JEWDAR
DANA VOWINCKEL’S DEBUT NOVEL , The World in a Ziplock Bag, is told from the perspec- tive of a 15-year-old Jewish girl named Margar- ita, whose life careens from Jerusalem to Ber- BOOKS / FICTION The universal sound of teenage angst
lin to Chicago —much like the author’s. After she won a ma- jor German literary prize for that book, publishers decided to make the story more avail- able to international audienc- es. Margarita’s father works
MISOPHONIA Dana
NON-FICTION / HISTORY Pictures from our evolution
Vowinckel HarperVia May 6
as a synagogue cantor in Germany while her mother long ago departed for Israel; amidst the domestic chaos, she’s sent to live with her grandparents in America.
SAPIENS: A GRAPHIC HISTORY, VOLUME 3: THE MASTERS OF HISTORY Yuval Noah
THE THICK BOOKS by Israel’s most globally pop- ular public intellectual, like last year’s Nexus , lead a lot of readers to wish for a more digestible approach, and he’s spent the past few years delivering it in an adaptation of his first major work. The third volume of his comic-book-style retelling of his blockbust- er ponders whether humanity is united by empire, money, religion — or something else entirely. The characters who try to dominate society, Harari ar-
Harari Signal May 27
gues, often end up dividing it instead. (Middle-grade readers get their own parallel set of big-picture explorations, drawn out in another Ha- rari series called Unstoppable Us. )
NON-FICTION / JEWISH LEARNING Keeping track of the tractates
DOS FOR DUMMIES WAS PUBLISHED in November 1991— and a publishing juggernaut was born: it has spawned over 1,600 titles. It took a decade for Juda- ism to get its own volume, written by Rabbi Ted Falcon of the Reform Movement along with technology writ- er David Blatner. Kabbalah for Dummies got its turn in 2006, and Torah for Dummies surfaced in 2008, under the supervision Kurzweil, who ran the pre-internet Jew- ish Book Club — and now he’s returned to distill 2,771 imposing pages spread over 63 hulking volumes into a basic navigational guidebook. It may even stay in print longer than new titles like Bluesky for Dummies or Poly- amory for Dummies.
TALMUD FOR DUMMIES Arthur Kurzweil Wiley May 13
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