Rating: Summary: Great idea, poor realization Review: It's a real pity that many good ideas in this book got such an inadequate treatment. Very innovative author. Imagine: God is dead, his corpse is about 2 miles long, afloat in the ocean, and Vatican is worried that it will get spoiled! Interesting characters are involved, including an intellectual Jesuit priest, a drunkard sailor, a nun, and many others. Interesting situations are conceived all the time. And yet none of that quite works: the bits and pieces don't fit together. The characters and the situations are not explored well, there is no inner logic to the book, and you never really get involved. Very disappointing.
Rating: Summary: God's Gift to Satire Review: This is one of the most intelligent books I have read in a long time. It's like Twain, but cohesive and uplifitng. Morrow's clever humor satirizes everyone and everything, yet through some feat of magic hurts no one. The only things missing from this incredible novel is the bitterness.
Rating: Summary: Damned, funny Review: James Morrow is going to Hell and I want to go with him. This book is profoundly sacreligeous and achingly funny at the same time. From the practical aspects of hauling a five-mile corpse to the eschatological implications of deophagia, Morrow keeps you thinking and laughing at the same time.
Rating: Summary: Breathtakingly Imaginative Review: A priest and a nun dancing naked in the whirlpool in God's navel - Morrow plays his cards very well. I enjoyed Towing Jehovah more than I liked its sequal, Blameless in Abaddon, but both raise compelling arguments.
Rating: Summary: well, they can't all be diamonds Review: Would you just look at that cover? Now that's just a work of art. Someone put their graffic art degree to good work right there. And the summary? What an idea! The death of God, and a handful of characters from all walks of life learning to deal with it; this book appears to be clarion call for our decade. It's a pity that it's just plain badly written. Each character is mind-numbling one dimensional, to a degree that I wondered if it was intentional. No. No, it's not. The writing style itself is so drab that it becomes a painful experience to get through. Conceptually speaking, the book is excellent. Morrow has the artist's touch and envisions scenes that are both intellectually stimulating as well as aesthetically arousing. However, the characters and diction do the text no good. I wonder if it would have been better as a film. All in all, I was disappointed.
Rating: Summary: Not near as good as Bible Stories For Adults Review: A major disappointment for me. Long-winded but not particularly clever once it gets past the basic premise that God is dead. Bible Stories for Adults was a much better book. Much ado about nothing.
Rating: Summary: One book I recomend to my friends. Review: God is dead. Damn. Now what? What to do with the body? Who is to know about His death? Who gets invited to His funeral? More to the point, what will happen to humanity if word of His death gets out? And an even more interesting question: what did He die from?! Jame Morrow's book, Towing Jehovah is a delight to read. A divine comedy, one could say. It was published in 1994 by Harvest Books, Harcourt Brace & Company, 525 B Street, San Diego, California 92101 USA. ISBN 0-15-600210-8 with 371 pages. The Vatican hires Captian Anthony Van Horne to command a supertanker and tow Jehovah to His final resting place in the Arctic. Along the way he encounters love, mutiny, debauchery, dispondant angels, starvation, millitant (very!) atheists (who don't act anything like atheists,) and, eventually, personal salvation--- a salvation of his own making, and which he pays dearly for. The book is pure satire, with a very baroque world-view. In Morrow's book, Dostoyevsky's claim that "without God, everything is permitted" gets the bit in its teeth and runs wild. The Divine Corpse is two miles long, floating face up in the Atlantic Ocean--- with a serene, rather pleased smile on Its face. It's a long way to the Arctic. Feminists want the body destroyed, since God really was male after all; the atheists want the body destroyed for, well, all the obvious reasons. Van Horne wants to preserve the body and prove to his father that he can get the job done, no matter the problems. One of the things I didn't like about the book was the way the millitant atheists behaved: when presented with news that God actually does (er, did) exist, they do not accept the fact like most atheists would and become theists: instead they decide to sink God's body (all but one atheist, who castigates them for the hypocrites they are), for the good of humanity. Another satirized issue was how people behaved once they knew with certainty that God is not watching them: in the book, some of th! em degenerate into hedonistic beasts, with only sex and alcohol (beer, wine, or gin) on their minds. I cannot conceive this being a valid response to the death of God: moral and ethical behavior is not predicated upon the existance of God or a belief in God, though many theists believe otherwise: I think Morrow understand this--- that's why he is satirizing the belief.
Rating: Summary: A terrific book for the open minded Review: Towing Jehovah was a terrific read, with imaginative twists, humor and thought provoking moments all the way through. No other author I've read writes with the imaginative freedom of James Morrow. I couldn't put this book down, and I haven't stopped thinking about it since I read it. I heartily recommend this book and his others, particularly "This is the way the world ends" (another great book), and the charming "City of truth".
Rating: Summary: Powerful and sure to be misunderstood Review: Here Morrow uses the ultimate literary device to explore all sorts of human behavior, especially human hypocricy. Though, many are certain to interpret the work as an attack on religion, it is nothing so shallow as that. The book is an attack on screwed up human behavior; especially (as previously stated) human hypocricy.
Rating: Summary: Best book read in 1997 Review: This is the best book I read in 1997, hands down. The image of a priest and a menstruating nun dancing naked in God's belly button is one I'll never forget. Read this book if you ever had you hand slapped by an angry nun.
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