Gumberg Library Staff Profiles

Frans Gunnar Bengtsson's The Long Ships resurrects the fantastic world of the tenth century AD when the Vikings roamed and rampaged from the northern fastnesses of Scandinavia down to the Mediterranean. Packed with pitched battles and blood feuds and told throughout with wit and high spirits, Bengtsson's book is a splendid adventure that features one of the most unexpectedly winning heroes in modern fiction.

In 1989, fresh from the publication of his first novel, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, Michael Chabon traveled to his mother's home in Oakland, California, to visit his terminally ill grandfather. Tongue loosened by powerful painkillers, memory stirred by the imminence of death, Chabon's grandfather shared recollections and told stories the younger man had never heard before, uncovering bits and pieces of a history long buried and forgotten.

"A novel of finely articulated tragic power. . . . Little short of a work of genius."--The New York Times Book Review  Asher Lev is a Ladover Hasid who keeps kosher, prays three times a day and believes in the Ribbono Shel Olom, the Master of the Universe. Asher Lev is an artist who is compulsively driven to render the world he sees and feels, even when it leads him to blasphemy. In this stirring and often visionary novel, Chaim Potok traces Asher's passage between these two identities, the one consecrated to God, the other subject only to the imagination.

Out of This Furnace is Thomas Bell's most compelling achievement.  Its story of three generations of an immigrant Slovak family -- the Dobrejcaks -- still stands as a fresh and extraordinary accomplishment. Out of This Furnace is a document of ethnic heritage and of a violent and cruel period in our history, but it is also a superb story. The writing is strong and forthright, and the novel builds constantly to its triumphantly human conclusion.

Witness Zorro's fight for freedom and justice in Old California. This 1940 release, starring Tyrone Power, is a fine treatment of the Zorro character, with one of the most intense sword fights you will ever see (You can see it on YouTube). Basil Rathbone is at his best as the arrogant villain.