The seeker should have found something else.
595944
Another poorly made movie adapted from a great book series. Instead of rewriting everything, just deal with what happens in the actual books. The actors are subpar especially Christopher Eccleston whom I really liked as the Doctor in the Doctor Who series. There never really seems to be any real danger for the lead character as he searches for the objects he needs to keep the Dark at bay. Better to keep with the Harry Potter movies than this.
3482563
The right person could have taken this theme and written a really valuable and useful book.  Legault's attempt is a poorly organized mish-mash tainted by his own biases.  Someone on the political left could have written a book with the same flaws and with mirror image biases and blind spots.  And it would have been just as bad.

Legault makes the case for critical thinking and this is good, but then he shows himself to be blinded by his ideology.
2625970
The title of this book does not convey its thrust very well.  I think that "Christianity for the Twenty-first Century" would have been a better choice.  (Note: if you are a bible literalist, this book and this review are not for you.)  In this book Bishop Spong continues his exploration of the meaning of Jesus for modern people.  His message is that you can believe in science and rationalism without having to abandon Christianity.  For example, on p. xii he says, "God and truth cannot be incompatible," and on p. 215, "So theism can die without God dying."

The heading for the first part is "Separating the Human Jesus from the Myth," where "myth" is to be taken in its best definition as a meaningful story that is the basis for a belief system.  He then goes through many chapters separating the human teacher from the christology, rather successfully, I believe.  If there is a weakness to his book, it is that his statement of what is left for a modern belief system could have been made stronger.  I would have liked to have seen more on the idea of acting on the message of Jesus: help for the poor, the sick, and the down-troddened.
4795332
In this book Marianne Williamson picks up where she left off with the 1992 book, "A Return To Love" in which she took "A Course in Mircles", (ACIM) which is a lifelong spiritual path with a message the world needs to hear, and distorted it into just another watered-down, New Age feel good philosophy. Marianne's idea of prayer, as related in "The Gift of Change" is totally foreign to the concepts of the Course. She mixes in the Bible and general spiritual platitudes which any beginner might agree with, but which are not up to the Course's standards. There are other exciting books available, for example by Gary Renard, that don't compromise of the Course's astounding message. Marianne compromises habitually. For example, she says on page 85 of The Gift of Change that we must go "from asking God to change the world to praying that He change us". According to ACIM, only our OWN change of mind can do this, and God, Who is perfect Oneness, does not interact with this dualistic insane world, or else He would be just as crazy as we are. This book does not do justice to the Course and serves to muddy the picture, not clarify it. Move over Marianne; give someone else a chance.
3791499
I wish I hadn't  read the book. The trail seems to have a collection of travelers,some of whom seem like real lowlifes and appear dangerous. I feel for those people who have romantic ideal of the trail .Like many good things in this country,it only takes a few Undesireables to ruin a great natural resource. For A first effort the writing was not too bad.
1265497
The cover has the tag line, "The Sun is smarter than we think."  I think that he is probably right, and in fact that's why I selected this book.  Alas, "Sun of gOd" did not prove the point.

Mr. Sams is self-taught and it shows up in his glib generalizations.

If Mr. Sams had confined himself to proving that the Sun has intelligence, it may have been a better book. Instead he falls into the trap of first discounting those who would not agree with him. These miscreants fall into two groups: mainstream religions and mainstream science.

In his Afterwords, he confides that he took a "crash course" in world religions in preparation for writing the book. Oops. Mr. Sams, please read&nbsp;<a data-hook="product-link-linked" class="a-link-normal" href="/Common-Heart-An-Experience-of-Interreligious-Dialogue/dp/159056099X/ref=cm_cr_arp_d_rvw_txt?ie=UTF8">Common Heart: An Experience of Interreligious Dialogue</a>&nbsp;as part of your world-religion crash course.

One of the strengths of "Sun of gOd" is the series of quotes throughout the chapters. If you have actually studied religion rather than just crammed for the tests, only read the quotes in the religion chapter. If you are Muslim, skip it all together because the Koran quotes are rather mean-spirited and are not balanced out later.

Likewise the science chapters are weak. That Mr. Sams is autodidactic becomes blatant. Again, go with the quotes and move on. He writes "... the Sun is exactly 400 times the diameter of the moon and is also 400 times as faraway from Earth as the moon.  It is this proportion that makes the full moon appear to be the same size as the Sun in the sky, and because of this, when the moon slips exactly across the Sun's face, it perfectly eclipses it." Fine, except that the moon is slowly pulling away from the earth and soon will not perfectly eclipse the Sun.

His understanding of genetics and evolution is hazy, hence irritating. Throughout the book he asks rhetorical questions that I kept answering with contrary evidence. We must not be watching the same shows on the Science and History Channels.

In the Afterwords, he credits all the people that helped proofread his manuscript. And yet none of them caught a simple error in the Notes section. In Note 13 he correctly states that subtracting 273 from degrees Kelvin gives you degrees Centigrade. Then in the example he adds 273 instead of subtracting. Okay, not a big deal, except that it shows he does not quite grasp his subject matter.

