Rating: 
Summary: A Heavenly Read!
Review: Whether Jewish or Christian or agnostic, this book is a very good read. It covers a lot of territory and gives the reader the option of many people the author meets along the way: You can have the answer [a palpable knowledge of God and a sense of connectedness with God]even if you don't have all the answers. You can learn to deal with (and enjoy) the ambiguities and ambivalences that face anyone on the journey of life. And it is refreshing to know that it has always been that way. This book is well worth the time and money!
Rating:
Summary: Tuna, anyone?
Review: If I were a child, I'd read it under the covers with my sturdy Mideast hat and sunglasses. Instead, I just didn't put it down from Ararat to Nebo. It bridges the gap from the Bible to today, beautifully. I'm familiar with both.
Rating: 
Summary: Let this book go!
Review: Like countless other people before him, Bruce Feiler has taken a tour of the Middle East. OK, maybe more extensive than most people, and with excellent guides, but...what's the big deal here? Does Feiler have anything original or interesting to say? After forcing myself to slog through 428 pages of often painful, pretentious, forced, overwrought, self-indulgent, mystifying (as opposed to mystical), uninspiring, boring "prose," I honestly cannot answer in the affirmative to either question. The only thing I can figure is that this book project gave the author a great excuse to take a cool trip, meet lots of interesting people, and to write something on a high-profile topic (the Bible), which could (potentially) sell a lot of copies, and possibly even push Feiler from a relatively obscure author to a relatively well-known one. Based on the early results (number of high-profile book reviews, interviews, etc.), congratulations may be in order to Feiler, but what's in it for the rest of us? Got me!The main problem with this book is not really the subject material per se or even the concept, unoriginal as it is (touring the Middle East with Bible in hand - what a brilliant idea!), but more the author's heavy-handed, obvious, forced, cliché-ridden, self-important, numbingly earnest, and sometimes just ridiculous over-the-top style, combined with screamingly obvious "insights" and brilliant revelations (NOT!) behind every rock and donkey (described in typical Feilerese as "Abraham's transportation!"). All I can say to this is: Oh my God!! Where does this all end? I mean, Feiler breathes the air, and it could be the same air Moses breathed! Feiler walks on the ground - the same ground (perhaps) that some other Biblical figure walked on thousands of years ago! Geez, with all this living history all around them, how does anyone living in the Middle East get through their day (I can just hear it now - 'Oh, honey, I'm heading out to the store down the street which a Biblical patriarch might have walked on to get some proverbial milk and honey! Do we need anything else?'). Meanwhile, on sort of a parallel track to Feiler's tedious, seemingly endless (you may feel like YOU have been lost in the desert for 40 years after reading this book!) wanderings through the Middle East is his incredibly annoying journey of "self-discovery." Apparently, for instance, the fact that Feiler was born and raised in the a "flat, sandy place, with pine trees...temperate winters...swampy summers" (he's talking about the American South, by the way), is critical in some mysterious way (never explained) to his powers of observation and psychological "transformation" he claims to experience in the "exaggerated geography" of the Middle East. Also, apparently, there is some cosmic importance (never explained) to the fact that Feiler has always been a "rigid, controlled person," reliant on such horrible things as "reason, skepticism, logic, learning" (a few weeks in the desert, though, and Feiler apparently has switched over to right-brain thinking - "emotion, intution, trust" -- yeah, whatever!!). Phrases (all left unexplained) like "it's as if the act of mapping the land was forcing me to remap my own internal geography" or "suddenly all the ideas I had been contemplating...came together in a flash" or "without verbalizing it, without even understanding it, I knew that this moment...would always be an anchor for me" or - my personal (least) favorite, repeated several times in slight variations throughout the book -- "I felt a quiet snap of release, like a door clicking open in the middle of the night, beckoning me to a place I'd always been afraid to go." Ee gads, Bruce, what the heck are you talking about?!? So, are there any redeeming qualities to "Walking the Bible?" Well, um, hmmmm...sort of, maybe. The author HAS done a lot of research, and you CAN learn something here. Another definite redeeming quality is Feiler's main companion/guide on this trip: Avner Goren, Israel's chief archaeologist in the Sinai from 1967 to 1982. Goren is a highly likeable character: unforced, warm, natural, boyish, comfortable in his skin, tremendously knowledgeable, wise, and a true native to the desert and the region. Basically, what I wonder is this: why, oh why, couldn't Goren - not Feiler -- have written this book? And also, as Feiler himself asks Goren, "so why did you come on this trip with me?" Good question, and one you may ask yourself if you read this book. Better idea: DON'T read "Walking the Bible." Given the fact that there are many fine books on the Bible, the Middle East, the desert, and journeys of personal discovery (Jim Crace's "Quarantine," for instance) out there, I strongly recommend that you read them instead. As Moses himself might say: "Let Feiler's book go!"
Rating: 
Summary: This Book is a Keeper
Review: This is an ingenius idea for a book and will have a long shelf life; the topic after all is a perennial. There is only one problem which is that the book walks through so much terrain, literal and biblical, that it gets tiring. Perhaps the author should have made this a two-volume collection because then he could have condensed it, made it more punchy, less tiresome. But, he's a good writer and it's worth owning. I recommend reading it slowly, as one would read the Bible, in fact.
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Summary: Chicago Jewish American Princess
Review: This is a wonderful, breathtaking book that anyone who cares at all about the Bible should be reading over and over and over again. It is stylishly written and fantastically reported. It is the best religious book written this century. I especially enjoyed the burning bush commentary. Buy this book!!
