The Book Thief

Went to see The Book Thief at the cinema last Friday... It's about an illiterate German girl, Liesel, who loses her parents and is adopted by an odd couple in the years leading up to the Second World War. Her step-mother is almost stereo-typically harsh at first, while her step-father provides light relief in the form of accordion playing and jokes. As a new girl, Liesel struggles at school (particularly since she can't read) but her step-father teaches her and she develops a friendship with Rudy, the boy next door.

The backdrop to all this is the growing power of the Nazis, the declaration of war and the increasing persecution of the Jews. A Jewish friend of the family ends up on the run, living in their basement. Meanwhile the girl attends a Nazi book burning and waiting behind until everyone is gone, manages to rescue one of the books, H.G. Wells' The Invisible Man which is so warm it's practically smoking!

There are quite a few genuinely funny moments and the acting on the whole is very good. The thing that I didn't like, and I can't quite put my finger on it, is the tone. The narrator is death, and there is certainly a fair bit of death in the film as you might expect, but the contrast with the almost unreal chocolate-box depiction of wartime Germany was unsettling. Which may have been the film-maker's intention. The book is aimed at young adults, and I think the film is aimed at this market too.

 I wouldn't say it was a great film,  but that's probably because it invites obvious comparisons with such heavyweight titles as Schindler's List and The Pianist. It's certainly not as good as those, but the lead actors are very watchable, particularly Sophie Nelisse as Liesel and Geoffrey Rush as her step-father.

There are some powerful moments, and I have to say that I didn't leave the cinema dry-eyed!

Paul of Tarsus

At first sight, this book looks a bit weighty and hard to read. Nothing could be further from the truth. Although Paul of Tarsus was written in the 1940s it has a freshness that brings the Apostle Paul's life and the Roman world in which he lived entirely alive.
Anyone who has ever read the part of the bible entitled the Acts of the Apostles will be familiar with some of the aspects of Paul's life.Of how he trained from quite a young age to be a bible scholar under the Jewish Rabbi Gamaliel, how he was involved in persecuting the early Christian church and how his life was radically transformed by an encounter with God on the road to Damascus. Also the many missionary journeys that he carried out in his later life.
All of these key scenes are in Paul of Tarsus, but we are also given a glimpse into the early life of Paul as he grew up in the busy Mediterranean port of Tarsus with it's colourful pagan festivals, Greek sports and rowdy street life. We are shown how all these influences shaped the older Paul and particularly his use of sporting metaphors in his writings.
We are exposed to some of the rigour of the Rabbinical training that he experienced in Jerusalem, so that we can understand to a degree some of the misplaced zeal he showed in persecuting the church. Most of all we're shown the extent to which Paul saw himself as rescued by God's grace from what he later saw as a fruitless life of hatred and intolerance. This helps to explain why he was so adamant as a Christian in his opposition to the group of Judaisers in the early church who were trying to impose the Jewish religious law on new Christians, whether Jews or Gentiles.
Most interesting of all, we are shown Paul's later life. The book of Acts ends with Paul's imprisonment in Rome, but we are shown that he was actually released from there and along with Peter, became very active in the rapidly growing church in the capital of the Roman empire. It was some years later, after Rome was burned to the ground, that Paul and others were wrongfully convicted of arson by the Emperor Nero and executed.

The author's warmth and knowledge of the ancient world shines through, bringing the world of 2000 years ago vividly to life. My main criticism is that in attempting to summarise Paul's writings, the Catholic author has a tendency to blur theological points and abuse the Protestant theologian Martin Luther for no obvious reason.
Having said that I would thoroughly recommend this book to Christians of any denomination, and to anyone interested in the early church and ancient world of the Near East.
I bought a second-hand copy from here: http://www.amazon.co.uk/PAUL-OF-TARSUS-Joseph-Holzner/dp/0906138612/ref=sr_1_12?ie=UTF8&qid=1394479558&sr=8-12&keywords=Paul+of+Tarsus