His strength seems to be Chaos Theory. And that is what he uses for his basic point that the Sun is a self-aware intelligent being. But given his lack of rigor in the previous chapters, how much can we trust what he tells us here? Is this really a viable argument or more fuzzy thinking? Commentary from actual physicists who have studied Chaos Theory and Solar Science would probably be enlightening.

Other than the chapters on Chaos Theory, I could have written most of the book in the summer of '69, when I was taking Modern Physics during the week and psychedelics on weekends. We're all One, man.
2849373
This book was interesting, but it could have been considerably better.  Laxer does a decent job of describing some aspects of living in a cult run by Frederick Lenz.  A reader understands Lenz's voluble and contradictory behavior.  But what would have made the book far more useful would have been an analysis by Laxer of how so many intelligent, educated, capable people were sucked in by an increasingly deranged charlatan.  If Lenz had appeared to be truly religious, and consistent in his teachings, his following would have made some sense.  But, given his erratic, contradictory, hypocritical, and disturbing words and behavior, it seems almost impossible that he would have attracted, maintained, and increased an intelligent membership.  Some sort of analysis was definitely needed.  I put down the book feeling as if I had learned facts without understanding reasons.
194490
The author is not a jungle explorer by profession and had many doubts about undertaking this trip in search of the "White City" on the coast of Honduras. Every other chapter describes the trip previous explorer, Morde, took to the area 1/2 century earlier. The author had access to most, but not all, of Morde's notebooks for reference. Morde claimed to have found the legendary White City, a large Maya-related but not Maya ruined city hidden in the nastiest of jungles. The author describes his own horrendous trials and tribulations in the jungle in the chapters between details of Morde's trip. Morde claimed to have found the city, but he never revealed it's exact whereabouts. And the author pretty much does the same here in this book.

Most of the text is endless descriptions of the suffering both he and Morde endured as they trekked through sparsely inhabited jungles, plus the author frequently reflects on the family he left behind to fend for themselves and how much he misses them.

The WWII spy aspect is a minor part of Morde's story, one short chapter, which is overblown in the hype for the book. He was a spy, yes, but we learn very little about this aspect of his life/career apart from an attempt to talk one of Hitler's inner circle into turning traitor. The plan fell through.

I admire the author's courage and endurance as he suffered an amazing amount of pain and discomfort while on the jungle trail. I often wondered why he felt the need to follow Morde's trail so completely, however. Why not air drop into a fairly safe area near where Morde indicated the lost city could be located and go from there? I'm sure the author had his reasons. Maybe there was no safe place to drop in.

The trip seemed endless and unbearable to me as a reader, so one can only imagine what it must have been like for the author. But, to be honest, I was bored by most of the book. He does indeed find what appears to be a large, buried ruined stone city finally, and he is fairly sure this is the same ruin Morde found. But we learn nothing about the city apart from an estimate of the layout from another explorer accompanying the author. The group is too exhausted and downtrodden to even do a bit of digging for pottery shards or uncovering what they assume are temple walls buried beneath thick undergrowth. He concludes that some things should stay lost. A nice philosophical idea, but that's not what I was expecting as an end to this story. If what he actually found is a huge unknown ruin, then it should be scientifically excavated. The author seems satisfied to have found what he believes to be a fabulous ruin built by an unknown people, but it appears it is his belief that it should remain hidden indefinitely. A frustrating letdown to this reader. I was often reminded of TV series like "Ghost Hunters" while reading this book. The viewer knows little, if anything, will come of it and nothing will be proven, but the show is now in its 7th season or more. Dangle the carrot and some of us will watch/read but for how long?
3751723
they were going on adventures. it could have being better
2764816
The adventure is enjoyable enough but it is ruined by a lack of focus on the mythology.  Under the guise of religions and gods being the universe showing us different faces of itself, R.S. Belcher throws in everything except the kitchen sink without much discrimination. This became especially clear when we got to a certain bar in the South and a certain character appeared for no reason other than it was a fun idea. So the story seems all over the place, aside from the mission of saving the good guys and wiping out the bad guys.

The most egregious problem was the use of the Knights Templar without any reference to the reason for their existence. In this case, Christianity is the kitchen sink that missed being added. As Belcher tells it, the original knights were 9 guys who just wanted to protect pilgrims out of the goodness of their hearts. Yes. But why did those knights have any goodness in their hearts or use the cross as their symbol? If you're afraid to use the basic mythos behind your story, then why write it? The symbols become empty, the story hollow.

He would do well to study such classics in the horror/fantasy field as The Stand by Stephen King or Good Omens by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman. None of them are Christian, but all build logically from the mythos they choose as the basis for their story.