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Summary: WOW
Review: I love this book and I came to admire this author tremendously. He's amazing and so is this book, which is adventure set in the Holy Land, which is full of the most exquisite descriptions. Highly recommend you all to buy borrow or somehow read this ASAP. You won't regret walking the bible with Mr. Feiler!
Rating:
Summary: Uplifting and Life Changing
Review: A rare book changes the way you live and experience the world. Walking the Bible does just that and more. It is gracefully written, hugely entertaining, and enormously thoughtful. It is filled with great thrills ... riding camels up Mount Sinai, standing on the very spot where Moses received the Commandments, tasting the salt pillars at Sodom and Gomorrah, crossing the Red Sea in a row boat, beholding the burning bush. Above all, it is a profound, deeply intelligent exploration of the Bible as a vibrant force in our lives and the world. Take the journey -- feel the desert wind, smell the Bedouin feasts, climb inside the great pyramids -- and soon, like the author himself, you will be transformed by the experience, even touched by the Holy Land and God.
Rating:
Summary: Walking the Bible
Review: Bruce Feiler, a nominal Jew, describes his journey to the Holy Land... His stories are fascinating as he and his guide retrace their steps while they explore the world of Old Testament characters and Biblical stories. It tells of Bruce's personal pilgrimage and spiritual awakening.
Rating: 
Summary: Part travelogue, part history book, part pilgrimage
Review: This book really should have been called "Walking the Torah," since it covers the Five Books of Moses and is written from a primarily Jewish perspective. I suppose the marketing people felt that "Bible" would have a wider sales appeal or something. Be that as it may, the most interesting thing about this book was the profound change in attitude that the journey brought to the writer himself. No, he didn't "get religion" and run off become an Orthodox Jew. However, he did gain a new appreciation for the Bible stories themselves, as well as the various people and places that the Bible describes. By his own admission, Bruce Feiler was a secular/Reform Jew who started out simply wanting to connect to the physical places mentioned in the Torah, i.e., to literally walk where his ancestors had walked. At first, Feiler thought of the Bible as a sort of Baedekers travel guide. He spent most of his preparation time reading history, geography, and archaeology. Once he got on the road, however, he soon discovered that the Bible is also "in the people" (his words). Whether they are true believers of many faiths or secularists who see the Bible as literature, the people who actually live in these biblical locations have a deep, almost mystical connection to the land itself -- a bond which goes beyond merely occupying a particular piece of real estate. Feiler grew to have this inner experience, too. As he himself explains, somewhere along the line he stopped thinking of The Book as a travel guide, and started seeing it as The Bible. Feiler's prose style is both creative and highly readable. While some have criticized his incessant junk food metaphors (chocolate mountains, cinnamon hills -- he was getting hungry maybe?), I found them rather amusing. On the one hand, here he is, talking about places mentioned in a Holy Book that is sacred to millions of people. On the other hand, he doesn't pontificate, nor does he idealize. He duly notes the the rampant commercialism at holy sites and, with a wry sense of humor, he comments on many strange justapositions of traditional and modern life. (The fire extinguisher kept near the "true burning bush" in St. Catherine's monastery on Mt. Sinai had me laughing out loud. Was the burning bush was expected to catch on fire?) As with most personal travelogues, there are things in this one that Feiler doesn't get right, even with his famous tour guide, Israeli archaeologist Avner Goren. (Who, by the way, was paid by Feiler to do this project, but so what? Hiring a guide is a time-honored travel practice, and more than one scholar has financed his research with moonlighting.) What I got out of the book was a deeper understanding of how the lay of the land in the Middle East influenced the Bible. This, in turn, opened up many Torah passages in new ways for me.
Rating:
Summary: So much more than a travelogue.
Review:
This book was truly enjoyable, eminently readable, and never boring.
Bruce Feiler set out on this journey as one who held to a rather Cecil B. DeMille-like literal interpretation of everything to be found in the first five books of the Bible (the Pentateuch).
What he discovered, however, is that there is a lot of discrepancy as to the exact locations of the events described in the Bible, and that the real world, especially as presided over by border guards and umpteen officials, is not all that generous in providing him with every shred of archaeological data that he is interested in accumulating. He meets with hostility and suspicion, all along the way.
Ahh, but it is the times that he meets with cooperation, hospitality and likemindedness that make the book interesting. Wonderfully interesting locals, and countless expatriates, who have relocated to the Middle East to be closer to what they percieve as the biblical foundation of their beliefs and cultural heritage..... these people, along with Feiler's Israeli guide, Avner Goren, provide the real insight into the discoveries that Feiler makes.
So many times the reader feels that they are a part of the starlit campfire summations of the day's adventures, times in which the Bible is read aloud and thereafter discussed within sight of the actual areas described in the text.
His [Feiler's] conclusion is that the Bible is "chameleon-like" in that it has the ability to continually reinvent itself.
As U.S.A. Today has summarized: "Bruce Feiler went looking for proof. He learned that proof doesn't matter."
In essence, the author found that a lot of what he had previously thought of as a biblical presentation of literal event and/or historical truth was neither historically verifiable, nor truthfully accurate.
The amazing thing is this, though. The experience of the desert and the meeting of those who live there today, combined to convince the author that a litero-historical interpretation of the Pentateuch is not a necessary pre-requisite to genuine spiritual experience, which he maintains he had, during his journey. The spiritual (and if amazon allowed italics I would italicize the word "spiritual" there) relevance of the Pentateuch is as alive today as it ever was.
It is a profoundly enlightening, rewarding read.
I highly recommend Feiler's book to all readers interested in the subjects of the Middle East and Old Testament biblical interpretation, in general.
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