Nextbook www.nextbook.org

“The Bones” by Seth Greenland (Bloomsbury) Shop at Amazon.com! http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/redirect-home?site=amazon&tag=tommywood-20 “And The Word Was” by Bruce Bauman (Other Press) Shop at Amazon.com! http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/redirect-home?site=amazon&tag=tommywood-20

When I go out of town, I often take a novel or two with me, knowing that a plane ride remains one of the few places to get serious reading done. Recently, I read two novels, Seth Greenland’s “The Bones” (Bloomsbury) and Bruce Bauman’s “And the Word Was” (Other Press), which made strong impressions about […]

Spring is upon us. My allergies have been acting up for weeks. So it seems the right time to talk about cross-pollination, a subject that it is at the heart of important new exhibits in Los Angeles and New York. When Massachusetts Gov. Michael Dukakis was running for president in 1988, he often talked about […]

KCRW

Tommywood is a column that explores the cultural landscape of Los Angeles through a personal lens, taking the reader everywhere from a tour of Frank Gehry’s Santa Monica, to Robert Evan’s bed, with a morning spent in Traffic school and lunch with French philosopher Bernard Henri-Levy, with time for a game of mah-jong, and a […]

The Jewish Journal

At the end of Woody Allen’s “Melinda and Melinda,” I sat in my seat stunned: Woody Allen had actually made a movie I liked — a good movie that had something to say about life and literature. It felt like a long time since I’d enjoyed one of his films. Many years ago, when Allen […]

Last week, playwright Donald Margulies, The Manhattan Theater Club and The Forward weekly newspaper announced the winners of a contest they sponsored on the topic of “What It’s Like Growing Up Jewish in New York.” You can read the winning entries at www.forward.com. I regret to say you will not find my name among them […]

The world lost one of its great comic artists last month. I am referring not to Johnny Carson, who was little known outside of the United States, but to Israeli satirist Ephraim Kishon, 80, who, although little known in America, was beloved around the world. I read somewhere that his books have sold more than […]