StartGroepenDiscussieMeerTijdgeest
Doorzoek de site
Onze site gebruikt cookies om diensten te leveren, prestaties te verbeteren, voor analyse en (indien je niet ingelogd bent) voor advertenties. Door LibraryThing te gebruiken erken je dat je onze Servicevoorwaarden en Privacybeleid gelezen en begrepen hebt. Je gebruik van de site en diensten is onderhevig aan dit beleid en deze voorwaarden.

Resultaten uit Google Boeken

Klik op een omslag om naar Google Boeken te gaan.

Bezig met laden...

Issa: The Greatest Story Never Told

door Lois Drake

LedenBesprekingenPopulariteitGemiddelde beoordelingDiscussies
1551,361,013 (2.7)Geen
The Bible explicitly records the life of Jesus, with one exception - his life between the ages of 13 and 30. Yet, ancient Buddhist scripture records the life of Saint Issa, which astoundingly parallels the life of Jesus of Nazareth. This book tells the story of Jesus' life during the missing years, and his journey through Asia.… (meer)
Geen
Bezig met laden...

Meld je aan bij LibraryThing om erachter te komen of je dit boek goed zult vinden.

Op dit moment geen Discussie gesprekken over dit boek.

Toon 5 van 5
Deze bespreking was geschreven voorLibraryThing lid Weggevers.
An interesting fictional account which tries to fill in the "missing" years in the story of the life of Jesus (Issa). The book traces the journey of Issa as he leaves his family and travels in the East. The story is told in a realist manner and shows how his interactions during his travels influenced his education and development.
  papyri | Jan 8, 2010 |
Deze bespreking was geschreven voorLibraryThing lid Weggevers.
I love reading Biblical Fiction, and was thrilled to receive a copy of Issa. I had a very hard time trying to get into the book, and I thought perhaps I was having a hard time because of my Christian beliefs. After reading the other reviews on the book I realize this wasn't the case at all.

Honestly, if this hadn't been a book that I had promised a review on, I wouldn't have finished it.

That old saying is so true when it comes to a difficult read, or one that you're struggling with. "So many books..so little time"
Something like that.

I didn't enjoy this book at all, which was disappointing, as I was hoping to find a new author to love. ( )
  emeraldessence | Dec 31, 2009 |
Deze bespreking was geschreven voorLibraryThing lid Weggevers.
"The greatest story never told" remains untold.

This is less a story about the lost years of Jesus than it is an attempt to imply the one true god can be reached via myriad of paths/religions and Christian teachings are merely a combination of Buddhist and Hindu teachings retold without an exact definition of Buddhism or Hinduism being applied. The important lessons learned from these supporting religions by Issa were left to the reader's imagination and interpretation, which leaves room for gross misinterpretation by those readers who have little or no knowledge of these religions or the civilizations from which they sprang.

Detailed imagery was sporadic. Writing style seemed a bit inconsistent. The reader's ability to develop opinion for characters is taken away, as Drake tells you exactly what to think. The book struggles abruptly for an ending. Overall, the book seemed more like a poorly researched outline for a much larger and more concise novel. ( )
1 stem Sovranty | Dec 20, 2009 |
Deze bespreking was geschreven voorLibraryThing lid Weggevers.
Loved this book!!! I'm usually leery about biblical fiction, and the "maybe this happened" type books, but this is wonderfully done. No preaching, no wild suppositions. Ms. Drake takes a legendary tale from Ladakh and weaves her story around it.

The story of Jesus (Issa) during his "missing" years is told in a very realistic manner, not hard to take in, unless you are of a narrow-minded, fixed viewpoint. The reader journeys with Issa in his travels and learning, his friendships and seperation from his family.

Despite knowing "the rest of the story," I was left wanting the story to continue, I didn't want Ms. Drake's rendition of the story to end. I hope that she writes more like this, I will definitely keep an eye out for it. I definitely felt a spiritual connection through this book.

