Review: Alpha and Omega

Alpha and Omega by Harry Turtledove
My rating: 0 of 5 stars

No matter what one's religious beliefs (or non-beliefs) I thoroughly believe every single adult should read ALPHA AND OMEGA. I cannot remember a work of fiction that has had this much impact on me in the matter of religion and the psychology of religion and of Eschatology. I believe Harry Turtledove to be a genius. He has taken the religious, social, ingrained, ancestral, and contemporary beliefs of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, and of various ethnicities espousing those beliefs (particularly throughout the Middle East and in the U.S.) and has created a tapestry that weaves the unbelievable, the believable, the matters strictly of faith, the matters of science, and the impossible, together and created a syncretic synthesis that is greater than the sum of its components.

In Jerusalem, members of a team of archaeologists (some Israeli, one an American secular Jew, one an Israeli Muslim) excavate below the Muslim Dome of the Rock, where Judaism believes the Second Temple to have been. What they discover issues in a book that is mind-exploding and spiritually uplifting and terrifying (simultaneously). I am definitely not the same reader I was before I read this book. I started it two evenings ago and have not been able to stop. It is making me examine who and what I am in a way that is life-changing.

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