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Summary: Left Behind - The Vanishings
Review: "Left Behind - The Vanishings," is a great Christian book for all kids and teenagers. The book allows the reader to understand what will happen in the future to all Christians, through the lives of Lionel, Vicki, Ryan, and Judd. The kids all deal with everyday problems that people all over the world encouter all of the time. "The Vanishings" will touch the lives of everyone who reads it, including children who are not very familiar with the Bible. While the characters in "The Vanishings" may not relate to some people in life, they still live the lives of many young people. "The Vanishings" shows kids what will come in life, and how to be able to be taken to Heaven when Christ returns. If you have not purchased "Left Behind - The Vanishings," then I strongly encourage you to do so.
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Summary: An attempt to scare young people
Review: "The Vanishings," by Jerry B. Jenkins and Tim LaHaye, is the first in the authors' "Left Behind: The Kids" series of young adult novels. This book is rooted in fundamentalist Christian theology, and will probably read like a strange fantasy to those who don't share that particular belief system. This installment in the series follows a group of teenagers immediately before and after the mysterious disappearance of all Christians from the earth.The main purpose of this books seems to be to scare impressionable young people into converting to religious fundamentalism. Throughout the book, characters worry about being damned to hell if they don't convert. One character is even threatened by her sister, who has already converted: "'You'd better do it too, Vicki. Tou don't want to go to hell.'" The book also spouts several popular fundamentalist mantras, such as the popular (and, according to my dictionary, false) claim that "'Christianity is not a religion.'" "The Vanishings" contains a few interesting touches, but overall it's a rather bland book. The characters are cardboard stereotypes. Overall, the book reminded me of those absurd Jack Chick cartoon tracts that I have come across over the years. Still, the book is a pretty good expose of the fundamentalist mindset for those who are curious about this particular religious culture.
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Summary: People all over the world have vanishe, find out what happed
Review: (...)I have read the first 6 books of this seirs. It talks about what it will be like when God comes back and takes his church (True belivers) up to heaven with him. I have always belivede in christ, I have read the book of Revulitin, but this story is about for reagular kids who are left behind. They havde tunes of great adventures. As soon as you pick the book up it will most likely be hard to get you away from it. Judd, Vicky, Linol, and Ryan are all left behind. They run into eachother at a chruch and become belivers. I am going to start telling about the first 6 books at once so don't expect to read it all in one book. THey find out that sombody close to lionle is framed to be dead and then sombody kills that person. There pastor thinks he know who the anicrist ( the person who say they are crist and fools a whole lot of people) is and the kids do not want to belive it becuse he looks like a nice guy, but when they hear a story of the guy who was at a metting with him, they belive it one hundred percent. The school opens up again and Judd and Viky go to a school wich had been changed to that name of who they belive is the anticrist. They are not aloud to talk about Jesus or God at school or bring Bibles or anything realet to it. THe kids want to share about God, so with two other kids help they make a newepaper for the high school. The paper was against school ruel so people came and checked every body out to find out who made it. The kids get away with it and go inside the school at night to give them out in another way. All of the kids get away, but the next day some adults go to one of the kids and told them to say who they was working with. This seirs is unbelivably good even if you do not belive in crist ( wich you might after you read the books) becuse it has so much action and discription in it. If you do not by it you should at least check it out form the libary. I only wish iI could tell you evry little detail of the book writhgt now but I can't. The lasts thing I am going to say is PLEAS READ THIS SERIES BECAUSE IF YOU DON'T YOU WILL BE MISSING OUT!!!
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Summary: Manipulation
Review: As far as I can see, the sole purpose of this series is to scare prepubescent children into being Christian. The only message I saw was of the be-completely-submissive-and-unquestioning-or-you-will-end-up-like-these-guys type. I also noticed that it never mentioned that only a third of the world is Christian, and that only a fraction of those are especially committed to their faith, so the Rapture would technically only apply to about a quarter-billion people. So. What did I learn? Some Christians aren't afraid to manipulate children to bring them around to their way of thinking. Sometimes the world is very depressing. This would be okay if it weren't based on just the fundamentalist Christian viewpoint that if you aren't Christian you are doomed. (Because if those guys are right, Ghandi went to Hell.) They could have said that only the pure of heart made it or something like that. But no, it's set up so if you're a Zen Bhuddist, you are evil. It rather pissed me off.
