List of 1059 of my books
רשימה של כ- 1059 מהספרים שלי
(an estimated 250 books are not listed yet)

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Amazon.com Editorial Reviews:
Once revered as semidivine beings and collaborators in the hard work of transporting goods and materials, Thailand's elephants have fallen on hard times. With the destruction of their forested habitats, a consequent nationwide ban on hardwood logging, and the decline of traditional agriculture in the rapidly urbanizing country, their numbers have declined from tens of thousands just a decade ago to only a few thousand today. Many of the surviving elephants have been put to work in traveling circuses or used for black-market labor, subject to overwork and all manner of abuse.
Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid, Russian expatriates who have been working together for more than 30 years, have a knack, writes art curator Mia Fineman, for "transforming the solemn rituals of high art into high comedy." It was with the utmost seriousness, however, that the two, on reading of the elephants' plight, traveled to Thailand and established the Thai Elephant Art School, through whose offices elephants create pop-art masterpieces with palette, brush, and trunk. (Elephants, it seems, have a well-known gift for the visual arts and, in the Thai case, adore the work of Vasily Kandinsky.) Sold to collectors on the world market, pachyderm-painted pieces generated $75,000 at a single early auction, the proceeds of which were used to establish and maintain sanctuaries throughout Thailand.

--Luc Sante, New York Times Book Review:
"Komar and Melamid's sensibility is funny, prickly, complex, humane, dense with implications, and a baited trap for ideologues and hypocrites."

A stunningly original first novel--modeled after the Talmud--in which the central story is surrounded by the voices and images of numerous characters, real and imagined.
Blue is the story of Abraham Tal, a diamond merchant in New York City who spends his days counseling friends and neighbors in what has come to be referred to as his "advice shop." It is here that his real passion lies, for Abraham is a commentator--a man who prefers to sit back and discuss the finer points of life rather than to go out and live.
In this kaleidoscopic novel the great irony is that Abraham's story itself is, page by page, surrounded by the stories of others. Franz Kafka, Marcel Proust, Bob Dylan, Elie Wiesel, Chief Crazy Horse, various Jewish Mystics and Rebbes, Vermeer, Kierkegaard, Abraham's mother, his father, his girlfriend--all are allowed their commentaries, often in the form of parallel stories from their own lives. Each page of text is also accompanied by a piece of art--a color photo, a painting or an illustration--that further comments upon the story. The result is a novel that can be read over and over again, in a seemingly endless variety of ways. Like Perec's Life: A User's Manual or Breton's Nadja, Blue makes a claim to enlarge the boundaries of literature.

The blue of the title refers to the color of a sapphire, or to the irresistible blue of a Vermeer painting, or even the blues of the Mississippi Delta. In other words, it signifies humanity's wide experience, and in terms of this structurally complex novel, that of Judaism in particular. The story centers around Abraham Tal, who with his brother, Tuviah, is a dealer in precious stones in New York City. In a life that reflects his heritage, not to mention the Old Testament, Abraham, who has never married, eventually seeks spiritual peace in Israel, passing his birthright to his nephew, Isaac. The basic plot is elucidated by a commentary that is five times as large as the story, but very much alive itself, being the disembodied voices of, among others, Abraham's parents, his dead lover, various Jewish teachers down through the centuries, artists such as Vermeer and Van Gogh, and twentieth-century figures Robert Johnson, Bob Dylan, and Joan Baez. There are also 112 illustrations, 80 of which are in color. Frank Caso
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Blue, a wildly original first novel by Benjamin Zucker, is a richly illustrated, multilayered story about aesthetics, love, brotherhood, and tradition. The novel's main character, Abraham Tal, is (like Blue's author) a gem merchant in New York City. Tal's treasure is a Venetian Jewish wedding ring, a mysterious link to the traditions of his family and his culture; his search for the ring's origins and significance drive the book's main plot. Blue's design is highly unusual and worth close attention. The text of the main story, about Tal and the ring, appears at the center of every other page in the book (each page of text faces a full-page illustration, meant to shed light on the story--subjects range from a photograph of the Taj Mahal to a self-portrait by Claude Monet). This central text is surrounded by commentaries in the margins, which are written in the voices of historical characters such as Vermeer, Crazy Horse, Bob Dylan, Proust, and Kafka, as well as the voices of Tal's mother, father, and girlfriend. The commentaries, like Talmudic writings, play with, build upon, and illuminate the primary story. Blue moves fluidly through time, offering its reader countless opportunities to discover the harmonies and beauty that, over the course of this story, its main character gradually learns to see. --Michael Joseph Gross

TITLE: Oxford Dictionary of Quotations
ISBN: 0198601735
Publisher: Oxford University Press

TITLE: Think
ISBN: 0192100246
Publisher: Oxford University Press, Incorporated
Publish Date: 10/01/1999
Author: Simon Blackburn
Binding: Hardcover , vii, 312 pages
List Price: USD 22.00
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