L. DANIEL HAWK, Joshua (Berit Olam: Studies in Hebrew Narrative and Poetry; Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press/Michael Glazier, 2000). Pp. xxxii + 302. $39.95. Consistent with the aims of this commentary series, Hawk provides an insightful literary analysis of the Book of Joshua in...

In 1990, George Bush broke his no-new-taxes vow, and conservatives, led by House Minority Whip Newt Gingrich, despised him for it. In 1994, the Contract With America that Gingrich engineered promised long-overdue tax relief, commencing with a $500-per-child credit and a lower capital-gains tax....

The first time Joshua Shapiro [of Joshua Then and Now] and his prospective father-in-law, Senator Stephen Andrew Hornby, meet, neither wastes time on preliminaries. (p. 30) In this contentious encounter between Joshua and the senator you have the book's major themes in miniature: Jewish cheek pitted against Anglo-Canadian snobbery; the special asperity that passes between two cultures that recognize and fear in each other the stubbornness and drive that they cherish in themselves; and the refusal of ...

We must separate the writer from his or her fictional hero. This is a first rule of literary judgment. Joshua Shapiro is the hero. He is a writer…. Joshua did become famous as a star of personality on Canadian television, for which he had contempt. "Anybody good on camera was an abomination to him, yet he owed his reputation to television."

[Joshua Then and Now] is a very funny and often wrenching book,… [a] clamorous, bumpily comic chronicle…. Richler crowds his hero's long voyage with as many colorful folk as on any ship of fools…. [He depicts] a world's worth of people who spend their passions raking at each other with the sharpened claws of class and religion and race even as they grapple to get into each other's pants.