Bernard Books

There are hundreds of books about maintaining a healthy lifestyle. Many of them are long, boring and simply not informative. "3 Easy Tips for Staying Healthy, Feeling Better and Looking Good" is definitely not one of them. Dr. Etherly's book is interesting and gets right to the point. If you are a person with a busy schedule, believe me, you'll have time to read this book. The way it's broken down allows you to go right to the section you need to. There's something in it for everybody. And believe me, once you've read it, you'll come away with a healthier mindset.

I originally bought this for my grandchildren, but my daughter reported back that the book was a sweet memory for her--I had forgotten that she had read it when SHE was a little girl! It was a hit!

This collection of three novels contains what are arguably Malamud's three best novels.( Out of eight). I believe that most critical opinion still considers 'The Assistant' Malamud's finest long fiction. The tale of Frankie Alpine the young Gentile who comes to work in the grocery of the aging Jewish shopkeeper Morris Bober, and who in the course of this has a conversion through suffering to a deeper humanity gives a major Malamud moral message i.e. Everyman as suffering, everyman as Jew. The baseball book 'The Natural' is along with being a wonderful baseball book, a symbolic and mythic work perhaps over- interpreted by the literary critics. "The Fixer" which deals with the famous Mendel Beilis case, and the 'Blood Libel" is the work in which Malamud deeply engages the theme of Anti- Semitism and Jewish suffering.
A truly outstanding collection.

