Marcia Falk's *Book of Blessings*

[Judith B. Kerman]

This is sort of a book review, not of content but of format. As a fairly
active book designer, I've got steam coming out of my ears. I hope people
will pardon me while I fulminate a bit, but I think Big Publishing has
promulgated a major rip-off here. I've been told that they gave Marcia a
hard time, and this was the only way they would publish it, at $50 per.
Shame on them!

After a long period of eager and even impatient anticipation, I got a look
at it this weekend, and HarperCollins should be ashamed of themselves -
it's the most overproduced book I've seen in years. Too thick to handle
comfortably (like a Revised Standard Bible), and it's all white space and
"design" - one usually-short blessing per page, in English, with the
Hebrew and xlit on the facing page. It would make a nice doorstop.

The prefatory essay looks very interesting, and the blessings might be
useful, but the format is absolutely inexcusable, all so they can have an
excuse to gouge the reading public on the strength of Marcia's good
reputation. If that's the only way they would publish it, she should have
found some other publisher.

Now that I've seen it, I do not intend to buy it. I'll take it out of the
library, read the prefatory essay, and that will be that. Marcia has
written that she's more interested in inspiring people to write their own
blessings than in producing new standard texts, and the most useful thing
in the book (from that perspective) is having the Hebrew provided for
innovative liturgy. So the result will be, in my case, that I *will* write
my own. Not that I don't like her liturgy, but it's not exactly what I
want to use anyway - for a reasonable price, I would have bought it
mainly as a resource and an inspiration, and to support her work. Too
bad this is not a reasonable price.

The right format would have been, at most, siddur-sized (and I DON'T mean
the size of *Kol Haneshamah*, which is also too big and gets fairly
criticized for too much white space, but has vastly more real meat in it.)
This book really doesn't have much more content than, say, Lawrence
Kushner's *Book of Letters* and could have been done in a
decently-designed inch-thick book, maybe less, whether in hardcover or
paperback. And it should have been.

On the same bookstore ramble, I encountered and bought Kusher's
co-authored "talmud-style" *Sparks Beneath the Surface*, which is $40 but
worth every penny - commentary on the parshot from a Renewal/Hasidic
perspective, with a commentary for every 1/3 of a parsha in the triennial
cycle. That's reasonable value for the money, even if the price is still
a bit stiff. (And they've got a bit of white-space too, but it makes
sense in terms of content/format relationship.)

L'shalom,
Judy Kerman
Saginaw Valley State University, Michigan
heterodox Jewish Buddhist Quaker feminist clown
in ferocious and loving pursuit
of the Cheshire Cat called "Truth"
http://www.svsu.edu/~kerman

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