A memoir about growing up in a dysfunctional, devout Jewish family in upstate New York. It's damn bleak, and incredibly funny. You've heard some of it on This American Life. ( )

I rarely laugh out loud while reading a book, but this dark satiric look at Shalom's relationship with God had me hooting out loud.

In this memoir the author recounts his struggles growing up Orthodox Jew, and tracking the myriad of things that will piss off God, and his mom, dad, the rabbi....

From shoplifting to studying in Israel, to walking, with his wife, 14 miles to see a Ranger's game (in order to partially keep the Sabbath, according to Shalom's accounting), the absurd and the sublime do a dark tango in this wonderful book.

If you're easily offended, or ultra-sensitive about religion, this isn't for you. ( )

I would have given this book five stars, but God may have frowned upon that and punished me for it by sicking a virus on my computer. That would be so God. ( )

This poignant, angsty memoir tells the story of Shalom Auslander's coming-of-age struggles within the tight grip of the ultra-Orthodox Jewish community of Monsey, New York. Writing from the perspective of a soon-to-be father, with a loving wife and a son on the way, Auslander looks back on his childhood and adolescence and tries to come to terms with the oppressive religious fanaticism under which he grew up. Of course, what is "fanaticism" to some is simply "values" or "beliefs" to another.

To be honest, this book isn't nearly as angsty and hate-filled as I had expected it to be on hearing other readers' takes on it. Instead of seeming enraged, Auslander comes off as mildly neurotic with a tendency toward embellishment, not altogether unlike David Sedaris or Augusten Burroughs. Yes, his upbringing was troublesome -- whose isn't? -- but his search for spiritual meaning is not so strikingly different from many others', and his relationship with God is certainly no more warped.

Actually, I found his perspective rather refreshing, and quite humorous at times. Unlike other memoirists, Auslander actually made me laugh aloud with some of his turns of phrase and characterizations. As with the humorous writings of Alan Zweibel, it's entirely possible that you have to have had a Jewish upbringing to really get the joke... though Auslander does provide parenthetical insertions to clarify Yiddish phrases and other intricacies of Jewish culture.

In some ways, this book was everything that I had expected from A Year of Living Biblically: humorous, relatively lighthearted, and soft on moralizing or seeking for deeper meaning. Instead, Auslander focuses on his perspective, his relationship with God, and his experiences with religion, spirituality, family, and community. No deeper value system is promoted, and no more universal meaning is ascribed. This is, pure and simple, his memoirs -- but in a very funny and often touching spiritual/religious context.

This book starts out very well. The first chapter is hilarious, cynical but intensely funny in its evaluation of religion in its special variety of Judaism. But the longer you read the less funny it becomes. The ramblings against God get redundant and make you tired of reading another chapter of whiny incantations against God's rough treatment of the author. He makes it nearly impossible to find a reason why he deals with religion at all, when it so obviously is that horrible to him. So this book is sometimes very funny, but most of the time quite exhausting in its redundancy. ( )