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The Last Ember
by
Daniel Levin
An Italian antiquities squad discovers a woman's preserved corpse inside an ancient column. Pages torn from priceless manuscripts litter the floor of an abandoned warehouse. An illegal excavation burrows beneath Jerusalem's Dome of the rome, ground sacred to three religions.
Jonathan Marcus a young American lawyer and a former doctoral student in classics, has become a sou...more
Jonathan Marcus a young American lawyer and a former doctoral student in classics, has become a sou...more
Hardcover, 432 pages
Published
August 6th 2009
by Riverhead Hardcover
(first published 2009)
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...dan sepanjang film Gladiator, dia selalu mengerang setiap kali Russel Crowe menyebut stadion itu sebagai "the Colosseum," sebuah nama yang tidak terbayangkan sampai seratus tahun setelah jatuhnya Roma.(hal.122)
Sejarah selalu punya banyak sisi, saat diceritakan oleh pihak-pihak yang berbeda. Sesuatu yang menjadi keyakinan umum belum tentu menggambarkan kejadian sebenarnya, meski telah dikisahkan turun-temurun selama ratusan bahkan ribuan tahun. Sejarah juga kerap menjadi ...more
Sejarah selalu punya banyak sisi, saat diceritakan oleh pihak-pihak yang berbeda. Sesuatu yang menjadi keyakinan umum belum tentu menggambarkan kejadian sebenarnya, meski telah dikisahkan turun-temurun selama ratusan bahkan ribuan tahun. Sejarah juga kerap menjadi ...more
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If you hate it when an author thinks that they have to infuse their characters with constant blue streaks of swearing to sell a book, then you'll like this one.
Daniel Levin has created an engaging action adventure that develops characters, takes you to interesting places above and below the ground in Jerusalem and Rome, and spins a tale that you will enjoy through the last page of the book.
While I don't really care that much which expensive brand of shoe a particular ch...more
Daniel Levin has created an engaging action adventure that develops characters, takes you to interesting places above and below the ground in Jerusalem and Rome, and spins a tale that you will enjoy through the last page of the book.
While I don't really care that much which expensive brand of shoe a particular ch...more
The Last Ember by Daniel Levin (pp. 432)
The DaVinci Code set the bar for popular historical thriller genre in recent years. While Brown’s formula works some days and others can feel too light, convoluted or heavy handed, Daniel Levin’s first novel seemed to be a great next step.
Levin’s Jonathan Marcus is a disgraced Rome scholar and archeologist who takes his talents and passions and becomes a corporate lawyer who specializes in antiquities and provenance. When a case...more
The DaVinci Code set the bar for popular historical thriller genre in recent years. While Brown’s formula works some days and others can feel too light, convoluted or heavy handed, Daniel Levin’s first novel seemed to be a great next step.
Levin’s Jonathan Marcus is a disgraced Rome scholar and archeologist who takes his talents and passions and becomes a corporate lawyer who specializes in antiquities and provenance. When a case...more
I really enjoy historical fiction and this book did not dissapoint. While reading I was travelling through ominous passageways beneath the Collessum in Rome then to the Temple Mount in Jerusalem picking up on histoical facts I had no knowledge of before. I find it interesting when reading a book of this nature to look up artifacts or buildings mentioned in the book on-line to give a greater context to what I am reading (such as the ancient city of Ostia or the biography of Josephus). I did th...more
Daniel Levin, Author
The Last Ember
Riverhead Books, ISBN 978-1-59448-872-6
Fiction-mystery, thriller, suspense, history, conspiracy
415 pages
September/October 2009 Review for Bookpleasures
Reviewer-Michelle Kaye Malsbury, BSBM, MM
Review
Daniel Levin, author of The Last Ember, is a graduate of the University of Michigan (BA) Roman and Greek civilizations and Harvard University Law School. (Inside cover, 2009) Background for this book comes from his cle...more
The Last Ember
Riverhead Books, ISBN 978-1-59448-872-6
Fiction-mystery, thriller, suspense, history, conspiracy
415 pages
September/October 2009 Review for Bookpleasures
Reviewer-Michelle Kaye Malsbury, BSBM, MM
Review
Daniel Levin, author of The Last Ember, is a graduate of the University of Michigan (BA) Roman and Greek civilizations and Harvard University Law School. (Inside cover, 2009) Background for this book comes from his cle...more
Jonathan Marcus, an American lawyer is sent to Rome by his law firm to examine and authenticate a client's fragment of a stone map. He is a former disgraced doctorate candidate specializing in the biblical era. Upon examination he finds a hidden message carved inside the stone. He presents his findings in court against his former colleague and lover, a UN preservationist, Dr. Emili Travia.
