Kaddish » (1 ED)

Leon Wieseltier lives in Washington, D.C.

This is New Republic literary editor Leon Wieseltier's powerful, luminous, and thought-provoking account of the year following his father's death and the life-altering effects it wrought. Informed by Wieseltier's intellectual rigor and passion for learning, this wide-ranging spiritual autobiography explores the history and philosophy of the Jewish rituals surrounding death as it charts the course of the author's journey through grief. This is a wise and beautiful book about mourning and metaphysics, about fathers and sons, and about what it means to be Jewish.

The New Yorker - Edward Hirsch

A brilliant book...Wieseltier has an aphoristic intelligence, and in a sense he is taking his place in a line of philosophers which runs from Pascal to Nietzche and on to E.M. Cioran. As this 'diligent and doubting son' repeats phrases from the kaddish like a mantra, an ancient magnificence stirs in the text and his brokenheartedness is balanced by his exhiliration. 'He taught me to be here,' he writes of his father,' 'and here I am.'