The end of the world never read so well.
A Christian novelist’s taut, exciting and fictional rendering of the march toward Armageddon.
Set two decades in the future, The 6th Seal follows three righteous rebels–Father Gudino, Maggie and Jason–as they fight against a frightening new world order led by a charismatic anti-Christ. The book recalls another recent piece of apocalypto-fiction: Tim Lahaye and Jerry Jenkins’s Left Behind. Both works endeavor to depict the end of the world in modern narrative and both take as their template the biblical book of Revelation. Despite its jaw-dropping sales numbers, though, Left Behind isn’t very good–by turns didactic and preachy, the series never transcends its poorly hidden proselytism. Not so with Seal. Emanuel’s book is similarly dogmatic–and hence probably appeals most to Christian conservatives–but he holds his religious cards closer to his chest and lets the story unfold without unnecessary sermonizing. Further, Emanuel’s book ironically benefits from his background as a military man. The end of the world is war, and war is hell. Thus the author–a former paratrooper–is able to infuse the military movements with a genuine energy that ratchets up the intensity of the book’s frequent action sequences. But that’s not all. Emanuel fancies himself an amateur hermeneute, and Seal purports to expound an “alternative perspective on the Biblical apocalyptic doctrine” which Emanuel calls “the Harvest.” In brief, many fundamentalist Christians believe that the faithful will be whisked away before the end of days and spared the violence of the last times, in the infamous “Rapture.” Emanuel’s Harvest, by contrast, keeps the faithful on earth through the first movements of the Revelation story, forcing them to endure some of that painful progress. Both theories are extremely speculative, though, and Emanuel’s claim is naïve, at least as biblical exegesis. However, it makes great fodder for his fiction.
The end of the world never read so well.Pub Date: Feb. 2, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-4392-1277-6
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
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