Nuclear War, Nuclear Peace: The Sensible Argument about the Greatest Peril of Our Age

History

Wieseltier, Leon.

Military

Henry Holt Co.

Nuclear War, Nuclear Peace

HOLT. RINEHART AND WINSTON

The Moral Obligation to Be Intelligent: Selected Essays

Collects essays on Twain, Dos Passos, Hemingway, Keats, Wordsworth, Frost, and "Mansfield Park," and includes the preface to the author's "The Liberal Imagination."

Literature & Fiction

TRILLING, LIONEL

Essays & Correspondence

Farrar. Straus & Giroux

Everything struck hard. The door slamming behind me in the black car. The shovel stabbing the mound of soil. The wooden box hitting the floor of the pit. I stood and I swayed and I said what I was told to say. I was presented with the words that justify the judgment, and I justified the judgment. "He is the Rock, His work is perfect, for all His ways are judgment . . ." I was presented with the words of the kaddish, the long one for the funeral, the one about the world that will be made new, the one that I had never said before, and I uttered it. "Magnified and sanctified may His great Name be . . ." "Magnified and sanctified . . ." Sounds, not words. Words that were nothing but sounds. The words spilled into the pit and smashed upon my father's coffin. I watched the words disperse across the surface of the wood like the clods of dirt that were falling upon it. I saw them there, the shattering words. I saw the letters and their shades. Finally they vanished into the earth. They were buried with him. Justify the judgment, but judge the judgment, too. Bring the judgment to judgment!Out of tears, thoughts. So begins this extraordinary spiritual journal--a record of the inner life of one of America's most brilliant intellectuals during a year of mourning. When Leon Wieseltier's father died in March 1996, he began to observe the rituals of the traditional year of mourning, going daily to the synagogue to recite the kaddish. Be-tween his prayers and his everyday responsibilities, he sought out ancient, medieval, and modern Jewish texts in pursuit of the kaddish's history and meaning. And every day he studied, translated, and wrote his own reflections on the obscure texts that he found, punctuating his journal with stories about life in his synagogue and about his family's progress through grief. In reflecting upon the fate of his father and of his people, he wrestles with problems of loss and faith, the meaning of tradition, freedom and determinism, and the perplexity of rational religion. Kaddish is a work of history, philosophy, and interior autobiography, of moral force and emotional power.

Kaddish

Religion & Spirituality

Judaism

KNOPF

Children have obligations to their parents: the Talmud says "one must honor him in life and one must honor him in death." Beside his father’s grave, a diligent but doubting son begins the mourner’s kaddish and realizes he needs to know more about the prayer issuing from his lips. So begins Leon Wieseltier’s National Jewish Book Award–winning autobiography, Kaddish, the spiritual journal of a man commanded by Jewish law to recite a prayer three times daily for a year and driven, by ardor of inquiry, to explore its origins. Here is one man’s urgent exploration of Jewish liturgy and law, from the 10th-century legend of a wayward ghost to the speculations of medieval scholars on the grief of God to the perplexities of a modern rabbi in the Kovno ghetto. Here too is a mourner’s unmannered response to the questions of fate, freedom, and faith stirred in death’s wake. Lyric, learned, and deeply moving, Wieseltier’s Kaddish is a narrative suffused with love: a son’s embracing the tradition bequeathed to him by his father, a scholar’s savoring they beauty he was taught to uncover, and a writer’s revealing it, proudly, unadorned, to the reader. Winner of the 1998 National Jewish Book Award "An astonishing fusion of learning and psychic intensity; its poignance and lucidity should be an authentic benefit to readers, Jewish and gentile." —The New York Times Book Review

Biographies & Memoirs

Community & Culture

Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group

Monument and Memory: The Columbia Seminar on Art in Society

Arts & Photography

Nuland, Sherwin B.

Libeskind, Daniel

Columbia Seminar on Art in Society (2002 New-York Historical Society)

Architecture

Columbia Univ Dept of Art History &

The author recounts his traditional year of mourning after the death of his father, and his pursuit of meaning in ancient Hebrew texts.

Politics & Social Sciences

Philosophy

Audio Literature

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Books by Wieseltier, Leon.