Book Description
Book Two opens in the summer of 1850 as the emigrants disembark in New York City. Their journey to a new home in Minnesota Territory takes them by riverboat, steam wagon, Great Lakes steamship, and oxcart to Chisago County.
Customer Reviews:
THE SWEDISH OCCUPATION OF MINNESOTA..........2003-12-29
This is an epic work by its Swedish author. Translated from Swedish into English, this beautifully written book of historical fiction was first published in 1954 and met with excellent reviews at the time. It is the second part of a four part opus, the first of which is "The Emigrants". This book, "Unto a Good Land", is followed by two additional books, "The Settlers" and "Last Letter From Home".
In the first volume, "The Emigrants", the author detailed the emigration of a Swedish family to the New World, grounding it in the reasons for the exodus of so many Swedes from their mother country in the middle of the 19th century. The focus of the first book in this four part opus is on the family, relatives, and friends of Karl Oscar Nilsson, a peasant farmer who unceasingly worked his farm, only to find that, no matter what he did, he could not progress and would continue to live on the cusp of total poverty. The focus of the first book is on their life in Sweden. Gathering up his family and friends of the family, the Nilsson family decides to take the monumental step of making a fresh start by emigrating to the new world, specifically the United States of America.
The second volume, "Unto a Good Land", focuses on the arrival of the Nilsson family and friends in the United States of America. It details their journey from New York, a journey that was to take them across the Midwest by rail, steamer, and foot to arrive in the wilds of what would one day be the State of Minnesota. It is in this wilderness that the Nilsson family and friends would homestead and struggle to make a new home. The author regales the reader with the travails this hardy group of settlers would encounter in their efforts to create by the sweat of their brow a new home in the wilderness. The early struggles of the Nilsson family to succeed in what was an unknown frontier is engagingly chronicled. I have enjoyed the first and second volumes so much that I look forward to continuing their journey with them by reading the remaining two volumes. This is a book that those who love historical fiction will greatly enjoy.
An excellent sequel.......2001-03-23
Karl Oskar Nilsson, his family, and a collection of other emigrants from Sweden now find themselves in New York harbor, ready to find their promised land in Minnesota. Traveling by steam train, riverboat, canal barge, and finally on foot, they reach Taylors Falls, Minnesota. Setting up as homesteaders, each family can claim 160 acres, and Karl Oskar is determined to pick the primest land. However, it is too late to plant crops, Karl Oskar has too little money to buy livestock, and winter is coming on fast. This is the story of the emigrants' first year in America.
This book is the second in the Emigrants quadrilogy, and this book is every bit as wonderful as the first. The characters seem as alive to me reading this book, as if I was reading their own diaries. Vilhelm Moberg is considered one of Sweden's great authors, and it is easy to see why.
As an aside, besides merely showing someone I would consider similar to my own Swedish ancestors, this book has made me understand more about life. I find myself haunted by the scene in which Karl Oskar walks twelve miles to purchase a 100-pound sack of flour so that his family can eat and survive the winter. Carrying the sack home on his back, he becomes lost in the forest, and nearly dies of exposure. But, realizing that he metaphorically carries his children in that sack, he continues on and when he finally finds his home, he delivers the flour to his wife without one word of complaint.
So, this is a wonderful book, a fitting sequel to The Emigrants. I highly recommend both books to you.
[For those of you with young children, I would like to recommend the Kirsten books in the American Girls series. Written for young readers (primarily girls), it tells the story of a Swedish family that immigrates to Minnesota in 1854.]
Immigrantion , only 800,000 per year is allowed........1999-03-15
Immirgrants come to the U.S. daily. Population in America has increased drastically since the 1950s. Other Modern day civilization begun in Europe and Asia have develope greatly, but the U.S.exsposes immigrants to much wider opportunities.
