The Saturday Wife

If I hadn’t read Naomi Ragen’s Chains Around the Grass, the title “The Saturday Wife” would have been a turn-off enough to make me pass on this book. Who wants to read about another wife/woman/girl story, which sounds like all about how to win her husband or any other man (men)? Not me! But because I was already convinced of Ragen’s magic as a writer, I had to pick it up. And I am glad I did.

The Saturday Wife (St. Martin's Publishing Group, 2008) is a character-driven story of a young Jewish woman who tries to find an ideal place in her community through good marriage and thus becomes a rabbi’s wife. However, her worldliness starts failing her position in the orthodox Jewish environs and build up to become a disaster for herself and her husband. In Delilah Glodgrab, and later Delilah Levi, Naomi Ragen has created a character that reflects the socio-cultural vibrations of orthodox Jewish faith afloat in the sea of contemporary urban society in the developed west.

The story proceeds amusingly as Ragen maintains the fun side of Delilah’s journey through life. It doesn’t get dark and gloomy despite every opportunity for Delilah to turn it that way. In fact, her ability, supplemented by chance, to wiggle out of trouble itself becomes an amusement for readers.

The ending perhaps is a bit anticlimactic and far from cathartic. In character-driven stories, the ending is supposed to come from within the character with spontaneity and sums up the character’s development. That doesn’t happen in The Saturday Wife and readers may feel kind of lost or abandoned at the end. Nevertheless, it’s a story that has a moral side, engaging narration, interesting characters, and some good faith/cultural knowledge for non-Jewish readers.

ISBN: 9780312352394

Barnes & Noble page: https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/saturday-wife-naomi-ragen/1100357539

Reposted from Word Matters!

The Field: The Quest for the Secret Force of the Universe

There are books that you read and you get a whole new worldview owing to the nature of information contained and the excellence of narration via which the information is conveyed. Award-winning journalist and author Lynn Mctaggart’s The Field (HarperCollins, 2008) is among those books. 

Written for the average educated reader, the book explains key concepts in science, particularly in unscientific by establishment science.
atomic and quantum physics. The author summarizes the details of important research studies carried out to explain the presence and influence of the fundamental, all-encompassing Zero Point Field—hence the shortened name The Field. Many of these studies, involving carefully designed lab experiments by dedicated scientists around the world, revealed scientific evidence of the Field and validity of several paranormal or out-of-ordinary observations and experiences that mainstream science fails to grasp, and hence refuses to accept: remote viewing, telepathy, distant healing, and many other phenomena that are usually tossed in the bin labeled

Mctaggart tells the story of the research as well as the researchers in each chapter while also adding adequate historical background to give the reader the complete meaning of the scientific investigation being discussed. This makes her presentation of the case for the Field quite compelling. Of special interest to any critical and analytical reader would be the lack of attention all this groundbreaking research has received over the decades, pointing to the hand of establishment and self-interested authority in the realm of academic science that is intolerant of challenging works breaking with their established scientific view of reality.

The Field is at its core a science book, and to this writer, it’s a must-read. 

ISBN: 9780061435188

HarperCollins Page: https://www.harpercollins.com/9780061435188/the-field-updated-ed/

Reposted from Word Matters!