Rating: 
Summary: A Favorite!
Review: Neil Gordon's "Sacrifice of Isaac" is a compelling story which had me bound to the text until I finished it. In fact I had taken Gordon's novel along with me on the train to read while traveling to the Indiana Dunes from Chicago and once there found myself sitting on my grandmother's headstone in the Furnessville Cemetery inorder to finish reading a riveting chapter. A suspenseful narration that on occassion might make a reader stop to think about the world as we too often see it or have been taught how to preceive our own cultural environments juxtaposed to so many others.The book discussion group of Temple Israel in Miller Beach (Gary, Indiana) also chose Gordon's first novel as their summer reading selection, and I've sent copies of "The Sacrifice of Isaac" now available in paperback to friends, and they have all become fans of Neil Gordon's writing too.
Rating: 
Summary: No Carravagio
Review: RE: AUDIO CASSETTE VERSION. I don't demand Clancy action from a "LeCarre thriller" but this novel is peopled with soul-less characters waiting...and waiting.... Each seems to have been allocated one bold action then, having exhausted the quota, spends the remainer of the story speaking in trailing-off sentences. After slogging through all this slow motion until you want to slap them silly, the sins-of-the-fathers dark secret payoff has long since lost any impact. The two readers of the audio version only add to the tedium with the female contributing an unconvincing German accent.
Rating:
Summary: No Carravagio
Review: RE: AUDIO CASSETTE VERSION. I don't demand Clancy action from a "LeCarre thriller" but this novel is peopled with soul-less characters waiting...and waiting.... Each seems to have been allocated one bold action then, having exhausted the quota, spends the remainer of the story speaking in trailing-off sentences. After slogging through all this slow motion until you want to slap them silly, the sins-of-the-fathers dark secret payoff has long since lost any impact. The two readers of the audio version only add to the tedium with the female contributing an unconvincing German accent.
Rating:
Summary: No Carravagio
Review: RE: AUDIO CASSETTE VERSION. I don't demand Clancy action from a "LeCarre thriller" but this novel is peopled with soul-less characters waiting...and waiting.... Each seems to have been allocated one bold action then, having exhausted the quota, spends the remainer of the story speaking in trailing-off sentences. After slogging through all this slow motion until you want to slap them silly, the sins-of-the-fathers dark secret payoff has long since lost any impact. The two readers of the audio version only add to the tedium with the female contributing an unconvincing German accent.
Rating:
Summary: Not just another thriller, but so much more.
Review: Running thru the Vegas airport to catch the last plane home. Quick stop at the bookstore looking for something to keep me interested during the wee hours when everyone else's reading light goes out and I just cannot sleep.
It looks like a decent Middle East thriller, and someone on cover says reminds them of LeCarre.
First few pages totally taken in --- fathers and sons and the the thick confused politics of Israel, which is usually enough to keep me reading...but then plunging on into Paris and a mystically binding love story...and further in, to the mystery of the Holocaust.
What had been just a quick thriller becomes a close lyrical study of the moral and personal complexities of growing up in Israel, to serve in an army that feels as though it is doing what the army your fathers fought against did in WWII. Moral passion, thick ambiguities, little resolved but all the questions of history and personal politics properly asked and unanswered.
Rating:
Summary: A mystery-thriller with a larger purpose
Review: This book is much more than a mystery-thriller, even though it satisfies completely on that level. Gordon uses the thriller form to probe the history of modern Isreal and the political and personal choices that have been made by the Jewish people since World War II. While the Characters are fictional, the historical issues are real, and Gordon's insights and ability to explore both sides of a political situation are superb. His use of classic elements of the suspense genre is a brilliant method for probing the larger historical drama. His extended metaphor from the title, which is set in a religious and art history context, is very powerful. This is one of the few times I have made a point to remember a first author's name, so that I would be aware if he wrote another book. I look forward to reading Gordon's second book, which has just been released (September 1998).
Rating:
Summary: A mystery-thriller with a larger purpose
Review: This book is much more than a mystery-thriller, even though it satisfies completely on that level. Gordon uses the thriller form to probe the history of modern Isreal and the political and personal choices that have been made by the Jewish people since World War II. While the Characters are fictional, the historical issues are real, and Gordon's insights and ability to explore both sides of a political situation are superb. His use of classic elements of the suspense genre is a brilliant method for probing the larger historical drama. His extended metaphor from the title, which is set in a religious and art history context, is very powerful. This is one of the few times I have made a point to remember a first author's name, so that I would be aware if he wrote another book. I look forward to reading Gordon's second book, which has just been released (September 1998).
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