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Summary: Left Behond The Vanishings
Review: I have always enjoyed the adult series of Left Behind books. The kids books are just as good. The kids interact with the characters from the adult series, experience the same events, etc. However, since the main characters are teens, these books can appeal to younger readers. So far, the stories haven't had the ups and downs that the adult series has had. The adult series has books that are a lot more boring than others. The kids series seems to be good in every book. These are not for really young kids, but would be appropriate for young teens. I enjoy them and I am an adult.
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Summary: Christ has come in Left Behind the Kids:The Vanishings
Review: I thought that this book seemed very imaginative, when the truth is that it really will happen one day. The whole series is about four kids who get left behind when the Rapture happens. The Rapture is when Christ comes down and takes the Christians up to heaven with him. These four kids, Judd, Vicki, Lionel, and Ryan, are in the same town, so they meet when they go to their church after waking up to empty homes. Vicki, Judd, and Lionel become Christians first; Ryan was hesitant because of the pain of losing his parents, his mother in a car accident and his father in a plane accident. The others kids' parents went up to heaven. This book was hard to get into, but when you are a way into the middle, you won't want to put it down. This book captivated me. I was dying to read the sequel. This book made me want to become a REAL Christian for fear of this happening to me. If you buy this book, Left Behind the Kids: the Vanishings, I suggest that you buy them in the complete set before you go crazy looking for the rest in the series. I don't know what will happen by the end of the series, but why don't you read along, and we can find out together in these books.
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Summary: It's so bad, it's good
Review: If you've been searching for the literary equivalent of "Plan 9 from Outer Space" or "Robot Monster," look no further. For all the uproar about manipulating children with fear-based propaganda, I find it hard to picture even the most gullible children being convinced by this piece of junk. First of all, the basic premise goes against one of Christianity's core ideas. Namely, that we all have a soul and our soul departs our bodies when we die, to go either to heaven or hell. (Or just to heaven, in some congregations.) So if all the people who are Raptured are taken to heaven, and if heaven is a place for SOULS, why are their bodies taken too? Why are their souls not simply sucked out, leaving empty corpses? In the book, the author specifically mentions a group of pallbearers who disappeared, only to drop the coffin which popped open to reveal the dead body gone too. This raises many questions. First, if the dead man was already in heaven, why was his body Raptured? Second, if this happens to every dead Christian going all the way back to the time of Christ, do the remains of THEIR bodies get Raptured too? If they're already almost completely decomposed, what good is a pile of old bones and soil?
Third, if you need your physical body in heaven (which, once again, goes against basic Christian beliefs, not to mention common sense) wouldn't you also need your hearing aid and contact lenses? (See page 111.) But despite its ridiculous premise, "The Vanishings" manages to also be horribly written. The entire book reads like a synopsis of itself - and it's just short enough to be just that. Jenkins skids through the plot with tires squealing, skipping over such unnecessary details as character development, dialogue, and description. I got whiplash just reading it. But to be fair, it was very entertaining whiplash. Possibly the funniest element of this book is, it gets quite boring around the climax. Jenkins, despite having written over 100 books, commits a common first-time-author mistake: explaining the back story at the very beginning of the book. He methodically tells the history of each character one by one, plodding through stereotypes of trailer park residents and teenagers alike. But this actually turns out to be the most entertaining part of the book, if only for inadvertently hilarious lines like, "Loving Jesus is for little old ladies!" Each character, one by one, is begged by a Christian family member or friend - whose conversion has swept away all their faults and made them kind and gentle - to accept Jesus. And each character, one by one, comes up with his or her own deep, philosophical argument against Christianity, namely, "Jesus is for losers! You're stupid!" Or, my personal favorite, "Oh yuck! All that boring religious stuff!" When the Rapture actually happens, the book stops being funny and starts being frustrating and boring. What should be the most exciting part is told in the past-tense. Nearly everyone discovers what happened the morning after, or from TV news. Even when the author actually gives himself a chance to describe to the reader what the Rapture looks like, he fails. The "newsman" (also known as an anchorman, to those who bother to do their research) _describes the very clip he is showing_! Isn't that the author's job? Later on, when the kids are shown a video made by a minister explaining the Rapture, Jenkins doesn't even bother to tell you what the video says - only that it clears everything up and convinces the characters that Christianity is the truth. Well, as long as it does nothing more than _change the character's lives_, there's no reason to tell us what it _said_ or anything... Read this book if you like to laugh at shoddy theology and even shoddier writing. Or read it because you genuinely believe the Rapture will happen, taking the word of two 19th century literalists over 1,900 years of Christian theology. If you are of the latter group, I have a message for you: as the bumper sticker says, come the Rapture, can I have your car?
