This intriguing ancient text deserves a solid academic study by serious scholars. Unfortunately, this book is not it.
Exploration of a long-forgotten text.
Filmmaker Jacobovici (co-author: The Jesus Discovery: The Resurrection Tomb that Reveals the Birth of Christianity, 2012, etc.) and researcher Wilson (Humanities and Religious Studies/York Univ.; How Jesus Became Christian, 2008, etc.) collaborate to popularize a little-known sixth-century text known as Joseph and Aseneth. The story, ostensibly about the Old Testament patriarch Joseph, was originally known to be written in Greek but now survives, in its oldest form, translated into Syriac. The authors dedicate a sizable portion of the book to a new English translation of the text, along with notes. They argue that the strange and anachronistic story is in fact a hidden Gnostic Gospel, which, when properly decoded, provides a wealth of detail about the life of Jesus and his wife, who the authors claim is Mary Magdalene. The authors argue that past interpreters ignored the early church’s trend toward typological analysis of the Old Testament, through which Christian motifs were located within the Hebrew Scriptures. Instead, they claim that Joseph and Aseneth should be read as a “disguised historical narrative.” The authors argue this “gospel” gives details of the personal life of Jesus: “It tells the story of how Jesus met his wife, how they married, and how they had children.” However, many readers will find Joseph and Aseneth allegorical at best, hopelessly mysterious at worst. It is only through what appears as speculation that Jacobovici and Wilson piece together a fantastical tale of love, intrigue and, of course, sex, around Jesus and Mary Magdalene. Wrapped in the modern trend to discount New Testament writings and push forward even the most tenuous Gnostic texts, the authors write that “[w]hat seemed like fantasy is actually history, and what seems like history turns out to be carefully edited spin.” Yet the authors’ subjective tone, dramatic language and willingness to stretch logic leave readers skeptical from the first page.
This intriguing ancient text deserves a solid academic study by serious scholars. Unfortunately, this book is not it.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-60598-610-4
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Pegasus
Review Posted Online: Nov. 12, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2014
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorker staff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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