City of Dreams: A Novel (!Hero Series #1) by Stephen R. Lawhead and Ross Lawhead


An interesting "What if...?" take on the story of Jesus.

Published in 2003 by Navpress

This may be the most pointless review I have ever written. There is something sad about a stillborn trilogy. In this case, only the first book was published, although co-author Ross Lawhead claimed the 2nd and 3rd books are written in his blog. So, this reminds of an unfinished building - lots of big plans but someone pulled the plug before it was completed.

 Nonetheless, here is the review:

The premise is simple. What if Jesus did not come into the world about 2,000 years ago, but instead was born in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania in the here and now. As a history teacher I very much enjoyed reading the alternate history aspect of this book - how would the world be different if Christianity did not eclipse the old religions of Europe? Would the worship of Jupiter, Thor and Diana have continued? Would Europe have developed the same sort of political structures? These topics are hinted at but are not really the main focus of the book.

 The book features Special Agent Alex Hunter, an investigator for ICON (International Confederation of Nations), a one world government organization that has been experiencing difficulty with religious groups who want to break free from ICON's iron grip. Hunter is a tarnished agent, having mishandled a standoff with a religious splinter group in the recent past. The standoff went bad and a bloodbath ensued. He has been brought to New York City to investigate a Zionist splinter group (turns out that Judaism survives in this alternate, but still experiences plenty of difficulties).

 Intrigue, plots and plots within plots are discovered and Agent Hunter is not sure who to trust - ICON, the local government or perhaps even the group he has infiltrated. Along the way, he meets Washer John, the character that corresponds to John the Baptist and his cousin Joshua, the character that corresponds to Jesus (Jesus is the Greek-ification of Yeshua or Joshua, if you are wondering about the name change).

 The first book ends with Agent Hunter making a major decision about who he can trust in a cliffhanger situation designed to make the reader look for the second book. Unfortunately...there is no second book. Too bad, it would have been an interesting read.

 I rate this book 4 stars out of 5.

 This book can be found on Amazon.com: City of Dreams: A Novel.

 Reviewed on December 6, 2011

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts over the last 30 days

IN the PRESENCE of MINE ENEMIES: SEVEN YEARS as a POW in NORTH VIETNAM by Howard and Phyllis Rutledge

Image
Originally published in 1973. Published in 1977 by Commission Press . Co-written with Mel and Lyla White In the Presence of Mine Enemies is, in reality, two kinds of books. It is a biography of Captain Howard Rutledge's (1928-1984) time in the prisoner of war camp nicknamed Hanoi Hilton by its prisoners in North Vietnam from 1965-1973. It is also a faith tract. The book gets right to the point - Rutledge is shot down in the fifth paragraph and captured by the sixth page. The book rarely gets bogged down in technical details and is very approachable by any reader. More on this in a moment. The descriptions of his captivity, such as the food, how the prisoners managed to communicate with one another, how they mapped out the prison despite no one ever managing to see all of it, the physical torture, the difficulty of solitary confinement, and the joy of finally being able to be with another prisoner are all told in sufficient - but not grotesque - detail. If you are looking for any ...
Read more

COMMEMORATIVE HISTORY of the GEORGE ROGERS CLARK BICENTENNIAL EXHIBIT by The Indiana State Museum

Image
Published in 1976 by the Indiana State Museum Society. 1976 was the bicentennial celebration of the Declaration of Independence and if you were not alive in 1976, you have no idea how much went into that recognition. Every store had special decorations, every town had commemorations, everyone had red, white, and blue clothing and this went on for a long time - not just on the Fourth of July in 1976. Part of this ongoing celebration took place in museums. The Indiana State Museum had a 3 year exhibit on Indiana's role in the American Revolution. People remember the original thirteen colonies and correctly note that Indiana was not one of those colonies. None of Indiana's immediate neighbors were, either. But, the modern states of Kentucky, Ohio, Indiana, Michigan, and Illinois were on the front line of a different kind of war zone during the American Revolution. There were no great ships, no massed armies, and precious few soldiers even wearing an actual uniform - but there were...
Read more

