AND THE SHOFAR BLEW

The sin of hubris in preachers whose pulpits give them great power is a riveting subject. AND THE SHOFAR BLEW, a contemporary story of an ambitious young minister and his flawlessly Christian wife, opens with Paul Hudson's call to revive a failing church in California. It thrums along as he builds it into a vehicle for self-aggrandizement and competition with his TV evangelist father, badly damaging family, friends, flock, and self along the way. Ruth Ann Phimister's beautiful work of conveying wife Eunice's piety, Paul's brash egotism, saintly old Samuel's patient sorrow, and so on with a cast of dozens, could not be bettered, unless she could be persuaded not to pronounce "realtor" as "relator." B.G. (c) AudioFile 2004, Portland, Maine [Published: OCT/ NOV 04]