Reviews for The poor and the powerless

The average rating for The poor and the powerless based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2010-09-02 00:00:00 Julio Chavez As the subtitle suggests, the author retraces the Pentateuch as best he can, Bible in hand and affable expert in tow. Mostly a disappointing book, I’m afraid. First, Feiler is a rather laborious writer – the 424 pages are packed with rather stilted purple prose at times (his imagery is wild and uninformative: mountains resemble pies, “a drip castle,” “sweet potatoes,” “rancid hamburger meat,” or bizarrely, “melting dinosaurs” [!]). Second, Feiler is one of those travel writers who feels the need to make every single thing an epiphany: this is okay for places like Mount Ararat, or the possible site of the burning bush; but I counted at least ten places where Feiler recorded a soul-shaking discovery (Egypt isn’t the bad guy in the Bible!, The actual spot where things happened doesn’t matter! “The desert was part of my own geography”! The desert gives you confidence by showing you how small you are! Etc etc). By the way, he feels fear of that inner geography ebbing away not once, but twice. Third, Feiler is a rather naive scholar. He tries to get at the “truth” of the Bible by asking stupid questions about the context of the stories: yes, they really had birthrights that could be sold, for example. Well of course: the stories don’t take place in a fictional universe, they’re products of their time! It’s like approaching the “truth” of Dickens by triumphantly showing that people really did talk like his characters in 19th century London. His naivete is deeper than that: “I basically believed there was a unified notion of God,” he writes. What?! He never considered that God differs in Islam, Christianity, Judaism, even within the Bible itself?! Is he really the best person to write this book? Obviously not. There’s a lot that’s very informative and interesting in this tome – ruminations on and possible explanations for manna, Moses’ name, the location of the Sea of Reeds, even the abundance of quail during the exodus. But there’s too few gems to justify slogging through this mountain of banality, really.

Review # 2 was written on 2020-02-26 00:00:00 Elizabeth C. Reyes I read this book because the topic- wandering through the Middle East and connecting to sites/events mentioned in the first five books of the Bible- seemed interesting. Also, I knew that the author would be mentioning some places I visited last year. The author's motivation for his trip was twofold: first, he felt the same longing that many people feel to experience the Bible more fully by visiting its home turf. Secondly, he wanted to write a book. His trip was work, basically. So here you have a sort of spiritual quest married to a job: air and earth. From the start it is clear that his visits to various places where Biblical events took place is extremely speculative. There are multiple possiblities as to where Moses crossed the Red or Reed Sea, where Jacob wrestled with an angel, which mountain God gave the Ten Commandments on, etc. How anyone manages to find deep meaning when no site is sure is beyond me...but it clearly wasn't beyond the author. He has emotional episode after emotional episode. As if this wasn't enough, the author repeatedly trots out examples showing how the first five books could not factually be true and then claims that they don't have to be, that the main importance of the Bible is its story. He still finds value in what he reads even though he's sure it isn't true. (The problem here is that the Bible presents itself as factually true.) So- what we have here is the author indulging in a form of romantic, religious superstition. (He doesn't claim that it's faith.) I can't imagine the Bible gained its appeal by asking its readers to turn off their brains and just FEEL whatever their imagination supplies. As a result, reading this book was a long, difficult slog through shifting sands. It has been said that the Bible has timeless appeal because it reinvents itself. No, it doesn't. It has been reinvented by people like the author, to suit their personal wants and needs.