SUPERMAN '78 (graphic novel) by Robert Venditi

Image
Published in 2022 by DC Comics. Written by Robert Venditti. Art by Wilfredo Torres and Jordie Bellaire. Synopsis Superman '78 is a short series (sadly) based on the Christopher Reeves movies that were released from the late 1970s through the mid-1980s. Like the movies, the plot is pretty simple and everything follows a very traditional Superman storyline - red shorts, sassy Lois Lane, bald Lex Luthor, and so on. That's fine by me - I really like traditional Superman. Brainiac saves the city of Superman's Kryptonian home from ultimate destruction when Krypton explodes by shrinking them and storing them safely on his ship in a glass jar. He keeps them stored away because they are the remnants of "a careless, dangerous civilization." When Brainiac discovers that Earth has a Kryptonian (Superman), he seeks to save Earth by eradicating Superman because he is an infestation of an alien civilization that has already destroyed their own world. Kryptonians are dangerous a...
Read more

BATMAN: ONE BAD DAY - MR. FREEZE (graphic novel) by Gerry Duggan

Image
Published in 2023 by DC Comics. Written by Gerry Duggan Art by Matteo Scalera and Deron Bennett. Synopsis Inspired by the "spirit of Christmas," Batman, Robin, and Alfred discuss the possibility that a hardened criminal can actually reform. Batman and Robin decide to reach out to Mr. Freeze and offer to fund his research.  Mr. Freeze has always justifies his crime sprees with the rationalization that he needs the things he steals for his research. He put his wife in a frozen stasis in order to stop the progression of a fatal disease and the research to fight this disease is incredibly expensive and sometimes requires exotic materials.  Now, Batman has provided everything Mr. Freeze needs in an old LexCorp lab. T heoretically, this should put an end to Mr. Freeze's criminal career, right? It turns out that Mr. Freeze is far more complicated and far more creepy than anyone knew... My Review I read all of the graphic novels in the One Bad Day Series this summer and I think ...
Read more

THE RED DRAGON (Action Adventures Short Stories Collection #10) by L. Ron Hubbard

Image
Originally published in 1935 by the magazine "Five Novels" Re-published in 2013 by Galaxy Press . Long before L. Ron Hubbard (1911-1986) became the creator of Scientology, he was a pulp fiction writer. He did this for nearly 20 years, with his first writing credit coming in 1932. The Red Dragon was originally written for a monthly publication called Five Novels. Synopsis The Red Dragon starts out very much like an Indiana Jones movie - an American damsel in distress is in China looking for the archaeological find her father had told her about. He has left clues to its location and she is seeking someone to help her. The site is located in Manchuria - a disputed zone under Japanese control in what would eventually become the beginnings of World War II in Asia (unknown to Hubbard at the time because Pearl Harbor attack was more than six years away). The mysterious Michael Stuart has stepped up to help. His nickname is The Red Dragon because he is audacious and because he had r...
Read more

THE INSTINCT for COOPERATION: A GRAPHIC NOVEL CONVERSATION with NOAM CHOMSKY (graphic novel) by Noam Chomsky and Jeffrey Wilson

Image
Published in 2018 by Seven Stories Press. Written by Noam Chomsky and Jeffrey Wilson. Art by Eliseu Gouveia. Jeffrey Wilson interviewed Noam Chomsky for The Instinct for Cooperation and the results probably would have been a typical interview with Chomsky. The interview was about the Occupy Wall Street Movement and the little groups that organically formed within the protests, such as the food tent, the medical tent, and the library.  Wilson wove in interviews that he had done with people who participated in the Occupy Movement, students and teachers who had bad interactions with education "reform" movements, and other topics like student loan debt.  This could have easily been a mess, but Wilson does a very good job of weaving together all of the interviews so that it felt more like a natural free-flowing conversation. The illustrations helped move everything along to make this very digestible. There is a lot of food for thought. Well done. 5 out of 5 stars. This graphic no...
Read more

