Edited Books

The Berlin Painter and his World, Athenian Vase-Painting in the Early Fifth Century B.C.

This book is edited by Michael Padgett, who, so far as I know, has nothing to do with Friends Seminary.  I chose to include this work because one of the contributing editors is Jennifer Udell, class of circa 80.  The Berlin Painter, I have learned, has nothing to do with Germany. Nor with paint.  He worked with clay making vases, over 300 of which are extant, decorated with red figures “painted” from red slip. He produced this impressive and beautiful opus during the fifth century BC in Athens.  He was so named by Sir John Davidson Beazley, a renowned British archeologist and art historian, because of an artifact found in Berlin. 

This is a big book – I weighed it, and it weighs 5 pounds.  Ten essays by scholars situate the artist among others of his…

A Life of Meaning, Embracing Reform Judaism’s Sacred Path edited by Rabbi Dana Evan Kaplan, PH.D 70’s? Rabbi Kaplan has put together an impressive collection of essays by rabbis, cantors and scholars, exploring the wide spectrum of approaches to this religion for its participants and for anyone else who might want to see how religion can be meaningful in our largely secularized world. My father was a Lutheran minister and I ended up a Unitarian Universalist. I certainly noted many parallels between my journey and that of members of Reform Judaism.

I learned a bit about the history of this branch of Judaism. It is quite a recent entry having been founded in the late 19th century by Rabbi Isaac Mayer Wise. Undogmatic, Reform Judaism is presented as open-ended quest for meaning, truth and the divine. In his introduction, Dana says, “Reinterpreting ancient religion can be both creative and spir…

Why I Like this Story, Edited by Jackson R. Bryer 50’s. I try to describe these books and, though I suppose there is some inevitable judging, my goal is for you to see what this book is like, not what I think it is worth. I usually like the books very much, but if I don’t, maybe you will. I think I will make an exception here and tell you why I love this book, why I think it is a great book. I am bowled over by this book. Writers writing about other writers produces incandescent, nearly transcendent moments. If this book is testimony to anything, it is that writing and life are so intertwined that they might be said to be the very same thing. Breath becomes word.

There are forty-eight essays In the book. Each writer selected a short story to reflect on. The first essay…

Where Were You? America Remembers the JFK Assassination, compiled and edited by Gus Russo and Harry Moses circa ’60. One of the grammar points we have to teach in French is the kind of sentence often referred to as “interrupted action.” Most Law and Order episodes begin with an ‘interrupted action:” The old man was walking his dog when he saw the dead body. Was walking – imparfait (the imperfect tense, the background action); he saw – the event, the passé compose. I thought that this book would be a series of interrupted actions. I remember that I was walking into the library at Emory University when the lady who checked our bags said, while weeping and struggling to breathe, “The president was shot.”

Indeed, there are quite a few such tales. Jimmy Carter, a forty-year-old congressman from Georgia, was returning from the fields on his tractor. Bill Cli…