Average customer rating:
- Profound!
- I respect the boldness Mailer exhibits here...
- Jesus, Still Comtemporary After All These Years
- Mailer Sucks
- Lovely, easy-reading story
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The Gospel According to the Son: A Novel
Norman Mailer
Manufacturer: Random House Publishing Group
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Binding: Paperback
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ASIN: 0345434080
Release Date: 1999-09-07 |
Amazon.com
In the two millennia since Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John wrote their separate biographies of Jesus, only a handful of other authors have attempted renditions--Charles Dickens, Leo Tolstoy, and D. H. Lawrence have tried their hands at it; scholars E. P. Sanders and Raymond Brown have produced academic treatises on the historical Jesus. Perhaps the best-known fictional account of the life of Jesus is Nikos Kazantzakis's The Last Temptation of Christ, which explores the Son of Man's all-too-human side. Norman Mailer joins these ranks with The Gospel According to the Son.
Not content to chronicle Jesus' life in the form of an apocryphal gospel, Mailer has the chutzpah to crawl inside his title character's head and tell the story from the first-person point of view. Here we get the Prince of Peace's personal account of his temptation by Satan, his three-year ministry, and his agony on the cross. Mailer presents an entirely new kind of passion play, one that remains faithful to the shape of Jesus' life as outlined in the gospels, while daring to imagine the inner life of this most elusive historical figure.
Book Description
For two thousand years, the brief ministry of a young Nazarene preacher has remained the largest single determinant of Western civilization's triumphs and disasters. Now, Norman Mailer has written a novel about Jesus's life. Is God speaking to me? Jesus asks. Or am I hearing voices? If the voices are from God, why has He chosen me as His son? And if they are not from God, then who gave me the power to perform these miracles?
It soon becomes evident that we are being told the story of a skilled and most devout carpenter who is living with prodigious questions. The result is an intimately readable account of a man thrust forward by the visions he receives, the sermons he offers, and the miracles he enacts until he comes to the apocalyptic end of his powers.
The Gospel According to the Son vividly recreates the world of Galilee and Jerusalem two thousand years ago. In a time of uneasy stability, the Holy Land is governed by a complacent but fearful establishment who rule over a despairing underclass -- it is a time of great change, open to comparison with our own. Mailer's signal accomplishment is to create for us a man wholly unlike others who is nonetheless filled with passion and doubt, strength and weakness; a protagonist divine and human, a son of God who shares our condition.
In
The Gospel According to the Son, one of America's greatest living writers has brought us a remarkable book -- by turns bold, thoughtful, poetic, tragic, passionate, and, to our surprise and pleasure, suspenseful.
Customer Reviews:
Profound!.......2007-08-06
The Gospel According to the Son is a deeply moving account of Jesus' life and ministry. Christ points out deviations in the four gospels we are so familiar with today. Mainly, though, this narrative is an inner dialogue; a peek at the thoughts of Christ. His struggles in faith and his many temptations reflect his humanity, while his miracles and the strength of his words echo his Father. Mailer's poignant and honest book is a must-read for everyone, regardless of faith.
I respect the boldness Mailer exhibits here..........2006-11-05
This is the first Mailer I have read. What I gather from his style is that of a particular psychological understanding, here of Christ presented as a man intent of fulfilling his monumental destiny. Within that sense of destiny lies a detached observance of the gathering storm that surrounds him, and the dichotomy of this position produces a Christ that is interesting, believable, empathetic, critical, stoic and loving.
While all of this is beneficial, the rhythm of the book is something stilted, and left me wondering why such a compelling premise for a piece of fiction written by one of post-WW2 America's biggest and highest regarded writers didn't energize or stimulate me. Bold yes, but less informative than accepted as an experiment in style and challenge.
Jesus, Still Comtemporary After All These Years.......2005-11-13
This book is a remarkable feat of scholarship, especially in its ablility to remain highly readable despite its scholarship. We find here a very human portrayal of a man struggling to literally embody God, and, despite the scope of such circumstances, we are oddly able to empathize with Jesus. He confronts his extraordinary situation, paradoxically, as an ordinary man.