DOWN ALONG with THAT DEVIL'S BONES: A RECKONING with MONUMENTS, MEMORY, and the LEGACY of WHITE SUPREMACY (audiobook) by Connor Towne O'Neill

Image
  Published in 2020 by Workman Publishing. Read by Geoffrey Cantor. Duration: 7 hours, 25 minutes. Unabridged. Connor Towne O'Neill was attending the 50th anniversary recognition of the Selma to Montgomery March when he discovered something unexpected. The Selma to Montgomery march ended when Alabama State Troopers joined local deputies at the Edmund Pettus bridge and beat them until they retreated. The bridge is named for a Confederate General and a Grand Dragon of the Alabama KKK. O'Neill was looking for a place to park and drove into a graveyard. In the graveyard, he discovered a group prepping a part of the graveyard for the re-installation of a bust of Nathan Bedford Forrest (the original had been stolen) in the graveyard. It was on a piece of property owned by the United Daughters of the Confederacy in the middle of the graveyard. O'Neill sensed that this was the more powerful story, no matter how dramatic that moment on the bridge had been 50 years earlier. He decide...
Read more

OUR SUBWAY BABY (audiobook) by Peter Mercurio

Image
Published in 2020 by Listening Library. Read by the author, Peter Mercurio. Duration: 7 minutes. Unabridged. I first heard about this story and the book Our Subway Baby in a social media post so I searched out the book. I didn't realize it was a book for children when I started searching, but it's a sweet little book. The book starts with Danny Stewart spotting a newborn infant boy that was abandoned in the corner of a New York subway station. Stewart contacts the police, but also his boyfriend, Peter Mercurio, wondering if this was somehow fate. After all, they could never have children, but here is a child in need. The couple keeps tabs of the baby and eventually adopt him. Their families and friends help them gather all of the things parents would need and baby Kevin finally joins his family. The story is told from the point of view of Peter, as if he were talking to a young Kevin and telling him how Kevin found his way to his home. The language is simplified and the tricky...
Read more

COMRADES in ARMS (kindle)(short story) by Kevin J. Anderson

Image
Published in 2014 by WordFire Press My Synopsis: Veteran (and prolific) author Kevin J. Anderson delivers a compelling short story/novella in the tradition of the golden age of sci-fi with Comrades in Arms .  Humanity is at war with an insectoid race that uses psychic energy to create weapons and even peer into the future.  The story is set in an asteroid belt way out in the middle of nowhere. Some of the asteroids have breathable atmospheres, but they're not comfortable for either race to live on for long.  Even though the asteroids have limited value, there is no way either side will give them up so the war has ground itself into a stalemate of sorts.  However, humanity has developed a new weapon that is starting to turn the tide. Mortally wounded humans are brought back to the base and given the Robocop treatment. Their bodies are refitted with armored limbs, organs are replaced, and a "werewolf trigger" is installed deep in the brain. The werewolf trigger sets th...
Read more

SLAPSTICK or LONESOME NO MORE! by Kurt Vonnegut

Image
Originally published in 1976. Synopsis In the essay that serves as the prologue to Slapstick , Kurt Vonnegut writes about family, connection, and acceptance. He spends a lot of time talking about his older brother - more than he usually does in his essays. He also talks about his sister - a topic of frequent discussion in his essays. She and her husband both died with days of one another, one of an accident and the other of cancer. Kurt Vonnegut and his wife adopted three of their four children.  In his essays Vonnegut makes frequent mention of the lack of family connection in our modern world and he thinks we are far the worse off for it. This novel is all about family connection, featuring two physically deformed twins who who are psychically connected. The twins were kept apart from society in an old mansion on a large estate in order to protect them from society and to protect the reputations of their elite, ultra-rich parents. After all, the "right sort of people" don...
Read more