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Summary: Left Behind: A Good Read For All Kids
Review: It seems you've misread your Bible, Liquid Peppermint. The Bible never states that we will die when the Rapture happens (see Genesis 5:21-24 and Hebrews 11:5 for an account of Enoch being Raptured body and soul). In fact it says that the people who are alive on the earth when the Rapture happens will not have to go through death (1 Thessalonians 4:15-18). When Jesus died on the cross and rose again, His body and soul both rose from the grave and were taken up into Heaven (Luke 24:50-53). It states specifically that our soul and body will both be taken up into Heaven (where our perishable bodies will be transformed into immortal bodies - 1 Corinthians 15:50-57) when the Rapture occurs, including people who have long been dead since the beginning of time (see Ezekiel 37:1-10 for proof that God can do this and has done it in the past). To answer your question about hearing aides and contact lenses, Scripture states that we will be made perfect like Jesus in Heaven - there will be no handicaps, however large or small (Philippians 3:20-21).
If you truly are inquisitive about Scripture, I suggest you read it and ask the Lord God to reveal His truths to you. God Bless!
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Summary: Tami's Review
Review: Setting: Mount Prospect, Illinois at the time of the first coming of Jesus Christ (a.k.a. the rapture)
Characters: Judd, the runaway; Vicki, the rebel; Lionel, the liar; Ryan, the skeptic; Bruce Barnes,
junior pastor of New Hope Church; and Uncle Andre, Lionel's uncle.
Summary- Judd, Vicki, Lionel, and Ryan are introduced as teenagers who have had opportunities to accept Christ as Savior but choose not to for various reasons. Christ comes back and takes their parents and families, except for Ryan. His parents are killed in the accidents that happen when people mysteriously disappear, leaving only their clothing, jewelry, and glasses behind. The four teenagers lives become intertwined with many of the events that happen as a result of these disappearances. The children end up at the New Hope Church where they see a video left by the previous pastor shown by the junior pastor who was also left behind. They are told what happened and given the chance to accept Christ now. They are given the hope that it is not too late to have a home in heaven when they die. The book ends with the invitation and the following books, for it is a series, give insight into who accepts or rejects Jesus Christ. These events try to follow the prophecies found in the book of Revelation in the Bible.
Author Evaluation- It is very suspenseful but the awfulness of the concept causes concern
among many librarians. It is well written although sometimes pedantic and preachy.
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Summary: The Vanishing
Review: The Vanishing by Jerry B. Jenkins is about people vanishing because the world is about to end. The main characters are Judd Thompson Jr.,Vicki Bryne,Lionel Washington, and Ryan Daley. The problem was that their family members and friends were vanishing right out of their clothes.My favorite character was Judd Thompson Jr.because he was brave enough to run away to London,England. I could relate to many of the characters in the story because I am also Christan.My family and I believe in the world ending someday.I have done some of the things that the characters have done in the story. I have also lied about doing my homework. I had tons of homework,but I wanted to go outside and play basketball.So I just told my mom that I was finished. I like the book. It was exciting and breathtaking. I didn't know what was going to hapen next.My favorite part of the book was the ending. It made want to read the next Left Behind book series. The part I didn't like was the first part of the book because I couln't get into it. I was too lazy to read. I wouldn't change or take anything out of the story because it was a good book. I would recommend this book to anyone who believes in the world ending. A Christian would like this book. I think this is a great book for 12-15 year olds.
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