Average customer rating:
|
Unto A Good Land: A History Of The American People, Volume 1: To 1900
Jr. David Edwin Harrell ,
Edwin S. Gaustad ,
John B. Boles ,
Sally Foreman Griffith ,
Randall M. Miller , and
Randall Bennett Woods
Manufacturer: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
 General
| United States
| Americas
| History
| Subjects
| Books
All Titles
| Qualifying Textbooks - Fall 2007
| Stores
| Books
Similar Items:
-
Unto A Good Land: A History Of The American People, Volume 2: From 1865
-
The Underground Railroad in Floyd County, Indiana
-
For the Record: A Documentary History of America, Third Edition, Volume 1
-
Everyday Life in Early America
-
Puritan Dilemma: The Story of John Winthrop (Library of American Biography Series), The (3rd Edition) (Library of American Biography)
ASIN: 0802829449 |
Average customer rating:
|
Unto A Good Land: A History Of The American People, Volume 2: From 1865
Jr. David Edwin Harrell ,
Edwin S. Gaustad ,
John B. Boles ,
Sally Foreman Griffith ,
Randall M. Miller , and
Randall Bennett Woods
Manufacturer: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
General
| United States
| Americas
| History
| Subjects
| Books
All Titles
| Qualifying Textbooks - Fall 2007
| Stores
| Books
Similar Items:
-
Unto A Good Land: A History Of The American People, Volume 1: To 1900
-
Liberalism and Its Challengers: From F.D.R. to Bush
-
Ragged Dick: Or, Street Life in New York with the Boot Blacks (Signet Classics)
-
Annual Editions: American History, Volume 2, 19/e (Annual Editions American History)
-
Unto A Good Land: A History Of The American People
ASIN: 0802829457 |
Customer Reviews:
THE SWEDISH OCCUPATION OF MINNESOTA..........2005-08-19
This is an epic work by its Swedish author. Translated from Swedish into English, this beautifully written book of historical fiction was first published in 1954 and met with excellent reviews at the time. It is the second part of a four part opus, the first of which is "The Emigrants". This book, "Unto a Good Land", is followed by two additional books, "The Settlers" and "Last Letter From Home".
In the first volume, "The Emigrants", the author detailed the emigration of a Swedish family to the New World, grounding it in the reasons for the exodus of so many Swedes from their mother country in the middle of the 19th century. The focus of the first book in this four part opus is on the family, relatives, and friends of Karl Oscar Nilsson, a peasant farmer who unceasingly worked his farm, only to find that, no matter what he did, he could not progress and would continue to live on the cusp of total poverty. The focus of the first book is on their life in Sweden. Gathering up his family and friends of the family, the Nilsson family decides to take the monumental step of making a fresh start by emigrating to the new world, specifically the United States of America.
The second volume, "Unto a Good Land", focuses on the arrival of the Nilsson family and friends in the United States of America. It details their journey from New York, a journey that was to take them across the Midwest by rail, steamer, and foot to arrive in the wilds of what would one day be the State of Minnesota. It is in this wilderness that the Nilsson family and friends would homestead and struggle to make a new home. The author regales the reader with the travails this hardy group of settlers would encounter in their efforts to create by the sweat of their brow a new home in the wilderness. The early struggles of the Nilsson family to succeed in what was an unknown frontier is engagingly chronicled. This is a book that those who love historical fiction will greatly enjoy.
Product Description
Part one of Moberg's epic novel about Swedish immigrants in the United States who go westward from New York City and settle near lake Ki-Chi-Saga (now Chisago). TEXT IS IN NORWEGIAN.
Average customer rating:
|
UNTO A GOOD LAND
Vilhelm Moberg
Manufacturer: Fontana Paperbacks
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
Historical
| Genre Fiction
| Literature & Fiction
| Subjects
| Books
ASIN: 0006130232 |
Customer Reviews:
What a Pleasure!.......2007-04-25
Normally, I consider romance novels a guilty pleasure. However, this particular romance has all of the pleasure without any of the guilt. How refreshing! The story begins with Catriona being willed to neighbor Sir Michael Stewart after the distant cousin she has been taking care of passses away. Sir Michael Stewart is a widower and confirmed bachelor with two grown daughters. He eschews fashionable society and instead enjoys his farm and solitude until Catriona's arrival disturbs his peace. Catriona establishes herself as his housekeeper and is intent on keeping her promise to her late cousin. She won't leave Sir Michael's until she has made his house respectable again and helped him find a wife. To Tempt a Gentleman is filled with fast-paced, witty, acerbic dialogue. About half-way into the book the plot really begins to thicken as we discover Catriona's history and full identity. The plot may be a little bit too contrived at times, but the dialogue more than makes up for the occasional choppiness in the plot. Also, I appreciate that the author manages to convey sexual tension and chemistry without compromising moral integrity. This novel is simply a pleasure.