A measured and thorough look at America's hottest political issue. Think the U.S. Supreme Court "settled" the issue in 1973? Think again.
Dr. Bernard Nathanson's vantage point is one that comes to the pro-life cause once in a generation (or maybe twice if you consider the turnaround of Norma McCorvey, the "Roe" in Roe v. Wade). It's a view rich in knowledge and nuance.
"Aborting America" is peppered with misspellings and $3 words that will send most scurrying for the dictionary. Example: We learn that feminist leader Betty Friedan (misspelled "Frieden" in several places) was a raconteuse (that's a person who's good at telling anecdotes).
We shouldn't quibble too much with form. Language is all about communication and Nathanson communicates most effectively.
"Aborting America" is really a journal of a pro-choice revolutionary coming out of moral ether. He rounds on right-to-lifers (often for good reasons) and serves up near-hilarious lines like "Our record so far was unblemished: Not one death in 50,000 abortions." (p. 133 of the 1979 paperback edition).
Nursing a conflicted mind, Nathanson is unfailingly honest and that's what gives the book its power.
Dr. Nathanson's book holds many important lessons for fellow Jews although much of organized Jewry will probably discount the messages because of the doctor's later decision to religiously affiliate with the Roman Catholic Church. Nathanson's move to Catholicism has less to do with Judaism's tenants on abortion (it's pro-life and Nathanson knows this; citing the Orthodox Union's 1976 convention resolution about the infringement on the rights of the unborn) than with the fact that Nathanson's father (also a conscientious obstetrician/gynecologist and the major influence of our author's formative years) ruined Judaism for him.
Dr. Joseph Nathanson forsook the quiet piety of his Orthodox Canadian family, moved to New York City, and became an outspoken religious skeptic. As the younger Nathanson put it: "My father undermined religiosity in me so continually and so artfully that I was left with nothing to believe in." (p. 6). Lesson to Jewish parents, artfully summarized by Rabbi Daniel Lapin: Develop a voice for traditional morality or you will lose your children to Christianity.
If Bernard Nathanson came to believe that Christianity's protest line approach to abortion somehow made it superior to Judaism then he should realize that the Jewish approach is different and nowhere summed up better than in the Book of Genesis when it describes the ways of Jacob (a.k.a. Israel, the father of the Jewish nation) and his brother Esau (who is likened to Rome and Christianity) - "Esau...was a man of the field but Jacob was a humble man dwelling in tents." (25:27). The Jewish way, articulated well by Telshe Yeshiva Chicago Rosh Yeshiva Rabbi Chaim Dov Keller in his 1992 speech to the national convention of Agudath Israel ("Family Values, a Jewish Approach"), is to build a culture of life from the inside out (strengthening the family and community through learning Torah and prayer in our synagogues and homes). Carried out properly, abortion, euthanasia, war-mongering etc. become unthinkable in such a culture (very few if any pro-choice activists in Boro Park). Some might conclude that the Jewish approach is failing - 50,000 abortions a year in the State of Israel. Yet it really means we need a higher level of religiosity among Jews. Thus I call on Dr. Nathanson to return to our people, strengthening us through his powerful witness accompanied by increased Torah study and increased Torah action.
Even the most cursory glance at the U.S. abortion debate will pick up a subtext of a Jewish/Roman Catholic conflict with Jews being conspicuous on the pro-abortion side (even though traditional Judaism is decidedly pro-life. Rav Moshe (Moses) Feinstein, widely believed to be the greatest rabbi ever to live in the United States, equated abortion with murder. With advances in delivery-room technologies including the widespread use of Caesarean section, any supposed "liberality" of Jewish law compared with Catholic doctrine has dwindled to barely perceptible levels). By the way, Judaism's prohibition of abortion comes from Genesis 9:6, the same verse that sanctions capital punishment (G-d's amazing shorthand in evidence again).
Are Jews attracted to pro-choice because it's a way of sticking a finger in the eye of Catholicism for past sins, mostly European-based, real and imagined? Perhaps it's more superficial - a Jewish proclivity for fighting the establishment especially when the Jew suspects the establishment won't hit back very hard. Or perhaps it's more ominous and deeper - irreligious Jews pound on Christian social ethics as a way of showing contempt for Judaism's Torah (G-d's Etz Chaim, or Tree of Life). The Roman Church is the most numerous and publicly visible upholder of "old" and New Testament morality. Jews and others can use Christianity as a punching bag and not be thrown out of polite society.
Dr. Sigmund Freud "fought" Catholicism for years amid little criticism from fellow Jews. Rabbis and laymen ought to start psychoanalyzing themselves and others to determine if anti-Christianism is pulling some Jews into moral narcissism.
Comparing Jewish involvement in the abortion movement with that in communism (read James Billington's "Fire in the Minds of Men") and neoconservatism shows the phenomenon isn't necessarily triggered by Christianity's presence. All three movements exhibit a cavalier attitude for life but this probably says more about the low religious character of the Jews involved more than anything else.
Nathanson demonstrates that he was not lashing out at religion when he helped found NARAL (originally known as the National Association for the Repeal of Abortion Laws). His attraction was driven by a concern for female safety, a concern made obsolete by improvements in technology. Taken in context, it's a powerful argument - "I had been terribly disturbed by the injustice and hypocrisy of the `60s, the disparity between rich and poor, East Side and West Side. I had seen the victims of self-abortion and hack abortionists." (p. 161).
A few sentences earlier, our author makes a stark admission - "When one is caught up in a revolutionary fervor, one simply doesn't want to hear the other side and filters out evidence without realizing it." Nathanson's anti-religious childhood rears its ugly head again. Because he hadn't prayed in years, the doctor lost the ability to make correct moral distinctions. Rabbi Nosson Scherman, in his superb introduction to the Siddur Kol Yaakov (ArtScroll prayer book) entitled "Prayer, a Timeless Need," explains that the Hebrew world for prayer (tefillah) comes from the root PLL, which means to judge. Mispalale, the act of praying, is a reflexive word meaning that to pray is to judge oneself. Lesson: Be suspect of the judgment of anyone who doesn't pray.
Back-and-forth talk about "rights" ratchets up the political temperature but accomplishes little else, Nathanson wisely observes. Perhaps the life movement should adopt the outlook of Rabbi Avigdor Miller. Rav Miller, who was passionately pro-life, once said: "It (life) is not a right. It's a gift and nothing more." Such an attitude could exercise America's atrophied gratitude and humility muscles.
Nathanson is reasonably sure advancing technology will tilt the field further toward pro-life. He sounds prophetic when we realize that the proliferation of ultrasound is likely a major reason the U.S. abortion rate hit a 30-year low in 2007. Nathanson reasons soundly but as the great physician and philosopher Moses Maimonides reminded us we shouldn't put too much faith in reason.
Western civilization is still greatly governed by emotional responses activated by naked human eyes. Frederic Bastiat and his intellectual descendants in the Austrian School of Economics cautioned us to weigh what is seen with what is unseen. Error and selfishness remain part of human nature thus if a woman thinks she can make her "problem" disappear forever with one trip to the abortion mill then she's likely to reason herself into that action.
"Aborting America" is an admirable defense of the unborn based on strict rationality. Nathanson's subsequent affiliation with Catholicism may be an admission that he couldn't sustain those arguments absent a religious base. But that shouldn't dissuade us from continuing to use rationality.
Rational appeals are essential for reaching Middle America. The success of the civil rights movement was due in part that it transcended its religious base and the personal religiosity of its leaders including Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. (the fact that MLK is referred to as "Doctor" King much more often than he's called "Reverend" King is evidence of this). This caused the movement to gain converts among media people, non-Christians, closet Christians, even atheists.
The pro-life movement has yet to similarly widen its circle. It remains a mostly Christian, heavily Roman Catholic, and Republican Party phenomenon. Nathanson trods around this issue but I'll come right to the paradox - Overt Christianity is the pro-life movement's greatest strength and its greatest weakness. Leaders shouldn't seek to de-Christianize the movement but pro-lifers ought to stay on message, showing restraint and being smart about public displays of religiosity.
Nathanson's rationalism does us another great service by defining what abortion actually is, medically speaking - Abortion is not the killing of the fetus per se. It is the separation of the fetus from the mother. The death of the fetus is often the by-product of the separation.
This may sound like moral equivocation until we realize that Nathanson, by marrying advancing technology to this principle, is offering women a way out of pregnancy without resorting to killing. Now if we can only get people to take the high road, to consider a higher law. Now that's something to pray for.

