What are we to make of Buck's apparent notion that the rabbi needs to be informed of the Christian belief that "Messiah has already come"? Does he imagine that Ben-Judah has never heard of this Christian belief before? I mean -- Jesus Christ -- the guy has surely heard the phrase "Jesus Christ." Read more

The world of this story has no children. This story takes place IN a world without children and yet it is not the story OF a world without children. That simply doesn't work. In a world without children, no other story can be told. Jerry Jenkins tries -- he tries to tell us stories of airline promotions, of secretive diplomacy and of mistaken-identity romantic blunders, but none of those stories seems possible in a world without children. None of those stories can be reconciled with the supposed setting of a world without children. Read more

Sections of this book: 1. Rayford Steele and Buck Williams are summoned to meetings at which they are offered highly paid jobs working for the Antichrist; 2. Buck vows never to take such a job; 3. Rayford vows never to take such a job; 4. Repeat sections 2-3; 5. Repeat section 4. ... Read more

For LaHaye & Jenkins, the conspiracy -- the framework of End-Times prophecy and all that it imagines -- trumps what even their five senses have to tell them. The requirements of the conspiracy overrule and outweigh reality. This is true whether the subject is the U.N. or reporting on Israel or religion cover stories or even fundamental human nature responding to the disappearance of the world's children. Read more

"Unless you take the book of Revelation literally, you will never understand it," Tim LaHaye says. And he insists that he does exactly that here in "Left Behind," with a literal portrayal of the book's literal prophecies. But he doesn't -- not even when the literal portrayal of "fire proceedeth out of their mouth, and devoureth their enemies" would be way more fun than what "Left Behind" gives us instead. Read more

Suddenly we're reading a book with spellcasting and magic in it. I tend to like books with spellcasting and magic in them, and I have no problem with crossbreeding genres, but this hadn't been that sort of book up until now and it doesn't seem fair for the authors suddenly to be changing the ground rules like this. The authors are violating the bargain they had established with the reader. Read more

Buck Williams hates and fears the Antichrist because he remembers that Nicolae Carpathia murdered two people in cold blood at the end of the last book. What Buck forgets is that Nicolae did this because Buck asked him to, begging Nicolae to protect him from those two men and agreeing to bury a story in exchange for that protection. Read more