The spareness of the biblical style helps us forget the author and the complex theological and historical weight that the story carries. We are able to focus on the personal, day-to-day, hour-by-hour inner life of Jesus, the man.
If you expect quirks and controversy, forget it. If you expect either a born-again, hysterical excitement or a ponderous intellectual examination, take a pass. But, if you are looking for an intimate look at the plausible humanity beneath the religeous and emotional furvor, then read this book.
Mailer's account is particularly comprehensible to the 90's mind in that he allows us to see Jesus coping consciously with the dangers his "celebrity" as a miracle worker begin to pose. In our celebrity conscious, media saturated time, we are perhaps more ready to appreciate the "crowd-control" aspects of the story of Christ, and the practical and psychological impact that those factors must have had on Jesus' day-to-day decisions.
So how can a jewish author in the 1990's create a plain spoken text in biblical dialects that becomes an exciting "page turner" even though we all know from page one exactly how it is going to turn out in the end? No matter how unlikely, Mr. Mailer has accomplished that feat. Read it with an open mind and your mind will open still further.
Mailer Sucks.......2005-10-12
I've never liked anything this unpleasant man has written but this one takes the cake. It's worse than his previous worst novel, Ancient Evenings, which single-handedly turned me off for years on all things Egyptian.
No, I'm not some outraged evangelical railing at someone making use of "My Lord `n Savior," I think Jesus is fair game and a fine topic for literature and speculation. But I'm not going to do as so many others seem willing to and automatically bestow praise on a book merely because it takes the sacred Jesus and casts him into the harsh light of modern judgment. In The Gospel According To The Son, Norman Mailer, proponent of the "non-fiction novel" (figure that one out) manages to make a good story dull and argumentative, drains all color and life from the plot, and delivers something that is SO dead on arrival it's unrecognizable as the tale of Jesus: a biography already filled with drama, betrayal, false arrest, torture, execution, and all the raw material of a gripping story. I've got to hand it to Mailer, not everyone could take a story ready-made for adaptation, all-but handed to him on a silver platter like the head of Saint John the Baptist, and then smash it down to third-rate nonsense. Here even the Devil was boring and it takes A LOT to ruin the best villain ever created. Mailer seemed to want to absent all vestiges of Christ from this little re-telling of the life of the historical man, Jesus of Nazareth, and I can actually respect that, but in rendering this material so skeptically humanistic as to be bland beyond tolerance puzzles me. I can't say I laughed out loud at the truly bad jokes slipped in here and there amid the equally execrable prose, but the line about "Peter was like a rock...he could be broken by a bigger rock..." elicited a genuine chuckle that something so lame made it past an editor.
Right after he released this work back in the late `90's, I heard the author on NPR saying, in essence, "The Gospels are badly composed. There are many writers who could have written them better, and I am foremost among that number." Mailer's ego knows no bounds and his trash talking was a little endearing. I just wish he was able to back it all up with a better book than this.
The bottom line is this book blows. Skip it in favor of The Last Temptation of Christ, or read a good translation of the four Gospels.
Lovely, easy-reading story.......2005-07-17
A book I re-read every few years, and always enjoy. A lovely interpretation of what Jesus may have been thinking moment-to-moment, day-to-day.
Product Description
A verse-by verse Commentary on the Gospel According to Luke.
Average customer rating:
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The Gospel According to a Mountain Momma
Paul Dodd
Manufacturer: Mcclain Printing Co
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Binding: Paperback
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ASIN: 0870126830 |
Average customer rating:
- Amazing.
- Exciting!
- Unforgettable!
- This book will haunt your very soul
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The Possessors
John Christopher
Manufacturer: Cosmos Books (PA)
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ASIN: 1587152371 |
Book Description
It all started when a group of British vacations was cut off by an avalanche. The skiing chalet up in the mountains seemed a good place to hold out for a hwile, but then the little boy mysteriously died...or appeared to. And in the impenetrable Swiss Alps something alien stirred... "A science fiction novel that is really frightening. First-rate entertainment." —The Spectator
Customer Reviews:
Amazing........2007-07-21
I can't understand why John Christopher isn't better known. Since discovering him in the last few months, I've searched for and read everything I could find. His best books should have made him as well-known as some of his contemporaries like Richard Matheson and Ray Bradbury.
