Martin Buber: A Life of Faith and Dissent

Paul Mendes-Flohr offers the first major biography in English in thirty years of this seminal modern Jewish thinker, Martin Buber. The book is organized around several key moments, such as his sudden abandonment by his mother when he was a child of three, a foundational trauma that, Mendes-Flohr shows, left an enduring mark on Buber’s inner life, attuning him to the fragility of human relations and the need to nurture them with what he would call a “dialogical attentiveness.”