-O.J. (last name omitted to protect anonymity.)
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Cannon worries about the safety of his wife Julie from his worst enemy, his twin brother Johnny.
STARING AT THE LIGHT is a taut psychological thriller that keeps readers on the edge of their seat until the final climax. Cannon and Sarah are deep individuals with pasts that shape their present and future. However, the tale belongs to the sociopath Johnny who finds hurting people to attain his goals as more than an acceptable practice. He takes pleasure from inflicting pain. Frances Fyfield provides her audience with a tight psychological thriller that will gain the author new readers.
Harriet Klausner
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Sometimes the writing could be ponderous and overly academic, but by and large intriguing, informative, and worthwhile.
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Hawthorne, with his Puritan ancestry, was obsessed with the idea of sin and what human beings do to conceal them from the community at large. I guess, in a way, he was concerned with hypocrisy. Hawthorne believed in the Biblical saying that noone could cast the first stone against anyone else because we all have our secret sins. You can tell he has disgusted by the Puritan way of life because it allowed no confession and no reconciliation. Everything not up to their moral par, all their desire and passion, was pushed down into their subconscious where they rotted. Like William Blake says, "Desire not acted upon, breeds a pestilance". The very act of suppressing desire makes it stronger.
In the story "The Birthmark" a woman named Georgiana is the most beautiful woman in the world, except for a birthmark on her cheek in the shape of a red hand. Her husband fixates on this harmless mark, believing it to be the symbol of all that is evil in the world. So he tries to destroy it with all his scientific knowledge and destroys her along with it.
In another story called "Egotism" a man is afflicted with a snake growing out of his bosom. It gives him the ability to see everyone's secret sins. "The Minister's Black Veil", one of his most famous, concerns a community's obsession and ultimate horror of their village priest wearing a black veil. Why is he wearing it they ask? What horrible sin could he have committed to feel ashamed to show his face? All it is a thin veil of lace but all their evil comes out in the face of it. Ironically, the people that have awareness of the evil in themselves manifest physical symbols of them which themselves and others can see. Thereby excluding themselves from hypocrisy because their souls are on public display. "Young Goodman Brown" is also included here and is a nightmarish meeting with the Devil.
Some of the more haunting stories that divert away from the Puritan psyche are "Wakefield" in which a husband one day walks out of his house and never goes back home. He lives close by his wife and passes by her in the street for decades but never approaches her. There is no rhyme or reason for doing this. In "Dr. Heidegger's Experiment" the fountain of youth is presented to some elderly guests with surprising results. "The Ambitious Guest" is a cautionary tale about seizing the day. "The Maypole of Merry-Mount" is a surreal tale of circus entertainers coming to found a colony in the new world and their inevitable confrontation with the Puritans.
The only story in this book that I didn't like was "The Celestial Railroad", strangely enough. It's an allegorical odyssey based on John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress and if you've never read that work, like me, you will not get anything out of it.
Hawthorne is a master of the short story. His strength is the ability to acknowledge that the evil in ourselves is undeniably existant but that only through admitting that existence can it be combatted. Lots of the characters in this collection destroy their lives with this admission. But at least they are true to themselves. If you enjoy this book, seek out The Scarlet Letter and The House of Seven Gables, or vice versa.
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There's always been a rivalry between Fodors and Frommers. In this case, Frommers is pulling ahead.
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This book focuses on the relationship between Judaism, Mandaeism, and Gnosticism as a way of painting a more detailed picture of Hekhalot and Merkavah mysticism. Deutsch uses a "comparative approach" to studying the texts produced by these different groups; the result is that Hekhalot and Merkavah mysticism looks quite syncretistic. Such an approach certainly gives insight, but it also causes a bit of confusion about the nature of Hekhalot and Merkavah mysticism.
Firstly, the benefits of using such an approach is that it paints a picture with wide brush strokes: the reader is likely to get good idea of major religious trends within the world of antiquity. Deutsch has three appendices that deal with Islam, Christianity, and Hermeticism that further illustrate what seems to be a general religious idea - that there are mediators between God and humanity that are above man but nonetheless divine. (Anyone familiar with the Christological controversies in the early centuries of Christianity will find much here that parallels those debates.)
These broad strokes also imply that there was a large amount of syncretism between different religious groups, with ideas from completely different religions permeating each other. Certainly, any historian of religion would agree that this is, indeed, the case: religions do influence each other. The question of "how much do religions influence each other?" is where much of the debate comes in.
This, then, is the downside to Deutsch's approach. Although in the last chapter he surveys much of the prior research on Hekhalot and Merkavah mysticism and notes that the authors of its texts were quite familiar with Rabbinic law and lore, it still seems like Hekhalot and Merkavah mysticism were quite syncretistic. Some influence is certainly possible and even likely, but isn't it also possible - and perhaps far more plausible - that despite these influences, Hekhalot and Merkavah mysticism arose out of streams that were already developed within Judaism such as apocalypticism? Indeed it is, and although Deutsch mentions these, it still seems that in the Hekhalot and Merkavah mysticism owes less to its own religious heritage than it does to other dualistic religions.
This book should be read with other works about Hekhalot and Merkavah mysticism in order for the reader to better understand Deutsch's contribution to the field. Think of this book as being like a chapter: it reads well when read with all the other chapters in a book. Otherwise, it is likely to make little sense.