MixedThe Spectator (UK)It exhibits much of the vividness and wide-ranging erudition of [Calasso\'s] earlier book, but the results are more uneven. Calasso’s retelling is intentionally an intellectual potpourri, and that is the source both of its appeal and its weakness. He begins with a midrash, the characteristic early rabbinic mode of exegesis that amplifies, elaborates and sometimes reinvents the spare biblical text. Other midrashim are then introduced from time to time as well as midrashim that one assumes are Calasso’s own invention. For some stretches of the book, he simply retells the canonical narrative, and these sections are not likely to be of much interest to anyone already familiar with the Bible. More welcome are the frequent junctures in which he midrashically fleshes out what is tersely told in the Bible ... Yet for all these winning moments, there is much that is flawed in this book. Calasso gets certain details wrong ... He sometimes gets a Hebrew term with its nuances exactly right, but he also makes quite a few mistakes ... Calasso’s great virtue as a writer is his willingness to go with the impulses of his own interests and preoccupations, even when they might seem rather remote from the subject at hand. Sometimes when he does this here, the effect can be annoying ... a very mixed and eccentric production but hardly an authoritative account of the Hebrew Bible. In some ways it is misleading, in others exasperating, but it is also beguiling, and there are points at which it actually throws fresh light on the biblical story.
Paul Mendes-Flohr
RaveThe New York Times Book ReviewPaul Mendes-Flohr, a distinguished scholar of German-Jewish intellectual life, has written a scrupulously researched, perceptive biography of Buber that evinces an authoritative command of all the contexts through which Buber moved. Martin Buber: A Life of Faith and Dissent is perhaps less a biography than an intellectual history of Buber, although the essential facts of his life are duly reported ... [Buber] was an inspiring figure who in often poetic prose erected elegant bridges between Judaism and general philosophy and theology, but there were unbridgeable contradictions at the heart of his enterprise, as the subtitle of this fine biography suggests.
Nathan Englander
PanThe New RepublicThe problem with this explicit addressing of Jewish themes—all, of course, involving victimhood—is its didactic insistence, which leads to contrivance or to sensationalism … What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank betrays a writer who has lost control of his materials. Even on a technical level, the writing is disheartening: the prose, undistinguished throughout, is no more than a vehicle for moving the characters from one point to the next. The characters themselves are for the most part schematically sketched, and riddled with ethnic tics (like Englander’s style, as in that ‘did not know from mercy’); they are just instruments to convey the author’s uninteresting insistences. And several of the plots are manifestly contrived for little but sensationalistic ends.
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