not only the material remnants of that past, but by how the erstwhile owners of those remnants felt.

This is the first book of Kay's that I didn't enjoy. I finished it more out of a sense of duty than anything else, but it didn't satisfy me. I never felt I connected to the characters or understood why I should care deeply about them. I rarely feel Kay's (usually relatively explicit) sex scenes are gratuitous, but I felt the ones in this book were. The most gratuitous was an unexpected and totally unnecessary scene of inexplicable incest between Baerd and his sister Dianora. I guess it was meant to underline the brutality and trauma of the war and occupation of Tigana, but that could have been - and was! - communicated by other means.

While I'm all for complicated and morally ambiguous characters, I just plain didn't like many of Tigana's. I felt a lot of the character development was told rather than shown, and I didn't feel invested in the characters' personal growth.

I've read nine other Kay novels, and read A Brightness Long Ago immediately prior to this. If there's anything that Tigana underscored for me, it was how much Kay has grown as a writer, especially where nuanced and, well, humanist depiction of female characters is concerned. Kay in 1990 was a very different writer than Kay in 2020 - and it's almost shocking how much he has improved in his writing (and inclusion) of female characters. This is both a compliment to his more recent work, and an indictment of it in the case of Tigana.

Edit [12/27/2020]: Also, there was bizarre and unnecessary ~Magical Blackface~. This wouldn't have been ok back in 1990, but it's especially galling to see it in 2020. There was absolutely no need for it. There were characters who could have been black to begin with, including the guy who ended up being in magical blackface, and there are innumerable other ways for the character in question to have disguised himself. My guess is this was an attempt to provide a better, richer sense of the diversity of the world of the book (i.e., it is multiracial/the people of this world have diverse appearances), but it failed utterly, because putting someone in the costume of another culture does not count as representation of that culture. It didn't succeed in its goal, and it's an incredibly bad look in 2020. The depiction of multiculturalism in general was uneven, and like its treatment of gender and female characters, the book failed on this front.