Reviews for The Left Left Behind

The average rating for The Left Left Behind based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2020-12-18 00:00:00 Hani Mishael My second book read from the PM's Outspoken Authors series. Like KSR's The Lucky Strike, this one has also three parts: 1. The left left behind - a satirical and hilarious novellete, inspired by the religious series Left Behind, which I haven't heard of until now. (Fun fact: the Antichrist in the series is a Romanian. Lol) 2. Special Relativity - a one-act drama, featuring Einstein, Paul Robeson and J. Edgar Hoover, raised from the dead for an afternoon. Pretty funny too. 3. Fried Green Tomatoes - an interview with the author. Overall, quite an enjoyable and light read; perfect after tiring days.

Review # 2 was written on 2010-02-18 00:00:00 Nanda Kumar This was my 2010 "Book I Read During Inventory". This book was planned to be Tao Lin's Shoplifting from American Apparel, but that book hadn't been counted yet when I started to read, and this one had. Because this is a BIRDI, it means that it's a short book that I could read in about an hour with lots of beeping going on around, people yelling and occasionally having to get up and point out where the ISBN number is on a book (I just realized how many times I've said the words "ISBN number", and how redundant that is since the N stands for number. I must get out of this awful habit). This is a short book, with parts to it: a short story, a short play and a bit longer than short, but still shorter than the story or the play, interview. The short story is a satire of the Left Behind series of books. The play and the interview didn't really do very much for me, so I'm only going to talk about the short story. In "The Left Left Behind" the entire 7 years of tribulation is jam packed into about fifty pages of story, and about as much happens in these fifty pages of story as in the first 3,000 pages or so of LaHaye and Jenkin that I'd read (what a waste of engery when I think of it as that many thousands of pages or more that I'd read of Left Behind). Bisson captures the stupidity of the originals, L&J's lack of knowledge about the professions they have given their characters to be engaged in, the asinine descriptions of characters that are stuck on a binary scale of good/evil, cute/ugly without any sense of gradations. The story also picks up on the implicit USA number 1 vibe of the Left Behind books, and its Republican association that people who have money are good people, people who are poor are poor because they are evil. This isn't across the board mind you, because some good uppper class people needed to be Left Behind to run the Tribulation Force in the L&J books, and to make up the rock band The Tribs in this spoof. I found the satire to be pretty funny, although I thought that there could have been a little more bite to it. But to digress two points that maybe would be better placed in a L&J book review instead of here. 1. If the Rapture comes and you are left behind, and you feel like you've made a mistake and now believe in God, if you've done this then why care about anything else? Basically what I am saying is that everything that happens from the second book in the L&J series through probably the middle of book 12 just doesn't matter. The central tenant of Evangelical (or the modern Self-Help movement for that matter) is, you are an insignificant piece of shit, nothing you do will make any difference, it is only by giving up any illusion of control and throwing your cards in with a hero like JC will you succeed, and JC is like the ultimate shitty story device that just can't lose, so throw you're cards in with him and it's all good. At least with Catholics there is the idea that your actions matter, it's doing good deeds and refraining from doing bad things, and when you do bad things you confess them that gets you into heaven. I get that I don't believe in it, but that makes sense to me. Evangelicals on the other hand don't believe in what you do, as long as you say you accept Jesus into your heart (or even on some tracts as long as you check Yes to say you are saved), then you goto Heaven, you have abdicated all responsibility from yourself. How easy, how American. Now, if all you have to do is say you've got JC in your heart, and if this 7 year tribulation is going on and at the end of it JC and his zombie army is going to wipe out the anti-christ and his army of mere mortals and everything that happens has already been written down in some weird ass chapter to the Bible, if all this is true than, why do anything. Why start a force to fight the anti-christ? It doesn't matter, you won't stop him, JC will. Why try to stop the returned prophets from getting killed when the time comes for them to die? There is no reason, it's inevitable. Actually by trying to stop these things the Tribulation Force is actually showing how they don't really believe in the literalness of the trippy shit that makes up Revelations. Which makes me ask do L&J really believe? Or do they doubt? 2. According the the mythology book I also read this week, some theories about the congruency of Hero myths from around the world have them as remnants of rituals from our earlier history, and are not actually historical events exaggerated. Lord Ragen's essay was especially devoted to this idea, and he gives a reading of The Iliad as partly the ritual of rulership passing from one king to another on an 8 year cycle (why the 8 year cycle I forget), but then the bulk of Homer's story is about the year leading up to and the year of abdication by a ruler and then the start of a fresh cycle. According to Ragen's theory many of the qualities of a hero myth Jesus conforms to. Now, the Tribulation is a seven year cycle, which means that in the eighth year a new ruler takes over, which in this story would be Jesus, making a symbolic passing of power from what could be said to be an awful rule (which in reality most every leader probably is at the time) to the hopes for a new golden age, or a new great leader (like supporters of a new leader will always think before they are disillusioned by more of the same). Thus putting the story of Revelation in the universal hero myth category, and really no different from a bunch of other stories, and really not about the end of the world at all, but only about the normal passage of power from one ruler to another (reductive? Fuck yeah, and I don't really know if I believe a word of this, but it's just something that came to me this week, most of the details have been left out because I'm getting tired of writing right now).