I also enjoyed being sent to the computer looking up different facts from the book, like the history of the Kushan's and such. Made me wish that the present region would reclaim the unity and glory of it's past, especially after all the tragedy and turmoil that has occured in recent years. I hope that the people can remember it's culture and dignity they had prior to the Taliban and other oppressive regimes and share with the rest of the world the richness and beauty of their forgotten culture. ( )
  AnamCara1965 | Nov 15, 2009 |
Deze bespreking was geschreven voorLibraryThing lid Weggevers.
ISSA is a mediocre book of extremely uneven writing quality and painfully tenuous grounding in either history or the alternate religious backgrounds it purports to draw from. ISSA is meant to be a fictionalized re-imagining of Jesus' youth and training as framed by the scenario presented in Elizabeth Clare Prophet's The Lost Years of Jesus: Documentary Evidence of Jesus' 17-Year Journey to the East. As the basic premise goes, Jesus was taken under the wing of his uncle, Joseph of Arimathea, a wealthy and influential merchant, who brought Jesus to India after Jesus received a message from God that he was meant to seek a powerful teacher far to the East. Along the way Jesus has run-ins with various tagalongs, holy men of various levels of moral clarity, corrupt local warlords, and eventually follows in the steps of the Buddha to achieve enlightenment of a sort.

If ever there were a right way to write fanfiction about Jesus' life, this book emphatically is not it. The story reads like a poorly plotted road movie with Jesus undergoing a series of extremely loosely organized episodes of him gaining and losing companions, observing things he doesn't like about society, and supposedly gaining in wisdom through the very vaguely defined act of "studying the vedas".

Unfortunately, Drake seems to be violently opposed to the tenets of writing which dictate that an author ought to "show" rather than "tell", and spends relatively little of the book allowing her characters and settings to speak for themselves. In fact, almost the entire first five chapters are devoted to a virtually unending stream of stilted flashbacks and strange introspective interludes as Drake appears to think that these narrative jumps provide a stronger backgrounding to her characters than describing and explaining their actions and interactions in the present tense. Some of these interludes are relevant to the plot, and some are not, but overall they detract much more from the continuity of the story progression than they add in either background details or mood enhancement. Strangely, many of them are much more detailed and atmospheric than the main plot (which is not saying much), which makes for an odd juxtaposition.

By chapter six, Drake appears to have decided her characters are well-established enough for her to leave off with the flashbacks, and her writing does become correspondingly stronger at this point. It remains relatively stronger through to the last few chapters of the book when Drake's tendency to tell rather than show comes back in full force as she appears to struggle with how to tie up the loose threads of her ending; she explains, for example, that her character Zhu Ling "Was outgoing and humorous. His words were measured and wise", but does not allow Zhu Ling more than a few sentences in edgewise throughout nearly the entire book, and certainly very few of even those several sentences display any significant wit or wisdom. Given that the book is only 15 chapters long, Drake is not left with a very high percentage of strongly written text in this book.

As to the tenuous grounding is history and religious philosophy, Drake's "research" for this book appears to be cursory at best, and complete fiction at worst. Throughout the novel her characters (and I don't refer to Jesus here, as some would argue this was part of his appeal) display feminist and anti-classist attitudes that seem designed to appeal to modern readers and give certain characters a whiff of moral superiority over the Eastern characters, but are extremely inappropriate to both the time and the culture and only harm any bid at realism ISSA makes. Likewise other aspects of the history Drake tries to include in her narrative are not consistent with the actual historical record such as the lineage of Kushan kings (which is puzzling, given that there is record of other kings whose rule actually coincided with the chronology of Jesus' life that Drake could have used instead), and Drake's shocking assertion that trade ships from "The far away northern islands", implying either Britain or perhaps Iceland and Greenland, were able to (and did) sail as far as India in 14 A.D., which is an utterly preposterous idea regardless of which set of islands she meant. Also, her descriptions of India are far more vivid than anything mentioned in previous chapters, especially when discussing the poverty, injustice, and violence, but it's strange that the reason for this sudden burst of descriptive detail is the fact that Jesus is deeply disturbed by these negative aspects of India. It seems incongruous that Jesus would consider India so shockingly more violent than his homeland with Herod slaughtering thousands of male infants and the casual brutality of the Romans so trumped up. Drake appears to recognize that this comparison doesn't make a lot of sense and even mentions that Jesus also realized how bad things were back home in Palestine, and tries to dismiss the weakness of her comparison with the cop-out excuse that India was "more chaotic", which is why Jesus found it worse than home.