It's a shame. It was a good idea, just poorly executed.
256169
This would be a better book if it wasn't based on exaggerations of the truth by Mortensen.
4724561
This would have been a better story if the location was some where else instead of in the white house.
2884490
Nick Cook, an aviation  journalist with the prestigious Jane's Aviation  publications, starts the "Hunt for Zero Point" in a spy thriller style, and I read voraciously as the Black Ops World seemed likely to  be exposed. Through page 150, I was sure that by the end of the book, the courageous author, in return for his dogged persistence, would end up in some other line of work,..... but alas not so.
My conclusion is that he started down a dangerous research road with all good intentions, but  somewhere along  the way he had a meeting which is unrecorded in his book. The result was that he was free to investigate any  trail he wanted to, and privately, he could reach any all conclusions he wished to, but if he wanted to  remain an aviation journalist, certain conclusions were not to end up in print. Ironically, he even tells us about his fear and then succumbs to it. His  conclusion therefore on whether beneficial technology  has been  hidden  from the world is only a cautious "maybe" .
The book then qualifies in my view as a commercial effort to recoup  his  research expenses, but in the  end, it is another contribution to misinformation and uncertainty.  By page 200, I had  given up hope of any breakthrough, but I read  to the end  to  confirm the following conclusion:
  Anyone who seeks to add any real validity to the "antigravity" story must conclude that there is sufficient direct  and circumstantial evidence to reveal that the establishment deliberately controls and suppresses such technologies for their present power and  business  interests.... and..... that they do so to the detriment of all the world's peoples. Nick Cook never approaches that level of sincerity.
3911600
There was the makings of a great thriller here, but Meade chose to focus on the wrong characters. I was never interested in the fate of Alex, a cold, hard-bitten killer whose motivations are kept under wraps until a (rather contrived) 11th hour reveal. If the story had been built around Massey's doomed attempt to save Alex from trying to carry out a mission that was inevitably going to lead him to disaster, it would have had a stronger emotional hook. But Meade spends much too much time setting up the mechanics of Alex's mission and not enough on giving us a reason to care about Alex. Since this isn't really alternate history, we know he's not really going to succeed, so it needed to be more about the 'why' and less about 'how.'

Sometimes evocative, but structurally clumsy and with a choppy writing style (and some really contrived setpieces) that keep it from catching fire. A shame.
2928033
More of a personal account of the author's terrible experience as a victim of the Holocaust than a blueprint for living, this popular book is still worth reading.

But if you are in a "search for meaning", you won't find it here. To be fair, Frankl never sets out to answer the question, and in fact proposes that each individual must answer it on their own, for themselves.

Frankl's position seems to be very similar to those of people like Albert Camus: that despite man's incessant search, there is no inherent meaning in life. Frankl differs in his response to this reality from people like Camus in that his solution to the meaninglessness of life is to create meaning on our own, based on our own interests and experiences. For Frankl this meant identifying with human suffering and helping others to find individual meaning. For me at least, it's hardly enough.

Of course there are no easy answers, and that is precisely the point.
1444479
I must confess that, although it is very well-written, I did not much enjoy this second instalment of John DeFilippiss saga which began in The Quest of the Thirteen. The previous book was much more upbeat as we followed the thirteen in their dangerous quest and, of course, it ended on a high, with the fulfilment of the quest and the accession to the throne of Grobius. We got to like and admire most of the thirteen participants and I was eagerly awaiting the next part of their story. Unfortunately this book is concerned with a willing sacrifice (in the Christian tradition) and the downfall of most of Grobiuss twelve followers. Human nature is shown at its most base and self-serving; the message for the earth and humankind is bleak.
3865182
Fitzgerald would have been better served as an evangalist. Perhaps he would not have died from a coronary doubtless related to his depression and alcoholism.

The book is told through the impressions of Nick, a middle class fellow, and revolves around Mr. Gatsby. A man who has replaced the fortitude of spirituality with the frailty of materialism in the hopes of acquiring a woman, Daisy, hardly worth his disdain let alone his life.

The story reflects the deeper truth that rationality and science alone cannot solve our problems and certainly cannot supplant the need for a higher purpose in life or belief in a higher power. To do so leaves a void too often filled with materialism which is a cheap substitute.

This is exemplified in the characters of Tom Daisy and Jordan, souless wraiths who drift aimlessly from place to place  draining the life of everything they touch. Even Tom, who has every conceivable material possession, betrays a longing for days gone by when he was revered as a football hero presumably since this was the only title he ever earned.

Gatsby is a compromised and tragic figure partially redeemed only by his solitary quest to fulfull an adolescent meaningless fantasy. Unlike  "old money" he has a goal however trivial.

The fulfillment of his goal is anti-climactic as with all  objects pursued solely for possession and display. The empheral joy of possession is replaced with the enduring meaninglessness of his life and the eventual ignomy of losing Daisy.

The end of the story shows the illusion of Gatsby, a young wealthy eccentric enigmatic gentleman, dissipated by the reality of Gatsby, a hollow common criminal consumed by the desire for a used mindless woman.

With the contemporary obssession with materialism, in the form of youth, beauty and wealth, to the exclusion of all else the book is more relevant today than it was then.