This book is one of his best. A group of people snowed in to a small resort while something alien takes them, one by one. There are moments that frighten as well as a movie. The story builds with a quiet suspense, just under the surface, and pays off with a plausible, strong ending.
I like gory, flashy Stephen King novels a lot. But John Christopher's English, stoic, thoughtful horror/science fiction is a great change of pace. This one will stay with me for a long time.
Other great John Christopher books include No Blade of Grass, if you can find it, and Wrinkle in the Skin.
Exciting!.......2006-06-04
An exciting and well written novel even if you're not a fan of science fiction. I really felt like I was holed up in the chalet in the middle of an avalanche with the characters.
Unforgettable!.......2004-11-11
I read this book for the first time when I was a teenager and I have been looking for a copy of my own ever since (I had forgotten the title and finally tracked it down). The story with its vivid characters has stayed with me for thirty years. The author made me feel as though I was in the lodge with the trapped guests and staff, feeling the dread they feel, sharing their helplessness. Find this book and read it!!
This book will haunt your very soul.......2002-11-14
I have never read this book for myself. My father read this story to my brothers and I when we were younger. I cannot stress to you the profound impact this book has had upon me. The fear that John Christopher creates, the very fight for ones own identity is gripping and terrifying. To think that these possessors can take all that you are and shut it away so powerfully that nothing you do can change that, or unlock it, or ever communicate outside of yourself again, is one of them ost frightening concepts that I have ever seen or heard in printed page or word.
John Christopher creates believable characters, not all of them very nice people. As they try and cope with the horror that descends upon them, one cannot help but iagine that you ytourself are transported to that Swiss Chalet, cut off from all humanity, from all aid. And there are people out there waiting to take you. I have found this book in my thoughts and in my dreams many times. This is not one that will ever leave you once yo have read it. It is truly unforgettable. It will possess you too.
Do not read this book unless you are willing to change yourself forever.
Average customer rating:
- An Absolutely Excellent Book!
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The Possessor and the Possessed: Handel, Mozart, Beethoven, and the Idea of Musical Genius
Peter Kivy
Manufacturer: Yale University Press
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Binding: Hardcover
Beethoven, Ludwig van
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ASIN: 0300087586 |
Book Description
The concept of genius intrigues us. Artistic geniuses have something other people don't have. In some cases that something seems to be a remarkable kind of inspiration that permits the artist to exceed his own abilities. It is as if the artist is suddenly possessed, as if some outside force flows through him at the moment of creation. In other cases genius seems best explained as a natural gift. The artist is the possessor of an extra talent that enables the production of masterpiece after masterpiece. This book explores the concept of artistic genius and how it came to be symbolized by three great composers of the modern era: Handel, Mozart, and Beethoven. Peter Kivy, a leading thinker in musical aesthetics, delineates the two concepts of genius that were already well formed in the ancient world. Kivy then develops the argument that these concepts have alternately held sway in Western thought since the beginning of the eighteenth century. He explores why this pendulum swing from the concept of the possessor to the concept of the possessed has occurred and how the concepts were given philosophical reformulations as views toward Handel, Mozart, and Beethoven as geniuses changed in the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries.
Customer Reviews:
An Absolutely Excellent Book!.......2007-07-29
So what is genius? Sure, we all have an idea. But sometimes that word is thrown around quite carelessly. What it is really?
I loved this book. It is extremely well written, intelligent, enlightening, and thought provoking.
Regarding Beethoven, even I, with a very limited understanding of music, could tell something extraordinary was happening the very first time I heard the Ninth Symphony and none of Beethoven's music has disappointed me since. I have CDs where Leonard Bernstein and Benjamin Zander talk about Beethoven's genius in their own words. But now I have a much greater understanding of the concept of musical genius as well as a profound appreciation of its rarity.