Another fun one by Huntington.......2005-10-19
I love this author! She is so clever in her dialogue between her characters. I loved the whole story line and thoroughly enjoyed Sir Michael and Catriona. It was another one of Huntington's that I couldn't put down! I definately recommend this book.
Excellent!.......2005-08-18
This is a great story! The characters are wonderful, and I absolutely loved Sir Michael and Catriona. The dialogue is very funny and I was curious to see what would happen as the story progressed. Very clever, very witty dialogue, interesting descriptive passages, and just a whole lot of fun! There are a lot of funny comments in this narrative; if you like words and a funny turn of phrase or description, you'll enjoy this story.
Amazon.com
"He was," as Salon's Gary Kamyia notes, "20th-century drug culture's Poe, its Artaud, its Baudelaire. He was the prophet of the literature of pure experience, a phenomenologist of dread.... Burroughs had the scary genius to turn the junk wasteland into a parallel universe, one as thoroughly and obsessively rendered as Blake's."
Why has this homosexual ex-junkie, whose claim to fame rests entirely on one book--the hallucinogenic ravings of a heroin addict--so seized the collective imagination? Burroughs wrote Naked Lunch in a Tangier, Morocco, hotel room between 1954 and 1957. Allen Ginsberg and his beatnik cronies burst onto the scene, rescued the manuscript from the food-encrusted floor, and introduced some order to the pages. It was published in Paris in 1959 by the notorious Olympia Press and in the U.S. in 1962; the landmark obscenity trial that ensued served to end literary censorship in America.
Burroughs's literary experiment--the much-touted "cut-up" technique--mirrored the workings of a junkie's brain. But it was junk coupled with vision: Burroughs makes teeming amalgam of allegory, sci-fi, and non-linear narration, all wrapped in a blend of humor--slapstick, Swiftian, slang-infested humor. What is Naked Lunch about? People turn into blobs amidst the sort of evil that R. Crumb, in the decades to come, would inimitably flesh out with his dark and creepy cartoon images. Perhaps the most easily grasped part of Naked Lunch is its America-bashing, replete with slang and vitriol. Read it and see for yourself.
Book Description
Naked Lunch is one of the most important novels of the twentieth century. Exerting its influence on the work of authors like Thomas Pynchon, J. G. Ballard, and William Gibson, on the relationship of art and obscenity, and on the shape of music, film, and media generally, it is one of the books that redefined not just literature but American culture. Reedited by Burroughs scholar Barry Miles and Burroughs's longtime editor James Grauerholz, Naked Lunch: The Restored Text includes many editorial corrections to errors present in previous editions, and incorporates Burroughs's notes on the text, several essays he wrote over the years about the book, and an appendix of 20 percent all-new material and alternate drafts from the original manuscript, which predates the first published version. For the Burroughs enthusiast and the neophyte, this volume is a valuable and fresh experience of this classic of our culture.
Customer Reviews:
(3.5): An Important Yet Flawed Novel..........2007-03-02
I'm not sure how to digest "Naked Lunch" let alone write a review about it. Burroughs' text is one of the most important to come out of the Beats, yet it's hard to read and didn't leave me with any sense of satisfaction. The novel is a true example of a novel driven purely by style and form and I think it hurst the overall vision of the text. I understand that the cut and splice and often tangential writing is meant to recreate a junk addicts perspective, yet at the end of the day, if nothing comes out of the text other than "some of the anecdotes were really something," it's hard to say how successful the novel is. Did I like it? At times. Did I enjoy reading it? Somewhat. I most certainly think it's a novel that has an important place in American History and within American Literature, but I don't think it stands up to "On the Road" and some of the other texts to come out of the Beat Generation.
