BookEnds

BookEnds

Lower Fairfield County's online book club

Category: Religion

Listening to the Good Book

I’m not a huge audio book fan, but I often find myself driving between 6 and 8 on Saturday evenings. That might not mean much to you, but to me it means tyranny: every public radio station between New Haven and Brooklyn — at least the ones I’m aware of — play only “A Prairie Home Companion” during those hours. No offense to Garrison Keillor — who’s an icon, I know — but I turn away as soon as I hear the chimes heralding American Public Media. I need to listen to something on the way down, so occasionally I’ll download an audio book.

Recently I was entertained by David Plotz’s new book, “Good Book: The Bizarre, Hilarious, Disturbing, Marvelous, and Inspiring Things I Learned When I Read Every Single Word of the Bible.” Plotz is an editor for Slate and began reading and blogging the Old Testament, from alpha to omega, a few years ago.

Plotz also reads for the audio recording, and I’ve heard his voice so often on Slate’s Political Gabfest that he feels like an old friend. While the book was a pleasure, I’m fairly certain it was more fun reading as an ongoing blog than listening to as an entire book. Still, I learned more about what’s in the Bible than I knew there was to learn.

Most interesting, though, was a point Plotz keeps coming back to again and again. You run through a lot of different tribes in the Old Testament, tribes against whom the Israelites war and with whom they intermarry, but we don’t know much about them. It’s not clear what happened to them all, but Plotz’s point is that he thinks the Jews survived as a people and a religious group because they wrote a book. They wrote their traditions down, and Plotz writes about how moving it can be to practice ancient rituals and know the same rituals were performed in ancient times. That really struck me: survival through book writing.

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AmericanLion

For November, I'll be reading American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House by Jon Meacham, which won the Pulitzer Prize last year. We'll update our book club selection for December and January shortly.

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Meet the Authors:

  • Marilyn Ramos is a partner at the Stamford litigation law firm of Silver Golub & Teitell. She is a member of the Connecticut Trial Lawyers Association and the Connecticut Bar Association. She is currently on the Board of Directors of the Fairfield County Bar Association and the Fairfield County Bar Foundation. She received her law degree from Pace University School of Law in 1989 and is a member of the Connecticut and New York bars. Prior to her career in law, she was a teacher with the Greenwich Public Schools and worked for the Stamford Human Rights Commission. Her views expressed on this blog are completely her own and do not represent those of Silver Golub & Teitell.
  • Roy J. Nirschel is president of Roger Williams University in Bristol, R.I. He grew up in Stamford and his father was a firefighter on the West Side. He received his bachelor's degree from Southern Connecticut State University and went on to receive a master's degree in public administration and a Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Miami. He has traveled around the world, visiting 35 countries, but said, "I can’t credit on the road with getting me on the road."