Month: December 2025

My Goodreads and Amazon review of By the Waters of Paradise: An American Story of Racism and Rupture in a Jewish Family by Clare Kinberg (Rated 5) – The Ties That Break. The titleBy the Waters of Paradise: An American Story of Racism and Rupture in a Jewish Family by Clare Kinberg is a summation of the multiple angles brought to bear on the author’s search for an unknown relative. Kinberg sets out to “find” her father’s late sister, Aunt Rose, who was banished from her Jewish family and close-knit St. Louis community for marrying a black man. Her personal search also becomes a historical investigation of race and religion in the last century, strands which Kinberg interweaves in a smooth and provocative narrative. With so much of the story untraceable, she draws on empathy and her own experience being married to a mixed-race woman and raising two black daughters, to imagine what life was like for Aunt Rose, her entrepreneurial husband Zeb Arnwine, and the black lakeside community in Michigan where they settled and opened Zeb’s Bar-B-Q joint. Examining the racism in her family helps Kinberg trace her own abhorrence of the tribal bigotry that poisons all of society. Likewise, she reconciles her faith with the racism and misogyny in Judaism by naming it, acknowledging its role in scripture, then writing new stories that teach alternative lessons on how we are commanded to treat people. As a fiction writer myself (see my Amazon author page and Goodreads author page), who creates characters as well as their stories, I admire Kinberg’s inventiveness. She reconstructs a credible life that connects her to the past and the present. Her accumulated knowledge and persuasive storytelling will accomplish the same for readers attempting to patch holes in their own histories.

Finding ourselves by reconstructing our ancestors

Why writers read: “If you want a new idea, read an old book.” – Ivan Pavlov

My Goodreads and Amazon review of On Animals by Susan Orlean (Rated 5) – Fair Game. In the words of author Susan Orlean, On Animals is about “the subject of animals — living with them, loving them, hoarding them, using them, and how our relationship to animals says something about who and what we are.” I like animals, but with a few exceptions (cats, for sure, and well-behaved dogs), I’m not a fan of them as pets. However, I am a huge fan of Susan Orlean, whatever her topic, and she is enamored of animals, both domesticated and wild, so I had no doubt I would be drawn to her book of essays. I was not disappointed. Among my favorites are “Show Dog,” about Biff the boxer, who is nothing like the stereotypical pampered prize winner depicted in most media; “Riding High,” about the centuries-long dependability of mules for agricultural and military transport; and “The Lion Whisperer,” about a man with an uncanny ability to co-exist peacefully with the king of (vicious) beasts. I also enjoyed learning about the place-loyalty of homing pigeons, animal actors’s rights, re-wilding captive whales, and matching teams of oxen. In short, all animals and their encounters with humans are fair game for this curious and entertaining author. The last set of essays are as much about Orlean the “farmer” as about the animals who live with her in rural upstate New York: fowl (chickens, turkeys, ducks, guinea fowl), cattle, cats, and a dog. Orlean’s relationships with her domestics is affectionate but respectful; she doesn’t baby or anthropomorphize them. She is particularly fond of her chickens. When she and her husband temporarily relocate to L.A., and she must leave the chickens behind, Orlean laments, “Our backyard in California is small. Moreover, there are zillions of coyotes and bobcats hanging out in the neighborhood, and they are not the scrawny East Coast models: like everyone in Los Angeles, the coyotes I’ve seen there look like they work out a lot with personal trainers.” Eventually forced to permanently move from NY to CA, a tearful Orlean observes, “I had reveled in the animals’ friendship and their strangeness; the way they are so obvious and still so mysterious.” We might apply the same paradox to people, if we attended to them with the same dedication Orlean devotes to her menagerie. As a fiction writer (see my Amazon author page and Goodreads author page), I can make that claim about the (un)knowability of the characters I create. I read On Animals soon after completing my novel Elephant Angel (out January 2028), during which I too collected interesting information about human-animal relationships. Orlean’s book was a fascinating complement to what I’d learned and spurs me to discover more about the animal kingdom as experienced by us and, as we can best infer, what they in turn make of us and themselves.

A menagerie between the covers of a book

Why writers read: “Read a lot. Write a lot. Have fun.” – Daniel Pinkwater