Rating: 
Summary: A Great Read
Review: This is by far one of the most challenging books I have read, I loved it!, it was a very invigorating read. Most people will find it too difficult a read I suspect.
Rating: 
Summary: Boring! Boring! Boring!
Review: The premise of the book has great potential, especially as we enter the Millennium. The writing style, however, is difficult, and the action crawls along. While I read most books within a week, I found this one to be lugubrious, confusing, and not at all interesting.Most of the characters never truly develop and the author gives each one an attitude of indifference toward what is going on. Needless to say, I was greatly disappointed.
Rating: 
Summary: demanding but rewarding
Review: E.L. Doctorow's latest novel is indeed very cerebral. It poses a great mental challenge to any reader. However, this is eased by the fluidity of his writing. His ruminations on faith, theology, Wittgensteinian philosophy, movies, pop standards, the Holocaust, all contribute to what the author is attempting to do in this novel -- not linear storytelling, but storytelling in all its possible dimensions, which, come to think of it, is the "stuff" of life. The novel, if at all it can be called that, is a powerful demonstration of the irreducibility of life to facts, even to stories! There's not a neatness here!, which may annoy most people.
Rating:
Summary: "GOD" Awful!
Review: This is not one of the worst books I have ever read---it is definately THE worst book I have ever read. Let me rephrase that---this is the worst book I have ever not read. I read at least one book a week. And I read a wide variety of books. While I certainly do not love every book I read, I can read the entire book and, if not totally satisfied, at least feel that the book has some redeeming quality and basis for the author having written the book. However, NEVER have I read barely 30 pages when I knew this book was just awful. Every page is like pulling teeth to get through. It is totally disjointed and so difficult to follow. And don't ask me what it's about---I HAVEN'T THE FAINTEST IDEA..... What a waste of time. I'm only glad that I had the sense to stop reading after 30 pages.
Rating:
Summary: impossible
Review: This is an impossible book to read. It is free flow consciousness reporting of a number of points of view which have no connection, or little. The Critical incident employed to hold the reader's attention is hardly ever addressed in the climax. There is no connecting plot line, but a series of bio's and other stuff. I read a lot, and this is one of the worst stories or works of fiction I have ever read. Don't waste your money.
Rating:
Summary: City of God
Review: I have just completed the first reading of Edgar Laurence Doctorow's latest novel, "City of God". It is not an easy read. It is disjointed. Some of the characters require imaginative guesswork. BUT it is well worth the effort. Anyone who has lived the majority of his or her life in the 20th century will find a "shock of recognition" on many pages. The conflict of science and religion, the newer studies in cosmology and the horrors we have been witness to, all pose questions that defy answers. Some of us may still find solace in our faiths. As a retired physician I found myself frequently facing a dark, starry sky with my fist upraised asking: "WHY?" How could God, an infinite, all-knowing, loving, immortal being allow so much hatred, so much misery, some of which occurred with the concurrence of organized religion to take place? The pat answers learned from my faith were not sustaining and have left a void. The author addressed many of these conundrums and stimulates the reader to begin or, in my own case, to continue to puzzle over these age old problems. He touches on the next centuries ecological catastrophies, which if dealt with with past solutions will surely lead to our extinction. His evolutionary concept of an evolving infinite being is intriguing. The novel is thought provoking, uncomfortable but thoroughly engaging. I will re-read it and would highly recommend it to all thoughtful yet perplexed readers.
Rating:
Summary: Superb
Review: An astonishingly rich reading experience. The most incredibly fascinating and challenging novel in some time, certainly the finest to date of 2000. Doctorow is an American treasure and proves once again that he his a remarkable literary talent.
Rating:
Summary: The artist succumbs . . .
Review: City of God shows Doctorow at his worst, succumbing to the self-love that is always tragic. Doctorow is more interested in what he knows, what he thinks he knows, and how good he thinks he can write that he failed to see that what he was writing was not very good. If you're a Doctorow scholar, obviously you need this book. Otherwise, go buy something else. Like Twain's cynical and mediocre Mysterious Stranger, no one will be reading City of God in 30 years.
Rating: 
Summary: E. L. Doctorow, "City of God"
Review: In "City of God," E. L. Doctorow uses a number of late-modernist/early-postmodernist techniques to sketch (rather than tell) a story centered on the growing intimacy between Thomas Pemberton, a disaffected Episcopal priest, and Sarah Blumenthal, a progressive rabbi. The narrative is made up of pieces assembled by a third character, Everett, a novelist friend of Pemberton's who is writing a book about the priest. Among sections presented from Pemberton's point of view are others told by Sarah's father (who as a boy had been a victim of Nazi persecution), Albert Einstein, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Frank Sinatra; meditations on cosmology and the movies; and a series of free-verse "jazz" riffs inspired by popular songs. Doctorow has taken a similar experimental approach before, most memorably in the novel "Loon Lake" (1980), but here his methods seem to take precedence over the story rather than elucidate it. Occasional nods are made to the societal anxiety brought on by the end of the millennium, but for another American novelist to say yet again that traditional novels are poor vehicles for communicating the dislocations of our violent century feels, in this case, schematic and secondhand. The book seems to be about the importance of love in a time when religious faith is perceived as insufficient to answer the questions about humanity and the universe that have occupied our century's greatest minds, but it is handicapped by Doctorow's decision to render this powerful theme only in arid fragments.
Rating:
Summary: Writing about the holocaust and other things
Review: E.L. Doctorow does a clever thing. He has a character who is the author writing this book. One organizing idea of the book is New York City. Another is ecumenical interest in God. The author uses time shifting and place shifting. This is an example of the use of the new historicism. Doctorow always has written with a sense of history. The city's grid was laid out in the 1840's. Ben and Ruth had two sons, Ronald and Everett. Ben was a naval officer, a naval communications observer in World War I. Ronald served in World War II. He had to parachute from his plane and was discovered by a French peasant. Ruth lived to age ninety five, exceeding the lifetime of her husband by some thirty seven years. She always said she would not give her opinion unless asked to do so. Sarah Blumenthal and Joshua Gruen are rabbis at the Synagogue of Evolutionary Judaism. The synagogue is the site of the placement of a cross stolen from Saint Timothy's, an Anglican Church in the East Village. Thomas Pemberton, or Pem, meets Sarah and Josh when the locus of the cross is determined. Pem, in the course of the book, undergoes the closing of Saint Timothy's and his own self-designated reassignment to a hospice, the finding of a holocaust archive from Vilnius pertaining to the experience of Sarah's father following the death of Josh from a beating in Lithuania, the start of his studies to convert to Judaism, and his marriage to Sarah. The author has occasion to interact with his own characters Pem and Sarah at the synagogue. Prior to Pem's beginning the conversion studies and prior to his marriage to Sarah, the author had commenced to study Pem in order to write an account of his experiences in his search for God. The book is multi-layered, intelligent, delightful.
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