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Rating: 
Summary: beautiful little book, who cares about nick cave!
Review: Beautiful little series of books which I was coveting (mea culpa) long before I bought them. It seems awfully unfair for the people below to give the book such a low rating becase 'nick cave' didn't introduce the chapter. Who cares? I enjoyed the format, design and lush language of the book.
Rating: 
Summary: Buy the British version !
Review: For reasons of political and religious correctness the Americans have issued their own versions of these pocket books. The British ones are much better.
Rating: 
Summary: Best and Most Cryptic Gospel w/ great intro
Review: I gather from the other extremely negative reviews that the British edition of this book has an introduction written by Nick Cave. While I'm sure Nick Cave's commentary on Mark is wonderful, so is the introduction by Barry Hannah in the American edition. Barry Hannah, a hilarious and rough-cut Southern novelist whose ability to craft a startling sentence is nearly unsurpassed, is drawn to Mark for reasons likely similar to those that drew Cave (or to those that led Borges to write an astounding story called "The Gospel According to St. Mark"): Mark is the strangest, least comforting of the Gospels, forging a dim and demanding Christianity out of the disquieting words and acts of Jesus with a minimum of explanation. God seems distant and truly ungraspable here; Mark is a million miles from the cloying certitude of the Pauline epistles, or from, say, the more prosaic Matthew. Hannah, a self-described "bad Christian" (again, not so different from Nick Cave, at least by my lights), manages to bring these qualities out beautifully in his introduction. (Hannah also makes "bad Christian" seem like probably the best thing anyone can hope to be.) By all means, get the British edition with Cave's introduction (as I now plan to do), but don't let that keep you from reading Barry Hannah's introduction too.
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