Liel LeibovitzReseñas

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I don't know much about Cohen, his discography, music history or Judaism, so it is difficult to evaluate this book which analyzes them all in light of each other. Interesting, yes. I should have read the book more slowly, with something like YouTube beside me and taken time to listen to the songs discussed instead of just reading straight through (though sometimes I listened to a song). Did Cohen really live so intensely and in artistic isolation as the story depicts? Was he always a genius or can we say that with the rose-coloured glasses of hindsight? I cannot answer. The book does make me wonder what it would be like to live intensely, creatively, and with such deep spiritual awareness. The author continually compares Cohen to a prophet. If his biography is reasonably accurate, then this does seem to be who Cohen was. And unlike many artists, he had the benefit of living his life long enough to reap the rewards of maturity in his craft.

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Stan Lee: A Life in Comics by Liel Leibovitz is a short biography of one of the icons of American mythology. This book is part of the award winning Jewish Lives series.

This is a short biography on one of the most influential men in American pop-culture, and a true American success story. The book tries to tie Stan Lee’s stories and ideas to Jewish culture and Jewish religious book, some of the passages are a stretch, but all of them are interesting and show an understanding of the author of the characters he created.

Stan Lee: A Life in Comics by Liel Leibovitz tells of how a poor Jewish kid from The Bronx transformed himself to be the face of geek culture. As his fame grew, Stan Lee found himself being distanced further and further from the creative work which he found so fulfilling, ending up being a Marvel spokesman with very little control over the creative efforts.

Stan Lee loved being a spokesman, he loved interacting with his audience and went on a college tour. He hung out with his fans and tried to implement their ideas, and wishes, when he got back to Marvel’s creative team.

The book follows Stan Lee throughout his career, focusing on some of the biggest characters he created and how his and Jack Kirby’s poor background, and Jewish heritage might have influenced their inception. It’s important to note that this is all conjuncture by the author, Stan Lee have always been purposely ambiguous about these issues, mainly because he wanted fans to have their own ideas. I remember seeing him retelling the origin of Spiderman, ending it with “I told this story so often, one day it might actually be true”; telling the frustrated host “you want the truth or a good story?”
We all want a good story.

Some of the chapters tell of Stan Lee’s contribution to the character Captain American (a Jack Kirby creation) and his own creations of the Fantastic Four – Mister Fantastic (Reed Richards), the Invisible Woman (Susan “Sue” Storm), the Human Torch (Johnny Storm),and the Thing (Ben Grimm) – the original X-Men with the civil rights counterparts (Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X), and Spiderman which, at the time, was the antithesis to everything which screamed “comic book hero”.

Marvel has been in decline (as a former share owner, I can still see my shares disappear), but when Disney bought the company it has a revival with Iron-Man (a second rate character in the comics), and the Marvel Cinematic Universe became one of the biggest grossing, if not the biggest, franchise in movie history. Stan Lee, of course, has become the cameo king of the movie world.

If you love Comic Con or Michael Chabon's book The Amazing Adventures of Cavalier and Klay, then you will enjoy this biography of Stan Lee (Stanley Lieber). The book traces the relationship between Jewish publishers and the comic book industry as well as the themes from Judaism that informed the development of the super hero genre. Lee was ahead of his time in developing his Marvel comic book characters which more popular today than they ever were.

Few artists have had as much of an impact on American popular culture as Stan Lee. The characters he created—Spider-Man and Iron Man, the X-Men and the Fantastic Four—occupy Hollywood’s imagination and production schedules, generate billions at the box office, and come as close as anything we have to a shared American mythology.

Deeply knowing, highly entertaining, and just a little bit irreverent, this unputdownable encyclopedia of all things Jewish and Jew-ish covers culture, religion, history, habits, language, and more.

This non-fiction book describes the way society has changed and evolved over time with love towards the video game and virtual world.

As a high school student in Berkeley, California, in the mid-1970s, I had an English literature class that, in keeping with the experimental educational ideas of that time and place, used relatively contemporary lyrics to discuss the wider aims of literature: a lot of Dylan (especially “Desolation Row” and “Highway 61 Revisited,” which the class spent weeks and weeks on) and others. Including Leonard Cohen and his famous “Suzanne.” My best friend (now my sister-in-law) and I began discussing, in class, the second verse, the one about Jesus, and we just started riffing about it. When other classmates wanted to chime in, our teacher - alas, his name lost in the mists of time - stopped them; we were two usually quiet students and he wanted to hear where we would take the story…..In the early 1980s, I remember hearing and being stunned by “First We Take Manhattan,” a manifesto about how the world can maim us, and I found John Cale’s version of “Hallelujah” on 1991’s “I’m Your Fan” to be the best ever, until kd came along….Decades later, I’ve lived in Montreal for 21+ years now; and when word came of Leonard’s death last year, over a span of a few weeks hundreds of locals, French and English both, congregated at the front of his house, sat on the doorstep and, with guitars and voices, sang his songs in remembrance and love. Earlier this year, in 2017, my husband and I attended a concert in tribute to Leonard, a year after his passing, organized by his son Adam, replete with international stars like Sting and Elvis Costello, with locals like Patrick Watson (he of the ethereal voice) and Coeur de Pirate, and of course, the elegiac kd lang, all singing Leonard’s songs. So you get the idea that this man, and his music, has meant a lot to me for a very long time. This biography, published in 2014, some time before his death but after the betrayal by his manager (who stole around $12M of Cohen’s savings), when he had to go back on the road, age 77, to earn some cash, describes Leonard Cohen’s life from two perspectives: the first, and perhaps most interesting to me, is his life-long struggle and engagement with his religion, Judaism. His religious identity shines through most of his songs, in the sense of much of the Jewish tradition being about doubt and thought and trying to reach an understanding of being a “chosen people,” and Leibovitz does a good job of bringing out that aspect of this very complex human being. The second perspective is, of course, that of the artist - moving from poetry to prose to songwriting, and I think it’s true to say moving to Buddhism (although Leonard himself didn’t like being called that, he always said “I’m a Jew,” and disliked the idea that one could not be both, philosophically speaking). Then there’s the great themes of the work: solitude (and who is more lonely than God?) and love (often hard-bitten, hard-won, hard) and how to be an authentic human. Famously, Leonard Cohen took years to write his songs, first writing a huge number of verses and slowly paring them down and perfecting them, so that in the end, the essence was all that was left: “I heard there was a secret chord/That David played and pleased the Lord/But you don’t really care for music/Do you?” “Ring the bells that still can ring/Forget your perfect offering/There is a crack in everything/That’s how the light gets in.” And, though this is obviously not in the bio, from his final album, “You want it darker/We kill the flame./Hineni hineni/I’m ready, my Lord.” A remarkable man, a remarkable life. And I feel richer for having read more about him. Wow.