After the case Emili and Jonathan start to dig deeper and deeper into the past. They are driven ...more
After the case Emili and Jonathan start to dig deeper and deeper into the past. They are driven ...more
Jeffrey
rated it
Recommends it for:
fans of historical puzzle novels in the Da Vinci code vein
Shelves:
thriller,
read-in-2010
This adventurous archeological Dan Brown wannabe is pretty good, but a long way from Angels and Demons or The DaVinci Code. People who put down Dan Brown focus on his language, but he was able to decipher obscure references in a way that the reader comprehended clearly. Here the sought after treasure is again revealed in a series of puzzles but I found the answers to each to be hard to understand. Finally, it seemed that practically every person was persuaded by greed to help out a terrorist,...more
Alicia Lemar
rated it
Recommends it for:
historical mystery fans
Recommended to Alicia by:
GoodReads sidebar
I'm going to stray a bit from the normal book review form and ad lib this one. Since you can read the book synopsis on the book's homepage here or the dust jacket, I'm assuming you are reading this review because you want to know how well this novel stacks up to its hype. Get ready for an amazing adventure - you will not be disappointed! I thought the plot sounded intriguing when I first picked up this book, and I was more than thrilled to be treated to a novel that rivals the likes of Steve...more
Cheryl
added it
Attorney Jonathan Marcus is an expert in the classics of historical artificial items. For his knowledge, that makes him a hot commodity. Jonathan is rushed to Rome. There he meets Bruce Tatton. Bruce shows Jonathan some stone artifacts. Jonathan identifies the item as pieces of a huge map of the city of Rome. They date back to the early A.D. century. What Jonathan has identified has caused a major interest. The Last Ember will have readers traveling from Rome to Jerusalem.
While I lik...more
While I lik...more
Amy
added it
This is a poor attempt of mimicking the sucess of "The Da Vinci Code" by Dan Brown. The plot is identical; dashing know-it-all arrives in Rome to solve a mystery and is quickly drawn into a game of cat and mouse played out over the city with "clues" from religious texts, artifacts, and drawings. People who are his friends ultimately double cross him but are helpful along the way and the villian is a shady character whose motivation is hiding the historical events in a differe...more
The Last Ember is a non-stop thrill ride. There is plenty of action, some romance, a lot of history and archaeology, great characters and a well-developed plot.
It's one of those stories where you have several groups of people converging on one ultimate goal. You have Jonathan and Emily, the Italian police group and of course the requisite bad guy. They are all after one thing - the Menorah that has been hidden for centuries. Two groups have similar goals and the bad guy has the sinis...more
It's one of those stories where you have several groups of people converging on one ultimate goal. You have Jonathan and Emily, the Italian police group and of course the requisite bad guy. They are all after one thing - the Menorah that has been hidden for centuries. Two groups have similar goals and the bad guy has the sinis...more
Daniel Levin's debut novel, "The Last Ember," is fast-paced, well-written and entertaining. The fact that he combines three of my interests (forensic science, antiquities and archaeology) is almost icing on this perfectly created cake.