Not Burroughs' best.......2006-09-08
Although NL has been acclaimed as genius, WSB himself didn't think it was successful. Those of you who are turned off by the contrived shocking imagery of NL and won't read another WSB novel: Please reconsider and read some of his later, more "mature" post-60's novels; Wild Boys, Exterminator! (short stories) Cities of the Red Night, Western Lands, etc.
Those are the books where Burroughs' 'voice' comes through, and makes his earlier writings (NL, Nova Express) seem almost childish.
linear rotted cell roadway.......2006-09-07
Wide dog fulcrum by standard turning smoking litre soft generations. Sons made independent significance account anything apart selfishly. Concise life success ghettoes? Greater time edit enjoy hours grace magazines commitment suspect.
Heroic attractive penalties baby utopian ovary stop animals. Logical taking reasonable serpent brother amidst setting consumers. Bed perspective each closer? Interest leisure volume leaving.
Indoors strictly priority eating. Violent curve maid departure.
The postmodern novel, except without the lies.......2006-07-01
The concept of the postmodern novel is confusion between symbol and meaning, explained through self-aware metaphor; Burroughs takes this further and makes a radio show of many small skits associated invisibly (topically; philosophically) around the concept of modern breakdown. He borrows from every source, pulp, science fiction, psychological thrillers, literature (Melville!), and even advertisements in order to create this highly metaphorical book. Where James Joyce and Thomas Pynchon created highly styled postmodern books, they never came close to this degree of truth and understanding of the human condition -- and how it might be transcended. This is one of my favorite books of all time and I will never tire of reading it, although many of the acts in the book are things that make me alternately blush or hide in fear.
Useless.......2006-06-27
For any number of reasons I can probably say that this is one of the worst books I have ever read. I understand that a lot of people think this is genius. I am not one of them. Personally, I don't find endless descriptions of sex with minority boys to be very entertaining reading, let alone genius. I also don't find pointless prose that appears to have no discernable thread of thought to have much value. Personally, I like to read good story tellers, authors like Tom Robbins or Salman Rushdie. Naked Lunch is about as opposed to them as you can reasonably get.
This is one of those books that sounds a lot better when someone translates it for you. In reading the preface where Norman Mailer talks about it in the context of the court proceedings in the 1960s, the book sounds interesting and culturally pertinent. However, upon reading it the book falls far short of the lofty status we get from Mailer's answers on the stand. I understand how Alan Ginsberg, a proclaimed NAMBLA member, would find it's material suitable. I wonder about Mailer though. While I'll never take a stand against a person's writing what they want, I do take pause when someone recommends something like this.
This is not literature so much as a heroin clouded view of the author's own serious problems and his interpretation of our culture's deficiencies. The notion that this is the "naked" truth, or lunch as it is so called, is so absurd that the book should never have been accepted as remotely resembling cult literature, in the past, present, or future. Who reads this and resonates with it? Who thinks, "Yes, gay sex with boys is what my mind is all about? Oh, and all the better that they're Arabs!" Very few people, the author included. Burroughs himself admits this was difficult to write. This is probably due to the fact that the vignettes portrayed here do not, in fact, represent anything so much as the anarchy resplendent in the author's own mind while he struggled with various addictions. As a case study in heroin and morphine addiction, this may have some merit. As a counterculture commentary on society I find it worthless.
This isn't about my sensibilities being assaulted - far from it. If I can read & enjoy Robbins's linguistic forays into sex with nuns, I can handle just about anything. I'm not offended with flying sperm so much as I am insulted that anyone felt this was worth reading; that I was lured into thinking this was a work of art. It's not.
Sometimes I read books that don't suit me, but I understand why someone would like it. This book falls squarely in the camp where people feel they need to proclaim it genius because they're so confused or intimidated by it. This book is far from genius. The author admits it was put together from scraps of things written while he was in his heavy heroin addiction, and that he vaguely remembers much of it. I don't see how, or in what context, this book will appeal to anyone other than a case study of a certain segment of people at a certain instance in time in America.
Customer Reviews:
book broke.......2007-04-28
great book, but unfortunately the binding broke as it is like 40 years old. literally.
Customer Reviews:
Burn Down Fear City.......2006-01-06
Actually, this wasn't my first introduction to Burroughs; that would have been "Speed" (no, not a story about a bus that couldn't go over 50 because it would explode!) - which is sadly out of print I think. I'm not sure the David Lynch film of Naked Lunch really did this book justice - make your own mind up. A truly astonishing piece of cut-up in action.
