Books: I, Wabenzi - Rafi Zabor

Publisher's Weekly: "A jazz drummer and music critic, Zabor has a great feel for the rhythms and melodies of language, but it is his skill at portraiture that will really lure readers. His descriptions of his father, a Polish Jew who immigrated to Brooklyn in 1938 and stayed in an unhappy marriage in order to be close to his son, are particularly evocative. And his account of his mother's descent into angry senility would be despairing if it weren't so often leavened with humor. The book's few dull moments occur when the author appears alone, with no person upon whom to play his riffs and observations. Religion, or rather the self-conscious struggle to connect earthly experience with the divine, also colors a large part of the book, particularly toward the end. But if Zabor is a mystic, given to visions and dreams, his memoir is nevertheless grounded in the joys, sorrows and many little vanities of ordinary life."