Readers who like that sort of thing will like this. As for the others, well, you don’t need to be a fundamentalist to enjoy...
Bad Arabs, steely-jawed Christians, evil Russkies, signs and portents from the Holy Land: LaHaye and Parshall, skilled packagers of prophecy, serve up Pat Robertson’s worst nightmare.
LaHaye (Luke’s Story, 2009, etc.), of course, has made a worldly fortune serving up visions of the end times with his Left Behind series, which one might have thought would offer the last word on the subject. But no: He left out some important twists on Revelation, namely a Russian-Islamic alliance that “only looked like a historic game changer,” a “global religious coalition for climate change” (evil, natch), and some inconvenient volcanic activity to pepper up the air while the forces of evil descend on Israel. Apart from that, it’s business as usual: The government is busy putting the mark of the beast on good Americans in the guise of a “biological identification tag,” and stalwart servants of Jehovah bearing biblically charged names such as Joshua Jordan (and, in the interest of gender balance, his daughter, who one wishes were named River) do their best to thwart Old Nick—and, for that matter, the Romanians. The story is predictable, the research loose, the errors many: There’s no such thing as a lieutenant major, not in this man’s army; neither is there a Dali Lama, unless the Tibetan Buddhists have appointed a cleric to oversee surrealist art; and bad old Islamicists would doubtless prefer to be grammatically correct when committing themselves to divine victory, Allah Ackbar. But no matter: This is no exercise in infallibility, but instead a by-the-numbers, fill-in-the-blanks genre thriller with all the usual cliches (“something grabbed her attention like a slap in the face”) mixed up with the first stirrings of the apocalypse.
Readers who like that sort of thing will like this. As for the others, well, you don’t need to be a fundamentalist to enjoy the end-days mayhem, but it probably helps. Suspending disbelief does, too.Pub Date: June 28, 2011
ISBN: 978-0310326373
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Zondervan
Review Posted Online: July 5, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2011
These letters from some important executive Down Below, to one of the junior devils here on earth, whose job is to corrupt mortals, are witty and written in a breezy style seldom found in religious literature. The author quotes Luther, who said: "The best way to drive out the devil, if he will not yield to texts of Scripture, is to jeer and flout him, for he cannot bear scorn." This the author does most successfully, for by presenting some of our modern and not-so-modern beliefs as emanating from the devil's headquarters, he succeeds in making his reader feel like an ass for ever having believed in such ideas. This kind of presentation gives the author a tremendous advantage over the reader, however, for the more timid reader may feel a sense of guilt after putting down this book. It is a clever book, and for the clever reader, rather than the too-earnest soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1942
ISBN: 0060652934
Page Count: 53
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 17, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1943
The writing is merely serviceable, and one can’t help but wish the author had found a way to present her material as...
An unlikely love story set amid the horrors of a Nazi death camp.
Based on real people and events, this debut novel follows Lale Sokolov, a young Slovakian Jew sent to Auschwitz in 1942. There, he assumes the heinous task of tattooing incoming Jewish prisoners with the dehumanizing numbers their SS captors use to identify them. When the Tätowierer, as he is called, meets fellow prisoner Gita Furman, 17, he is immediately smitten. Eventually, the attraction becomes mutual. Lale proves himself an operator, at once cagey and courageous: As the Tätowierer, he is granted special privileges and manages to smuggle food to starving prisoners. Through female prisoners who catalog the belongings confiscated from fellow inmates, Lale gains access to jewels, which he trades to a pair of local villagers for chocolate, medicine, and other items. Meanwhile, despite overwhelming odds, Lale and Gita are able to meet privately from time to time and become lovers. In 1944, just ahead of the arrival of Russian troops, Lale and Gita separately leave the concentration camp and experience harrowingly close calls. Suffice it to say they both survive. To her credit, the author doesn’t flinch from describing the depravity of the SS in Auschwitz and the unimaginable suffering of their victims—no gauzy evasions here, as in Boy in the Striped Pajamas. She also manages to raise, if not really explore, some trickier issues—the guilt of those Jews, like the tattooist, who survived by doing the Nazis’ bidding, in a sense betraying their fellow Jews; and the complicity of those non-Jews, like the Slovaks in Lale’s hometown, who failed to come to the aid of their beleaguered countrymen.
The writing is merely serviceable, and one can’t help but wish the author had found a way to present her material as nonfiction. Still, this is a powerful, gut-wrenching tale that is hard to shake off.Pub Date: Sept. 4, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-06-279715-5
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 16, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2018
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