Likewise, throughout her novel Drake takes an extremely tokenistic approach to Asiatic cultures, mixing and matching with contextless abandon, with Oms sprinkled liberally throughout, references to acupuncture and the supposedly zealous reverence of the Chinese for Kwan Yin tossed in once in a while, and Zhu Li, the Kushan king's apparent wise physician/herbalist cum kung-fu bodyguard (talk about stereotypes and racial tropes), being described as wearing a hairstyle with a suspicious resemblance to the queue, a hairstyle not introduced to China until the 17th century. Additionally, despite the premise that this book is supposed to be focused on the influences of Buddhist and Hindu teachings on those of Jesus, almost nothing is said about the specifics of either Buddhist or Hindu philosophy. For the most part, discussion of these philosophies is limited to vague references to certain characters "studying the vedas" or "learning Buddhist principles", and several recountings of Siddhartha Gautama's abandonment of his wealthy life for one of poverty and spiritual reflection. The central tenets of Buddhism (The Eightfold Path and the Four Noble Truths) are stated only once towards the end of the book and not elaborated on. Drake instead skips directly to Jesus "re-interpreting them" to wording that is supposedly more readily comprehensible to unlearned people, which is another nonsensical comparison given the simplicity and explicitness of the wording she uses for the Buddhist tenets and the comparative lack of clarity (and obvious Biblical derivation) of the wording she has Jesus use. My impression from that exchange was that Drake found it inconvenient that the Buddhist tenets and Biblical rules she'd included were not direct analogues as she'd tried to imply all along, and since she finally felt obligated to include a specific accounting of the Eightfold Path and Four Noble Truths, wanted to gloss over this fact to avoid any awkwardness--with the effect of drawing attention to it instead. Hinduism is barely touched on, with only one mention of Brahma as a parallel for Yahweh, with Drake's very bare understanding of how the Hindu pantheon is structured revealed in her belabored comparison.

If you are approaching this book as a Westerner with a lack of background education bordering on willful ignorance of Eastern religions or the history of the Near East or Asia, you might find this book interesting. If you have any more diverse background at all than that, you will likely find this book frustrating and poorly written, and possibly offensive in its ham-handed conflation of Asian cultures and philosophies with Biblical history, and its subtle and not-so-subtle patronizing of Indian and East Asian cultures for their sociocultural inferiority. I have seen other treatments of this premise before that were far more respectful on all fronts and far more believable in their historical contextualization. I will not be reading anything else from Lois Drake, and likely not from this publisher, either. ISSA is simply not worth my time, and it's likely not worth yours. ( )
  zhukora | Nov 6, 2009 |
Toon 5 van 5
geen besprekingen | voeg een bespreking toe
Je moet ingelogd zijn om Algemene Kennis te mogen bewerken.
Voor meer hulp zie de helppagina Algemene Kennis .
Gangbare titel
Informatie afkomstig uit de Engelse Algemene Kennis. Bewerk om naar jouw taal over te brengen.
Oorspronkelijke titel
Alternatieve titels
Oorspronkelijk jaar van uitgave
Mensen/Personages
Informatie afkomstig uit de Engelse Algemene Kennis. Bewerk om naar jouw taal over te brengen.
Belangrijke plaatsen
Informatie afkomstig uit de Engelse Algemene Kennis. Bewerk om naar jouw taal over te brengen.
Belangrijke gebeurtenissen
Verwante films
Motto
Opdracht
Eerste woorden
Informatie afkomstig uit de Engelse Algemene Kennis. Bewerk om naar jouw taal over te brengen.
Perched on a rock overlook, the two leaders peered into the encampment below.
Citaten
Laatste woorden
Informatie afkomstig uit de Engelse Algemene Kennis. Bewerk om naar jouw taal over te brengen.
(Klik om weer te geven. Waarschuwing: kan de inhoud verklappen.)
Ontwarringsbericht
Uitgevers redacteuren
Auteur van flaptekst/aanprijzing
Oorspronkelijke taal
Gangbare DDC/MDS
Canonieke LCC

Verwijzingen naar dit werk in externe bronnen.

Wikipedia in het Engels

Geen

The Bible explicitly records the life of Jesus, with one exception - his life between the ages of 13 and 30. Yet, ancient Buddhist scripture records the life of Saint Issa, which astoundingly parallels the life of Jesus of Nazareth. This book tells the story of Jesus' life during the missing years, and his journey through Asia.

Geen bibliotheekbeschrijvingen gevonden.

Boekbeschrijving
Haiku samenvatting

Actuele discussies

Geen

Populaire omslagen

Snelkoppelingen

Waardering

Gemiddelde: (2.7)
0.5
1
1.5 2
2
2.5 1
3 1
3.5
4
4.5
5 1

Ben jij dit?

Word een LibraryThing Auteur.

 

Over | Contact | LibraryThing.com | Privacy/Voorwaarden | Help/Veelgestelde vragen | Blog | Winkel | APIs | TinyCat | Nagelaten Bibliotheken | Vroege Recensenten | Algemene kennis | 203,238,012 boeken! | Bovenbalk: Altijd zichtbaar