Julia M. Klein, the Forward’s contributing book critic, has been a two-time finalist for the National Book Critics Circle’s Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing. Follow her @JuliaMKlein.
Julia M. KleinContributing Book Critic
By Julia M. Klein
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Culture They Hunted Nazis to the Ends of the Earth
The Nazi Hunters By Andrew Nagorski Simon & Schuster, 416 pages, $30 There is a Zelig-like quality to Andrew Nagorski’s “The Nazi Hunters.” More often than not, in a saga spanning decades and continents, Nagorski has been there, interviewing the men and women pursuing the worst villains of the Holocaust. Many of the stories he…
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Culture Chanan Tigay’s Mad Search for the World’s Oldest Bible
The Lost Book of Moses: The Hunt for the World’s Oldest Bible By Chanan Tigay Ecco, 368 pages, $27.99 Before Bedouins discovered the first Dead Sea Scrolls, in 1947 in a cave near the Dead Sea, another ancient manuscript briefly enraptured the archaeological community and promised to transform biblical scholarship. The find in question was…
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Culture The Enduring Mysteries of Raoul Wallenberg
Raoul Wallenberg: The Heroic Life and Mysterious Disappearance of the Man Who Saved Thousands of Hungarian Jews From the Holocaust By Ingrid Carlberg, with an introduction by Kofi Annan; translated by Ebba Segerberg MacLehose Press, 639 pages, $29.99 He was the multilingual scion of a powerful Swedish banking family, a gifted artist and architect, a…
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Culture Love in the Time of Viagra
Scary Old Sex: Stories By Arlene Heyman Bloomsbury USA, 240 pages, $26 In this era of energetically aging baby boomers and gauzy Viagra advertisements, discussing postmenopausal sex is not quite the taboo-shattering enterprise of yesteryear. But that fact doesn’t render Arlene Heyman’s debut short-story collection any less powerful or engaging. Heyman’s characters use sex to…
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Culture For Harry Houdini’s Wife, Love Was Not a Magic Trick
Mrs. Houdini By Victoria Kelly Atria Books, 320 pages, $26 The epigraph of this novel, a fictionalized account of the love story between the escape artist Harry Houdini and his wife, Bess, is a quotation from W.B. Yeats: “The world is full of magic things, patiently waiting for our senses to grow sharper.” The Irish…
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Culture Magical Realism and Sexuality Energize Holocaust Novel
Unspeakable Things By Kathleen Spivack Alfred A. Knopf, 290 pages, $25.95 Severed fingers tapping out a Schubert melody, violated flesh sizzling with sulfurous handprints, ghosts wrapping themselves around the living – these are among the images, unspeakable and clamorous, that populate Kathleen Spivack’s grotesquely poetic debut novel. Audaciously conceived and gorgeously written, “Unspeakable Things” is…
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Culture Before the War, They Found a Last Resort in Ostend
Ostend: Stefan Zweig, Joseph Roth, and the Summer Before the Dark By Volker Weidermann, translated from the German by Carol Brown Janeway Pantheon, 176 pages, $24.95 In the summer of 1936, Nazi Germany was preparing for the propaganda triumph of the Olympics, and Spain was exploding into civil war. Meanwhile, in the Belgian North Sea…
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Culture Primo Levi and the Italian Resistance
Primo Levi’s Resistance: Rebels and Collaborators in Occupied Italy By Sergio Luzzatto; translated by Frederika Randall Metropolitan Books, 284 pages, $30 Poet, memoirist, essayist, novelist and chemist Primo Levi (1919-1987) is best known as a cool-eyed survivor and chronicler of Auschwitz. But he was also briefly a Resistance fighter in the mountains of northwest Italy,…
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