Roberta Silman

Book Review: “The Poets’ Wives” — What Does it Mean to be Married to a Poet?

May 23, 2014
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Taken as a whole, “The Poets’ Wives” is a fascinating, brave novel whose love of poetry breathes through all three sections.

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Book Review: “The Marrying of Chani Kaufman” — The World of the Ultra-Orthodox Jews, Treated With Verve and Empathy

April 25, 2014
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Beneath the humor and the warmth and the charm of this novel, author Eve Harris bears witness to an existence far more complex and troubled than Ultra-Orthodox Jews might like to admit.

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Film Commentary: Wes Anderson, Stefan Zweig, and Discovering the Value of “The World of Yesterday”

April 10, 2014
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Perhaps a movie such as “The Grand Budapest Hotel, which is much more than a zany comedy, can lead us back, as director Wes Anderson may have intended, to the fabulous writing of Stefan Zweig.

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Book Review: “To the End of the Land” — A Work of Art About Israel, Fear, and Love

April 9, 2014
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“To the End of the Land” is about the devastation of war, how war erodes the human spirit, yet how that spirit is far more resilient that we may have ever suspected.

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Book Review: “Caught” — Running Drugs, Harum-Scarum Style

March 12, 2014
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Given all the terror and brutality we have lived through just in the thirteen years of this new, 21st century, the story of people running drugs back in the ’70s doesn’t seem to have much urgency.

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Book Review: Appreciating the Life of George Orwell — A Giant of the 20th Century

February 26, 2014
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George Orwell strikes me as a man who was easy to love because he had a tenderness in him that runs like a stream throughout these letters and makes you feel, as you read, how much you would have liked to know him.

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Book Review: “An Unnecessary Woman” — A Memorable Story of Redemption

February 5, 2014
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When the septuagenarian protagonist of this novel finally gets out of her claustrophobic apartment, everything changes.

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Fuse Book Review: “Country of Ash” — Another Essential Holocaust Memoir

January 16, 2014
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We become increasingly aware that we are in the mind of a doctor who has taught himself to observe carefully, who has an amazingly strong will to survive, and who chooses not to waste precious time and energy on anger or revenge.

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Book Review: “The Hired Man” — A Powerful Novel about the Aftermath of War

November 27, 2013
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Aminatta Forna has given us a novel that belies its modest premise, a book about how the human mind protects itself by not knowing, yet sometimes, due to unexpected circumstances, comes to terms with what it thought it could not.

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Fuse Book Review: “The Measures Between Us” — A Promising But Scattershot First Novel

November 8, 2013
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We are left with a somewhat scattered narrative written in the third person with an omniscient narrator that moves from one inner life to another, sometimes to good effect, and sometimes leaving the reader stranded.

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