PositiveLos Angeles Review of BooksMuch of the material here covers familiar ground that’s been trod by many scholars, including Raymond Brown, John Dominic Crossan, and E. P. Sanders. Pagels revisits it all, pondering the miracle accounts and stories of healing ... Books like Pagels’s go a long way.
Michael Ondaatje
RaveThe Los Angeles TimesThe metaphoric weight of a ship journey is impossible to avoid — all of these people are caught between worlds, between old lives and an uncertain future. Today's traveler sees a 12-hour plane flight as an annoying interruption, a dead space best handled with iPods, magazines, movies and a nap. But on a journey like this one, a three-week voyage through three oceans (Indian, Mediterranean, Atlantic) and two seas (Red and Arabian), life is still lived and lessons are still learned — especially by our narrator … This sense of dislocation might be the theme that connects the novel's episodes. I say ‘might’ because, along with being a quiet writer, Ondaatje gently pushes his story along, never insisting on a particular conclusion. Instead, he lets us take what we want from the small moments of wonder on the ship and more threatening ones.
