Falling Out & Belonging: A Foot-Soldiers Life
"Kamin offers a compassionate and well-reasoned tour through modern Jewish interpretations of death. There is not so much explanation as the promise of life itself and 'the universe and its elusive yet comforting concept of God, ' as well as the duty to live our lives on earth in a way that uplifts spiritual values and does honor to the memory of the departed. Intelligent and consoling, Kamin's work should be well received by most readers."
-Library Journal
"Rabbi Kamin's book provides you with thoughtful glimpses into the personal realities of dying and death."
-Melvyn Effron, The Jewish Voice of Delaware
"This beautifully written book is filled with real-life stories of Kamin's friends, family, and congregants as well as the timeless wisdom of the scriptures. The Path of the Soul is a poignant and moving work that helps readers to face mortality and provides a new perspective on life." -Rabbi Allen S. Kaplan, Union of American Hebrew Congregations
Explorers, colonists, native peoples--all played a role in early American settlement, and the legacy they left was a turbulent one. During the first three decades of the twentieth century, as the United States asserted itself as a world power, poets began to revisit this legacy and to create their own interpretations of national history. In The Colonial Moment, Jeffrey Westover shows how five major poets--Marianne Moore, William Carlos Williams, Robert Frost, Hart Crane, and Langston Hughes--drew from national conflicts to assess America's new role as world leader.
Sensitive to the nation's memory of colonial brutality, these poets mingled their pride in America with moral protest against racism. Some identified a dark side to the nation's history, particularly in the conflicts between white pioneers and Native Americans, that haunted their otherwise confident celebrations of patriotism. Others used poetry as a vehicle of discovery to challenge existing historical accounts or to criticize the failures of American democracy. Investigating these five major writers in terms of their cultural and political moment, Westover demonstrates how they dramatized the process of nation-building.
Colonization inevitably results in a sense of displacement. Each of these five poets struggled with such cultural alienation--especially those who belonged to a racial, sexual, or gender minority. They endeavored to unite their voices in a vocabulary of the national, a search to define the concept of we that would encompass all modern readers while recognizing those whom previous generations had dismissed. In this way, each writer hoped to redeem the country's losses symbolically through language.