This is by far the best-written book on this subject I have ever laid eyes on--If anyone can top this, it will be Dr. Gersh in his next book, but I do suspect that work this fine tuned will take many years to out do.

i have loved this book for years! , itis one of my faves!
when you reread it , it only gets better, and you can better understand the irony of what is taking place, the relationship between marillac and gerfaut is one you will enjoy and relish,
if you can understand the french language, please try to accquire
gerfaut in this format and you'll see it in a whole different light. great reading!

I grew up with this book, and it helped me to understand my adoption and my brother's adoption in a very gentle way. This is a wonderful book.

I own several Easton Press books. They are the best you can find if you collect leatherbound books. Huckleberry Finn was considered one of Twain's best works. You will not be dissappointed with this edition or the story.

Bernard Berenson is the greatest living authority on Italian art and the expert who directed the purchase of many of America's great collections of paintings. In this recent book (published in 1948), Berenson sums up the result of a lifetime of reflectiion on the problems of aesthetic judgment and presents the guiding principles which underlie his own taste. His view of art is a dramatic and humanistic one; it examines the response of man's total being to the experience supplied by works of art, and judges in terms of the whole experience. The humanist Berenson consequently has some sharp things to say about contemporary tendencies in painting; the man who could, without faltering and on the basis of his own judgment, spend a fortune on a painting for a client does not hesitate to record here is own passions and prejudices. This directness, combined with his knowledge and enormous culture, makes this fundamental book on the theory of art a continual delight to read.
--- from book's back cover

My favorite graded reader so far is Sunnyvista City, an Oxford Storylines, level 3, by Peter Viney. The plot and sentences flow smoother than any I've read. Even with a vocabulary of only 1000 words, the actions and explanations are clear and succinct. The dialog is simple but crisp. There are enough characters to flesh out the story but not so many as to overwhelm us. The mystery unfolds at just the right pace, not so slow as to lose our interest and not so fast as to lose our comprehension.