I highly recommend this book. It will remain on my bookshelves for a very long time.
Average customer rating:
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Possessors and Possessed: Museums, Archaeology, and the Visualization of History in the Late Ottoman Empire (Ahmanson-Murphy Fine Arts Book)
Wendy M.K. Shaw
Manufacturer: University of California Press
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Binding: Hardcover
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ASIN: 0520233352 |
Book Description
Possessors and Possessed analyzes how and why museums--characteristically Western institutions--emerged in the late-nineteenth-century Ottoman Empire. Shaw argues that, rather than directly emulating post-Enlightenment museums of Western Europe, Ottoman elites produced categories of collection and modes of display appropriate to framing a new identity for the empire in the modern era. In contrast to late-nineteenth-century Euro-American museums, which utilized organizational schema based on positivist notions of progress to organize exhibits of fine arts, Ottoman museums featured military spoils and antiquities long before they turned to the "Islamic" collections with which they might have been more readily associated. The development of these various modes of collection reflected shifting moments in Ottoman identity production. Shaw shows how Ottoman museums were able to use collection and exhibition as devices with which to weave counter-colonial narratives of identity for the Ottoman Empire. Impressive for both the scope and the depth of its research, Possessors and Possessed lays the groundwork for future inquiries into the development of museums outside of the Euro-American milieu.
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Eugene O`Neill and His Eleven-Play Cycle: "A Tale of Possessors Self-Dispossessed" (Henry McBride Series in Modernism)
Donald C. Gallup
Manufacturer: Yale University Press
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Binding: Hardcover
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ASIN: 0300071876 |
Book Description
From 1935 to 1939 Eugene O`Neill devoted nearly all of his creative energy to a vast cycle of plays tracing several generations of an American family. Based on O`Neill`s extensive unpublished notes, drafts, plot summaries and other materials, this book tells for the first time the complicated story of the cycle project--what the playwright intended to do, how he went about it, and why in the end he failed.
Henry McBride Series in Modernism and Modernity
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Book Description
Extreme Spirituality is any experience — whether it be firewalking or practicing humble service to others — that shows us how our egos mask, limit, distort, or diminish our knowledge of a greater reality. Over twenty extreme spiritual practices are highlighted, and readers will learn how even unpleasant or dangerous situations can help us experience how love, wisdom, compassion, and interconnection reveal aspects of our divine nature and leave us with a crystal-clear distinction between our egos and our "higher-selves."
This book, using many different extreme spiritual practices as examples, uses a logical and enthusiastic approach to teach people how to assume a totally spiritual perspective in any situation. By doing this, even sorrowful or frustrating situations don't have to cause as much suffering. We can choose our reactions to them and use them as insights for spiritual growth.
Customer Reviews:
I hoped this would be more about the technicalities of fire walking and glass walking.......2007-08-01
This book was good but not great.
Tolly is one of the world's foremost experts on transformational events, fire walking, glass walking, brick breaking etc. I hoped that this book would be more of a review of the techniques and how they work rather than talking about his own transformation as a result of learning the techniques.
The book is good because he does a wonderful job explaining the resistance and fears that most people have to any major transformational event. He talks about his own experiences and overcoming his own fears.
Overall I thought the book was good but incomplete in some areas.
Simple, But Worthwhile.......2007-06-08
Extreme Spirituality is a simple read. Each chapter is short and about a practice that heightens spirituality, such as: firewalking, piercing, skydiving, fasting, etc. Though it doesn't really go into depth about any of them or try to explain how they work, it does open the mind up to possibilities and perhaps encourages people to challenge their fears and preconceived notions.
Wonderful.......2007-05-12
I'm seriously thinking of going to the states and doing this man's firewalking course!
Radical just aboud describes it.......2007-03-29
This is a great book! Yes it talks about some extreme things, as suggested by the title, but it approaches them from the perspective of a "real" person. Giveing simple direct answers to questions like "WHY would anybody want to do that?" A good read, very informative and thougth provoking. Highly recommend
good.......2007-03-15
recommended to expand view of how one looks at what might be considered spiritual
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