Really enjoyed the abridged audio of this, mostly because I didn't know anything about Cohen and it turns out he had such an interesting life. But it did drag on a bit, which might have been the writing and might have been the abridgement. Probably a great read for the Cohen diehard fan.

Because I have read a lot of Chinese history (for more than 30 years), I have a fairly good background in Chinese history so I found this book at times both boring and occasionally surprisingly interesting but the ratio (8:2) was insufficient to hold my interest. It would have made more sense for me to skim through the background sections and just read the pages that told the story of these 120 young men who came to America to learn 'about the west', but unfortunately I didn't. The stories of the young men--and more importantly, their identities and who they later became--was the 'new' part and it was interesting, but it was also predictable and while sometimes that is fine (for example, the handling of Henry VIII in the brilliant Wolf Hall), in this case it wasn't. There were successes and failures, flashes of accomplishments balanced by the driest of careers, but that was to have been expected in a group recruited from families and candidates who often had to be cajoled to spend a large chunk of their youth abroad.

This book is best read by those who have a thin knowledge of China 1850-1949 as it will yield far more fruitful information, or by those who don't mind panning for the 'new'. Yes, these 120 'fortunate sons' 'went to America, [and] went to school,' but did they revolutionize an ancient civilization? Well, perhaps a few made a dent, and this is the story of those few, but time is perhaps better spent on those who went abroad and truly did revolutionize China -- Sun Yatsen, Zhou Enlai ....

a fascinating in-depth account of why American Jews choose to make Aliya. If you ever wondered why people would be willing to give up material comforts and the absence of fear to move to a country that is constantly under attack and always with new elections on the horizon, this book will explain the answer. I especially loved the author's coming to terms with his own yerida, his immigrant from Israel as that it's not as necessary for all Jew to move to Israel, as long as all Jews feel united together with the Jews of Israel. Amein to that!

This Kindle Single was a good, short introduction to the Dreyfus Affair for someone who previously knew next to nothing about it (i.e., me). Although it claims to present new archival discoveries/evidence, it seemed like a relatively standard account--which was fine with me--about how and why the captain was framed with minimal broader interpretation/reflection on French society at the time.

This is an amazing book which tells a fascinating story, has a happy and sad ending, and has the advantage of being true. It reads like fiction, but has been painstakingly researched, with source material as diverse as imperial communications and private letters. While there wasn't room enough in one book to discuss every single one of the 120 Chinese boys who came to America at the turn of the nineteenth century, enough time is devoted to different boys to get a feeling for the highs and lows of their American experience as well as their later lives when they returned to a China in turmoil. Overall, definitely a book worth reading for anyone with an interest in Chinese-American relations.

This book was sent to me for review.

The Chosen Peoples: America, Israel, and the Ordeals of Divine Election does more than dispel any preexisting theories regarding Divine Election, and surprisingly, the authors do give credit to the power behind the forces that sustain the continuing notion.

Todd Gitlin and Liel Liebovitz wanted to discredit or to deflate the assumption of Divine Election or “choseness” with their brazenness. Yet, within the book, the reader gets the sense that they did a turnaround of sorts, through their own research. Their perceptions and concepts changed from subjective to objective. Their presumptuousness did a back flip. Forces beyond their control reigned supreme in the outcome of their intelligent, incredible and masterful work, The Chosen Peoples: America, Israel, and the Ordeals of Divine Election.

The song known to most people as "Lili Marlene" actually began life as a poem written by Hans Leip, a German soldier, in 1915. Titled "Song of a Young Sentry," the lyric expressed the soldier's wistful longing to return to his sweetheart and to his former life, away from the dreadful chaos of war.

This book traces the interesting story of how the poem became "Lili Marlene", beloved song of soldiers around the world during World War II. Against the background of the growing Nazi threat in the 1930s, Leibovitz and Miller explore the lives of Leip; of Norbert Schultze who composed the haunting tune; and of Lale Andersen, the singer who first brought the song to life. They relate how, thanks to the German Army military station, Radio Belgrade, the song came to be popular among the troops and on the home front, despite the fact that Nazi propaganda minister Goebbels detested and tried to suppress it.

Where the book succeeds most is in its explanation of what the song meant to lonely soldiers of all nationalities. Radio Belgrade broadcast "Lili Marlene" every evening at 9:57 p.m., before signing off, and throughout Europe fighting men stopped to listen and to think of home. Although sung in German, which few Allied troops could translate, the tune's expression of hopeful longing was well understood by soldiers everywhere, and it provided a few minutes of comfort at the end of each day.

Lili Marlene: The Soldiers' Song of World War II, is a well researched and clearly written biography of a great song. It once again proves that music is a universal language, bringing people together and offering comfort and hope even in desperate times.