Sobibor traces the life of Berek (later Bernard) Schlesinger from his Polish shtetl childhood to his life during the Holocaust - hiding in the woods, finding refuge with non-Jews, confinement in Sobibor, escape during the uprising, working with partisans' documents. A physician after the war, he follows a relentless, unfulfilled pursuit of retribution for Nazi war criminals through the courts. The Sobibor uprising and its leaders, Alexander Pechersky, are pivotal to the novel. The author, Michael Lev, a product of Soviet Jewish culture, avoids loud rhetoric and heroic pathos, keeping the narration within the limits of realism. A flowing, masterful read.

Modernity has expandedupon the Psalmist’s admonition to put one’s trust not in princes. Power can assume, to borrow Gabriel Marcel’s phrase, an “infinity of masks”; yet these masks only obscure the vacuity of ideology and its inability to save man from himself. Problematic Man pursues both diagnosis and prognosis of the existential condition of modern man. Between the “death of God” which Nietzsche proclaimed and the atmosphere of anxiety, insecurity, and meaninglessness in which man now draws his daily breath stands an indisputable connection. To parse this connection, and thus bring forth something approaching a solution to “problematic man,” Marcel brings into conversation an array of philosophers and philosophies, ranging from Aristotle to Augustine, from Pascal and Kierkegaard to Heidegger and Sartre. Elegant in style and subtle in judgment, Marcel contrasts modernity’s inheritance of unprecedented scientific and technological progress with its spoils of unhappiness and unease and concludes emphatically that a re-integration of the Gospel is the fundamental solution to Problematic Man.

In The Last Temptation of Max Gold, it's god who visits Earth. Over the course of 4 days and 4 nights, god challenges and tempts Max Gold's resoluteness. With the aid of a few cases of Corona and a carton of cigarettes, Max Gold supports and defends the logic imparted to him from Satan. Upon realizing his futility, god vanishes and humanity's salvation finally becomes a possibility.