Levin's protagonist, Jonathan Marcus, is an archaeologist turned lawyer who comes to Rome to prosecute a case. To his surprise, one of the defendants is a former colleague, Emili Travia, from his archaeology days ... and she is trying to pre...more
Levin's protagonist, Jonathan Marcus, is an archaeologist turned lawyer who comes to Rome to prosecute a case. To his surprise, one of the defendants is a former colleague, Emili Travia, from his archaeology days ... and she is trying to pre...more
Well, it's too long, the characters are stock, the story has no arc, the writing is passable at best and cringe-inducing at worst, and the plot is the same paint-by-numbers style as any number of other books, movies, and television shows. The one redeeming factor? The amount of background research. This is a book that meshes ancient history (in the form of Rome and Jerusalem) with modern problems (revisionist history and archeological terrorism) and does it well. I had a chance to hear the autho...more
A modern day Indiana Jones...
This is an archaeological adventure of Jonathan Marcus, an American lawyer who was once a Rome Prize scholar but lost his dream of pursuing his interest in archaeology due to an accident. He later was lured back to Rome as a lawyer but got embroiled in the search of the Menorah, the one which was supposedly secreted safely by Josephus Flavious. I had a crash course on antiquity terminologies and got lost in the underbelly of Rome and Temple Mount. I tried...more
This is an archaeological adventure of Jonathan Marcus, an American lawyer who was once a Rome Prize scholar but lost his dream of pursuing his interest in archaeology due to an accident. He later was lured back to Rome as a lawyer but got embroiled in the search of the Menorah, the one which was supposedly secreted safely by Josephus Flavious. I had a crash course on antiquity terminologies and got lost in the underbelly of Rome and Temple Mount. I tried...more
This was one of those books I picked up while I was walking around my new library. They had it listed as one of those "Readers Choice" books. Once again it took me a while to read this one. Lately I'm not consuming books like I used to...must be the season. My initial thought after finishing this book was...that felt more like a history lesson and a wanna be davinci code book. Don't get me wrong, I love history, and I love reading about hidden chambers...lost items, those mysteries ...more
Dan Brown bersiap-siapkah menghadapi saingan baru!
Apa yang akan anda rasakan saat menemukan mayat dengan rajahan tulisan di tubuhnya
Atau saat menjelajah lorong di bawah tanah dalam ketakutan akan bahaya yang mengancan menemukan tulisan dinding?
Atau mendadak dipanggil untuk menghadiri sebuah pertemuan dan menemukan diri berada dekat dengan jawaban yang selama sekian lama dicari?
Perasaan seperti itulah yang menyelimuti diri Jonathan Marcus, seorang pengacara...more
Apa yang akan anda rasakan saat menemukan mayat dengan rajahan tulisan di tubuhnya
Atau saat menjelajah lorong di bawah tanah dalam ketakutan akan bahaya yang mengancan menemukan tulisan dinding?
Atau mendadak dipanggil untuk menghadiri sebuah pertemuan dan menemukan diri berada dekat dengan jawaban yang selama sekian lama dicari?
Perasaan seperti itulah yang menyelimuti diri Jonathan Marcus, seorang pengacara...more
Finished this book at 3:30am. I told myself I wouldn't do it - stay up that late, but the book kept drawing me in. Every night, I stay up late, trying to get further into it, and every day I would research things on the computer, like Cities for Life, an anti- death penalty cause that he talked about. The book is written in a literate Da Vinci Code style, well-researched, and takes a fairly unknown object and weaves a great historical mystery and quest around it. The author is almost a twin...more
Despite some minor editing flubs, this first novel is a real winner. The work was extremely well paced and the characters were well drawn. The energy in the book was palpable and the action moved along non-stop. The timeline seemed a little too compressed to hold all of the travel from Rome to Israel and back as well as all of the action in each place, but the compelling story made me want to overlook this. It was also good to have a novel where people from different faiths shared common pro...more
What ever happened to Indiana Jones? In recent years the Indiana franchise seems to have sparked a plethora of material about adventuresome archeologists but almost all of them take themselves much too seriously. It may be Dan Brown’s fault but add this one to the list. An effort to make this novel’s hero confused, self-pitying and guilt stricken about events from his past doesn’t save it, in fact, it makes it more pathetic. And the attempt to make the setting more cutting edge by framing th...more
The book tells of a search by good guys and bad guys for the gold Menorah taken to Rome after the sack of the Temple of Jerusalem in 70 AD, and then probably taken to Carthage by the Vandals who sacked Rome in 455, and then maybe secured by Belisarius in 515 and taken from Carthage to Justinian in Constantinople, after which it may have been sent to a Christian church in Jerusalem, where it might have been captured by the Persians in 614, but was probably instead smuggled back to Constantinople...more
If you enjoy thrillers that include history, culture, and religion, set in stunning locales of both Italy and Jerusalem, I highly recommend Daniel Levin's The Last Ember. I had a chance to meet Daniel Levin last year at our local independent bookstore (he was also introduced by Steve Berry of the Cotton Malone series). Levin had such wonderful insight to share on the research for this book, and the room was spellbound by his stories.