Further book, film and music reviews, plus general shenanigans can be found at: www.mindcrash.co.uk and http://blog.myspace.com/mindcrash
Product Description
This edition was especially created in 1995 for Quality Paperback Book Club by arrangement with Penquin Books
Average customer rating:
|
Everything Is Permitted: The Making of Naked Lunch
Manufacturer: Grove Pr
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
Adaptations
| Movies
| Entertainment
| Subjects
| Books
General
| Movies
| Entertainment
| Subjects
| Books
Movie Tie-Ins
| Genre Fiction
| Literature & Fiction
| Subjects
| Books
Performing Arts
| Arts & Photography
| Subjects
| Books
| Dance
| General
| Reference
| Theater
General
| Arts & Photography
| Subjects
| Books
General
| Foreign Languages
| Reference
| Subjects
| Books
ASIN: 0802133037 |
Amazon.com
The gospel according to Thomas is an ancient collection of sayings attributed to Jesus and thought to be recorded by his brother Judas, the Twin (Thomas means "twin" in Aramaic). Some scholars suggest that this gospel was collected from New Testament sayings, while others believe it springs from a completely independent author because many of the quotations are not in the New Testament at all. It slept for two millennia in a stone jar until it was accidentally exhumed by a group of fertilizer gatherers in the northern Egyptian desert in 1945. (The gospel is just one document in the fourth-century papyrus library discovered near the city of Nag Hammadi, from which the entire collection gets its name.) Marvin Meyer's distinguished translation includes Coptic text on each left page and the English translation on the right. It is considered by many to be perhaps the closest we'll ever get to reading what was actually said by the historical Jesus. In The Gospel of Thomas, you'll discover a different kind of Christ--a wandering spiritual teacher from Galilee who performs no miracles, reveals little prophecy, announces no apocalypse, and dies for no one's sins. --P. Randall Cohan
Book Description
A fresh, authoritative English translation, with an informative introduction, fascinating explanatory notes, and the Coptic text, with interpretation by Harold Bloom, our pre–eminent literary critic.
Customer Reviews:
For a nonexpert, a thought-provoking volume.......2007-07-04
This is a Gospel allegedly authored by Judas Thomas the Twin. This Gospel does not provide a narrative analysis as the four Gospels of the New Testament do. The focus is the (page 5) "sayings of Jesus." As such, this work is closer to what is called a (page 7) "a collection of sayings." The introductory essay (an introduction and a rather difficult concluding essay by Harold Bloom sandwich the slim volume of sayings) notes that there are three explanations for the "Gospel of Thomas," one of which is that it is (page 13) "independent of the New Testament synoptic gospels, but it is related to oral or written traditions similar to those behind the synoptic gospels." Marvin Mayer, the book's editor, suggests that the Gospel of Thomas (page 13) "preserves sayings that at times appear to be more original than the New Testament parallels."
Bloom's concluding essay uses this Gospel to raise interesting questions about Biblical understanding. Not being an expert, I say nothing more. Individual readers will need to examine his work for themselves and come to their own judgments.
The Gospel itself is interesting, given that quite a few of the "sayings" are very close to what is in the traditional four Gospels. One example:
55 Jesus said, "Fortunate are the poor, for yours is heaven's kingdom."
110 Jesus said, "Let someone who has found the world and has become wealthy renounce the world."
Other apothegms:
1 And he said, "Whoever discovers the interpretation of these sayings will not taste death."
95 Jesus said, "If you have money, do not lend it at interest. Rather give [it] to someone from whom you will not get it back."
And one final saying (discussed at length in the introduction and in Lane's work on the Bible):
114 Simon Peter said to them, "Mary should leave us, for females are not worthy of life."
Jesus said, "Look, I will guide her to make her male, so that she too may become a living spirit resembling you males. For every female who makes herself male will enter heaven's kingdom."
What to make of the Gospel of Thomas? I'm not an expert, but I do find this interesting reading. What it portends for an understanding of Scripture I must leave to others. But the questions that come to mind as one reads the essays and, even more, the text itself, makes this an interesting expenditure of mental energy.
