The Book of Calamities

Starred review from July 7, 2008
Trachtenberg (Seven Tattoos
) wryly observes: “Everybody suffers, but Americans have the peculiar delusion that they’re exempt from suffering.” He shared in this denial until a friend died of cancer, and then he began to ask questions. “Most of these are unanswerable,” he admits. Why me? How do I endure? What is just? What does my suffering say about me? about God? And what do I owe those who suffer? This book is “a layman’s response” to unimaginable anguish, a collection of powerful stories rather than a philosophical treatise. Writing movingly about victims and survivors of natural disasters, war, genocide, domestic violence, addiction, illness, suicide and injustice, he deftly intermingles their stories with observations from religion, philosophy and literature. Not everyone will want to face this much misery, and Trachtenberg offers no easy solutions. His book, however, like Andrew Solomon’s The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression
, succeeds because it asks the right questions, calls on the experience of articulate witnesses and—through skillful narrative and trenchant observation—beguiles the reader into facing heartbreaking reality.

July 15, 2008
Nowperhaps more than ever, in the years after 9/11, in a kind of instance of graveside humorwe jest about calamity with books like "The Worst-Case Scenario Survival Handbook" or the Lemony Snicket series. "The Book of Calamities" is no jesting matter. Trachtenberg, an award-winning writer of essays and short stories and himself a recovering drug and alcohol abuser, pulls no punches in his depictions of mass murder, suicidal despair, martyrdom, disease, and the effects of natural catastrophe; he offers no easy answers. To Trachtenberg, the "true meaning" of such suffering is "not so much found as made, maybe the same way God is supposed to have made Adam, from breath and earth and spit" and that the creation of such meaning itself may ease the pain of suffering. Recommended for most collections.

Copyright 2008 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.