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A hilarious re-imagining of the heroes of the Old Testament for a modern world-and the neurotic, demanding reader. In the beginning...there was humor. Sure, it's the foundation for much of Western morality and the cornerstone of world literature. But let's face it: the Bible always needed punching up. Plus, it raised quite a few questions that a modern world refuses to ignore any longer: wouldn't it be boring to live inside a whale? How did Joseph explain Mary's pregnancy to the guys at work? Who exactly was the megalomaniacal foreman who oversaw the construction of the Tower of Babel? And honestly, what was Cain's problem? In Ladies and Gentlemen, the Bible!, Jonathan Goldstein re-imagines and recasts the greatest heroes of the Bible with depth, wit, and snappy dialogue. This is the Bible populated by angry loners, hypochondriacs, and reluctant prophets who fear for their sanity, for readers of Sarah Vowell and the books of David Sedaris. Basically, a Bible that readers can finally, genuinely relate to. Jonathan Goldstein's new book, I'll Seize the Day Tomorrow, will be available May 2013.
An impressive interdisciplinary effort by Chinese, Japanese, Middle Eastern, and Western Sinologists and Judaic Studies specialists, these books scrutinize patterns of migration, acculturation, assimilation, and economic activity of successive waves of Jewish arrivals in China from approximately A.D.1100 to 1949.
II Maccabees continues the chronicle of the "Time of the Troubles" (167-64 B.C.E.), begun in I Maccabees. It recounts the stories of conflict between militant Jews, led by Judas Maccabaeus, and their Hellenistic oppressors. Aside from the story of the struggle to control the temple and the holy city of Jerusalem, though, II Maccabees shares little in common with I Maccabees. The second volume of reflections of Jewry in the generation following the Maccabaean revolt presents and evaluates the experience from its own unique perspective. How these events came to be written, who told the stories, and what reasons motivated such divergent yet parallel interpretations are the questions Jonathan A....
I’ll Seize the Day Tomorrow is the story of Jonathan Goldstein’s journey to find some great truth on his road to forty. In a series of wonderfully funny stories, the host of CBC’s WireTap recounts the highs and lows of his last year in his thirties. Throughout the year, Goldstein asks weighty questions that would stump a person less seasoned. For example: What is it about a McRib that drives people crazy? Can we replace extending an olive leaf with extending an olive jar? How much wisdom can we glean from episodes of Welcome Back, Kotter? His friends and family, many of them known through their appearances on WireTap, weigh in with hilarious results as Goldstein eats, sleeps, and watches bad TV all the way to his date with destiny.
U.S. historians present 16 essays on the American view of the Chinese from the 18th century to the present. Among the perspectives are art, commerce, missionary activity, diplomacy, popular culture, and a comparison with images of Japan. Includes a general bibliography. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR
"Jonathan Goldstein is our premier historian of the trade conducted between Philadelphia and China. His carefully researched new book casts needed light on the China trade of Stephen Girard, a key Philadelphia China trader, and an important figure in early United States business history. One of our first millionaires, Girard bridged several worlds. He was a curious and adaptive American, and the product of the France of his birth, naming his trading ships for enlightenment French philosophes. Goldstein's book looks at Girard's encounter with China, tracking the full arc of his China trading from entry through withdrawal, noting Girard's careful study and trade risk assessment from start to e...
The Jewish communities of East and Southeast Asia display an impressive diversity. Jonathan Goldstein’s book covers the period from 1750 and focuses on seven of the area’s largest cities and trading emporia: Singapore, Manila, Taipei, Harbin, Shanghai, Rangoon, and Surabaya. The book isolates five factors which contributed to the formation of transnational, multiethnic, and multicultural identity: memory, colonialism, regional nationalism, socialism, and Zionism. It emphasizes those factors which preserved specifically Judaic aspects of identity. Drawing extensively on interviews conducted in all seven cities as well as governmental, institutional, commercial, and personal archives, censuses, and cemetery data, the book provides overviews of communal life and intimate portraits of leading individuals and families. Jews were engaged in everything from business and finance to revolutionary activity. Some collaborated with the Japanese while others confronted them on the battlefield. The book attempts to treat fully and fairly the wide spectrum of Jewish experience ranging from that of the ultra-Orthodox to the completely secular.
On the eve of his fortieth birthday, the author reflects upon his life, which does not include a wife, kids, car or a house, in a series of humorous stories that discuss automatic hand dryers, toy poodles and the McRib.
Heterodox Macroeconomics offers a detailed understanding of the foundations of the recent global financial crisis. The chapters, from a selection of leading academics in the field of heterodox macroeconomics, carry out a synthesis of heterodox ideas that place financial instability, macroeconomic crisis, rising global inequality and a grasp of the perverse and pernicious qualities of global and domestic macroeconomic policy making since 1980 into a coherent perspective. It familiarizes the reader with the emerging unified theory of heterodox macroeconomics and its applications. The book is divided into four key sections: I) Heterodox Macroeconomics and the Keynes-Marx synthesis; II) Accumulation, Crisis and Instability; III) The Macrodynamics of the Neoliberal Regime; and IV) Heterodox Macroeconomic Policy. The essays include theoretical, international, historical, and country perspectives on financial fragility and macroeconomic instability.