Sacrifice of Isaac

Rating:
Summary: My 2nd favorite book of all time
Review: Gordon outdoes LeCarre with this literate thriller. The writing in this book is absolutely first class!

Rating:
Summary: Neil Gordon is the next LeCarre or Graham Greene
Review: I bought this novel mostly because of the title. Luckily the title only barely hints at the contents. Though this book does contain what one reviewer called "revisionist history", it isn't meant as a history text. It is meant as a thriller that gives you pause to consider moral issues.

Rating:
Summary: Powerful Tale!
Review: I'm not alone as an American observer of what has been happening in Israel the last three years in feeling uncomfortable with the treatment of Palestinians by Israelis. I hadn't fully appreciated when I opened this book, how directly the author would address this issue as he tells the story of two disaffected sons and their relationship with a father who played a role in the founding of Israel. The discomfort of the sons with how the dream of Israel had turned into something less than noble, matches my own. Since so much of the novel explores the interior world of those who contribute to the unfolding of the story, one ultimately of betrayal, this book demands a certain care on the part of the reader both for the characters and for the larger issues being discussed. Personally, I was mesmerized by the story and the conflicted morality represented. Mr. Gordon weaves together the voices of the characters with grace, even as he richly evokes the circumstances in which they find themselves. The light, the rain, the shadows, the smells came alive for me as I dropped into the world he creates. This is fine writing that draws one into the mystery of what happened and why.

As a footnote, I'll observe that it seems unhelpful to have reviews of different media lumped together. Comparing the experience of listening to an audio version of a book with the experience of turning the pages is, in my estimation impossible. That one review dislikes the inflection of a voice rendering dialogue means absolutely nothing in assessing the quality of this book.

Rating:
Summary: An exciting mystery for 2/3rds of the novel, but then drags.
Review: Neil Gordon has written revisionist history disguised as an exciting mystery. His hidden agenda contains the charge that the motive for bringing in illegal immigrants into Palestine during the war was to provide "canon fodder" for the forthcoming war against the Arabs. Benami is accused of condemning women and children to Hitler's death machine by changing names of exit visas to include only young men presumably able to fight in the Haganah. Moreover, all his references to the Jewish government are hostile. As a novel the story drags during the last 100 pages. The motives of an outsider, Chevejon, are obscure, even though his passion for helping Danni and Luke to uncover the actions of his father, Benami, drive the story. For me, the novel was a mixed bag.

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: 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: 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).