3 Stars and a half..........2007-02-23
I didn't bother reading the introduction and commentary, I went straight for the juice and read the ghospel. As a deist I didn't find it so much different from other ghospels, a bit shorter maybe, but about the same. Maybe less jolly and honky dory, a bit more down with life, good and evil are the same and all that. A bit closer to some eastern phylosophy sort of meaning, but still the same, jesus is the choosen one, he shows the way, but then will leave and leave us to dwell with the BS.
As footnote, did you know that "ghospel" is a wrong word? The original ghospels were written by greeks and they titled them "Evangels", which means "good news". Speaking of greek, I liked a lot the facing text in greek and coptic. I do suggest this edition of the book to curious ones, at the end of it all is a quick read.
Ham on Wonder Bread. .......2006-05-28
Meyers sandwiches the 114 sayings of Thomas (in English and Coptic), and his commentary on that text, between two essays: his introduction, and a dozen or so pages from the famous humanist, Harold Bloom.
The middle sections may or may not be worth the price of the book. (I haven't looked over the notes yet.) I find Thomas a bit "hammy," both in the sense that (having read a few Taoist and Buddhist works) Gnostic metaphysics strike me as pretentious, and in the sense that in their lack of historical or moral interest, they are "un-kosher," don't sound like a Jewish prophet. This doesn't sound like Jesus to me; it sounds like an Alexandrian philosopher. But it's worth reading Thomas for his importance in modern Jesus debates.
Surrounding the text one finds two slices of "wonder bread" of doubtful nutritional value.
Meyer properly attempts to put Thomas in context, but offers some dubious arguments in the process. He repeats the standard Jesus Seminar line that Q is very like Thomas. The view that Thomas is an early text is often based on the assumption that both are "sayings Gospels." (A rather oxymoronic concept.) More importantly, as I show in Why the Jesus Seminar can't find Jesus, and Grandma Marshall Could, Q is radically different from Thomas. First, even the Jesus Seminar version of Q contains some stories and miracles, which Thomas does not. More fundamentally, while Q contains some of the most profound moral teaching in all literature, Thomas edits almost all of it out. Q is 37-50% moral teaching; Thomas is about 2%, and even that can be pretty anemic. ("Don't lie, and don't do the things you hate.") Odd that a "sayings Gospel" would edit out the Sermon on the Mount! Even odder that Meyer does not notice! Nor do other Jesus Seminar scholars, Elaine Pagels, or Harold Bloom.
In fact, in my analysis of Thomas and the Gospels, I found that Thomas was less like the canonical Gospels than any other ancient writing I surveyed. The convention of calling it a "Gospel" at all is, in my opinion, highly dubious.
Meyer claims that the "absence of allegorical interpretations" in Thomas' version of the parable of the sower "helps confirm that such elements were added later," and therefore Thomas contains material that predates the Gospels. But scholars like Sanders and Jenkins have rebutted this argument. John Meier, N. T. Wright, and Richard Hays also give reason to believe Thomas depends on the canonical Gospels. Meyer is honest enough to admit that some scholars take this view. The problem is (I argue) "early Thomas" scholars get the worst of the debate. In fact, often they simply ignore opposing arguments. (Pagels admitted to me she had not read Meier or Wright's views on Thomas.)
While a good writer, Harold Bloom is in even further over his head. He uncritically accepts the view that Thomas offers an "earlier Jesus." Both Meyer and Bloom repeatedly cite Burton Mack, whose gifts, in my opinion, are more those of a myth-maker than a historian. Bloom also glibly repeats Meyer's error about Thomas being similiar to "Q."
Bloom expresses amazement that the Gospels contain only a few Aramaic sayings of Jesus: "If you believed in the divinity of Jesus, would you not wish to have preserved the actual Aramaic sentences he uttered?" The answer is, first of all, Jesus may have spoken mostly in Greek. But also, Bloom seems to have a less sophisticated and more magical notion of language than the early Christians. In the Christian Scriptures, Jesus is the "Logos," the translation into humanity of the nature of God. By speaking in different languages in Acts, the Holy Spirit in effect blessed all languages, and the act of translation.
