Crosstown Sabbath: A Street Journey Through History - Hardcover

Morton, Frederic

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0394560701 ISBN 13: 9780394560700

Publisher: Grove Pr, 1987

Synopsis

While riding on a bus in New York City, the author looks back on his life and examines the Jewish culture

About this title

From Publishers Weekly:

From the unique vantage point of a passenger on a No. 18 crosstown bus, bound from the Upper West Side to the Upper East Side of Manhattan on a Saturday afternoon, Morton (The Rothschilds, A Nervous Splendor develops a seminal, elegant critique of the Judeo-Christian "payoff-obsessed" work ethic"drab toiling now for the sake of drab gorging later." If this elegiac essay idealizes the spontaneity and comradery of paleolithic hunters and goes too far in linking the "archstriver" Cain to contemporary greenhorns (readers can only ponder the acerbic indictment that would have emerged from a subway ride), this urban Ecclesiastes acknowledges that he is "a helpless, shameless, rabid, rapturous nostalgic." With keen descriptions of mundanities (the beast of a bus "chokes out diesel coughs while squatting on four splayed-out wheels"), this stinging satire will strike an immediate chord with New Yorkers but should give pause to progress junkies everywhere, addicted to and betrayed by "the endless Hebrew chore of advancement and perfection."
Copyright 1987 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Grove Pr
• Publication date: 1987
• ISBN 10: 0394560701
• ISBN 13: 9780394560700
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1