“Part researched history, part clarifying criticism, and at times it becomes a phantasmagoria dreamscape.”
“an appreciative, scholarly study of traditional popular song that goes into considerable and enlightening detail about the intermingling of black and Jewish popular music.”
“a poet’s witty and ruminative examination of how Jewish songwriters…used outsider status to gain perspective in forging a canon of sophisticated, quintessentially American songs in the pre-rock era”
“…an artfully written art biography that captures its subject in the same kaleidoscopic palette as Chagall painted.”
“Mr. Century’s strong narrative line and his interviews with Ross’s now aged younger brother help to snatch the sweet scientist with the cast iron chin from the waters of oblivion.”
“Barney Ross” is an intense biography. In barely 200 pages, Century has condensed all the essential information about tough kid Beryl Rasofsky, a Kohen (rabbinical royalty) who, in other eras, would have be destined for the Talmud.”
“It is good to have Douglas Century’s brief but informative biography…Not merely was Ross one of the prominent American Jews of his day, but he was the most prominent Jewish boxer in the 1920s and ’30s.”
“It is not often that a modern biography ennobles not only its subject but the genre itself, but this is exactly what Mr. Century has accomplished, crafting a narrative as unsparing and inspiring as its subject.”
Inspired by the hunger for books on Jewish subjects written in a lively, intelligent, and popular manner, Nextbook Press's Jewish Encounters Series brings together writers of the first rank with people and ideas and events from the Jewish past. The series, under the general editorship of Jonathan Rosen, is a collaboration between Nextbook Inc., devoted to the promotion of Jewish literature, culture, and ideas, and Schocken, with its storied backlist of Jewish classics. It is a sister organization to Tablet magazine.
