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Flood of Facts. There is the usual generous garnishing of sex and sensation: Canaanite fertility rites, Roman butchery. Spanish torture and nondenominational rape. But again and again the story stalls. Again and again Author Michener, sweating but unstoppable, primes his imagination with a flood of facts. The book is punctuated with maps, charts, captions, drawings, diagrams, historical digressions and dates, dates, dates—even for events that never happened.
But author Michener's big-scope treatment is pious and platitudinous. His attitude is something worse. Blandly he moves in on a richly evolved spiritual tradition, drenches it with admiration and misunderstanding, glazes over anything unfavorable, and winds up converting the Chosen People into everybody's Good Neighbor Shem.