After his father died, Leon Wieseltier began to observe the traditional year-long period of mourning, going to the synagogue three times a day to recite the prayer known as the mourner's Kaddish. Struck by the profound, yet unexpected power of this practice and the poverty of his knowledge about it, Leon began to study the history and meaning of this ancient ritual. Taken from Wieseltier's spiritual and thoughtful journal, Kaddish provides a record...

"A comic, bittersweet tale of family evocative of The Yiddish Policemen's Union and Everything Is Illuminated Alexander "Sasha" Karnokovitch and his family would like to mourn the passing of his mother, Rachela, with modesty and dignity. But Rachela, a famous Polish e;migre; mathematician and professor at the University of Wisconsin, is rumored to have solved the million-dollar, Navier-Stokes Millennium Prize Problem. Rumor also has it that she spitefully...

Uses Royal Archives sources to examine how the untimely death of Prince Albert plunged both his queen and the nation into a profound state of grief that reshaped the British monarchy.

The Queen begins with a familiar epigraph "Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown"--Henry IV, Part II. The action of the film takes place during the week following the death, on August 31, 1997 of Diana, Princess of Wales. One of its accomplishments, courtesy of adroit use of newsreel and other contemporary footage, is to remind viewers of the deep sadness that surrounded that event. It is also about the divergent and potentially ruinous ways the...