Bloom asks, "Is it not an extraordinary scandal that all the crucial texts of Christianity are so suprisingly belated?" He should know better. The earliest extant Buddhist text is from 600 years after the Buddha. The earliest account of the resurrection, by contrast, was written a mere 20 years after the fact, and the first extant text is a mere 90-100 years later. Nor is 40 years (to Mark) so long; I could transcribe 1st hand accounts of the bombing of Nagasaki (where I once lived) tomorrow, from eyewitnesses, 61 years after the fact.
Misleading To Scientific Researchers .......2006-02-25
If you buy this book seeking futher knowledge of the man Jesus, you will discover the writing to be based on unbelievable script. It is totally unlike any other writings found regarding the person, the man, that lived two thousand years ago. Christ would have been appalled at events attributed to him and this book is unacceptable to any Christian. The gnostics were a sect of people who believed themselves to be enlightened and had a following just as many false teachers throughout the centuries have influenced the easily suggestible person.
This book was attributed to Thomas! This alone would defy belief in the script of this book as being written by the disciple. Although Thomas tended towards skepticism at Christ's ressurection, he stood in awe as he realized it was the man he had followed and believed to be the Son of God. Thomas undoubtedly would have condemned this book. To say a false teacher named Thomas may have written the book is possible, but the person who wrote the script appears to be having sport with the true follower of Christ.
I have just finished watching a rather informed history of the gnostics on the "History Channel", and the saga of their lives and travels were nothing new or wise, just as we find today in so-called scholars who endeavor to establish a scientific path of Christ's life. Men of yesterday were given to forgeries just as we find in our generation, so if you are in quest of the truth of the times and life of Jesus, forget it, you won't find it here.
Focus on the actual text...avoid the commentary.......2006-01-30
For any true believer and follower of Christ and his teachings, this book will most definitely be a rare and invaluable jewel. The mysteries, admonishments, knowledge, wisdom and understanding reflected by Christ in these sayings will speak to the very heart and spirit of the individual who is truly seeking. There is most definitely a direct correlation with the teachings, and sayings of Christ that are most familiar and recognized in the canonized four gospels.For the believer, my suggestion is to search and study these sayings as you would any other scripture, recognizing the living spirit behind all scripture that speaks to the spirit within.
My suggestion would be to purchase the book for its actual text, and not the unnecessary insertion of Harold Blooms dissertation found in the back of the book. His essay tries to separate the consistent unity behind the scriptures of the old and new testament; and to as well separate the Christ that is found in cannoned scripture from the Christ reflected in the writings of Thomas. However I suggest that the individual judge for themselves of how much benefit they will receive from the added insight.
Books:
- Wagner's Ring: Turning the Sky Round
- War against the Idols: The Reformation of Worship from Erasmus to Calvin
- Wings of Discovery
- Your Face Tomorrow: Fever And Spear
- 13th Gen: Abort, Retry, Ignore, Fail?
- 1949: A Novel of the Irish Free State (Irish Century)
- A Breath of Fresh Air (Ballantine Reader's Circle)
- A Christmas Guest: A Novel
- A Hero in Every Heart: Champions from All Walks of Life Share Powerful Messages to Inspire the Hero in Each of Us
- Almost Doesn't Count
Books Index
Books Home
Recommended Books
- Al Gore: A User's Manual
- The Everlasting Man
- Paris Trance: A Romance
- Needlelace and Stumpwork
- Restaurant Basics: Why Guests Don't Come Back...and What You Can Do About It
- Principles of Financial Engineering
- Statistics for Experimenters: An Introduction to Design, Data Analysis, and Model Building
- Protecting Public Health and the Environment: Implementing The Precautionary Principle
- Keep Your Hard Earned Money: Tax Saving Solutions for the Self Employed
- 2002 International Trade Statistics Yearbook/Annuaire Statistique Du Commerce International
The Search for Christian America
Annual Editions: American History, Volume 1, 19/e (Annual Editions American History)
Vindicating the Founders: Race, Sex, Class, and Justice in the Origins of America
VENTANAS LENGUA Student Edition
The United States: A brief Narrative History