Daniel Levin has created an anxious page-turning thr...more
Daniel Levin has created an anxious page-turning thr...more
Written in the style of "The Da Vinci Code," this story deals with an attempt to track down the lost Menorah using hints from Josephus. Archeologists, UN officials, Americans, Italians, Israelis and Palestinians all rush to decipher the clues, rushing between Jerusalem and Rome. Although not a page turner like Brown's works, Levin shows off some well earned knowledge. However, his ignorance of both Hebrew and more importantly, of the laws of Tum'ah and Tahara, turn the discovery in t...more
If this were a movie it would be Da Vinci Code meets National Treasure meets Bourne Identity. A page turner but at times far-fetched. The bad guy is always one step ahead and has numerous fall back plans. Even when things don't work out there is always a plan. Lots of interesting history about Rome and ancient Jerusalem makes you think your decision not to learn Latin or Hebrew was a mistake. Much like the Da Vinci Code this book will stimulate discussion about religion and the relationships bet...more
Not bad...obviously heavily influenced by the Da Vinci Code. A few too many characters, and the usual implausibilities of a historical thriller like this. Only a couple of things annoyed me.
1. One of the characters, who was supposedly familiar with classical civilization (as in, studied Classics in graduate school), assumed that ancient Greek and Roman scientists thought the world was flat. No, they didn't. They thought the sun and planets obited the earth (and some of them even...more
1. One of the characters, who was supposedly familiar with classical civilization (as in, studied Classics in graduate school), assumed that ancient Greek and Roman scientists thought the world was flat. No, they didn't. They thought the sun and planets obited the earth (and some of them even...more
A couple of people recommended The Last Ember to me after I blogged about enjoying The Lost Symbol by Dan Brown. Both described the book as a "Jewish Dan Brown mystery." After having read it, my response to that recommendation is yes and no.
Yes
There's an ancient mystery that surfaces when a very well preserved body is found. Jonathan Marcus, an archeologist studying at the American Academy in Rome is called into help. The discovery gives clues that leads him and...more
Yes
There's an ancient mystery that surfaces when a very well preserved body is found. Jonathan Marcus, an archeologist studying at the American Academy in Rome is called into help. The discovery gives clues that leads him and...more
Oh boy. This book is the Jewish answer to the Da Vinci code.
The short short on it is: the author clearly knows a shit ton about judaism and antiquities and rome and jerusalem and artifacts and whatnot. he did a great job putting it all together into a twisty plot - something I could never do in a million years. Then again, I am no great connoisseur of twisty plots, they all amaze me almost without fail, so it is possible that those who are could have predicted nearly everything from...more
The short short on it is: the author clearly knows a shit ton about judaism and antiquities and rome and jerusalem and artifacts and whatnot. he did a great job putting it all together into a twisty plot - something I could never do in a million years. Then again, I am no great connoisseur of twisty plots, they all amaze me almost without fail, so it is possible that those who are could have predicted nearly everything from...more
I thought this book had an interesting premise and I was excited to read it, but the slow start had me second guessing my decision. The action does finally pick up and the twists and turns kept surprising me. It's a little far-fetched in places, and down right nail biting in others. It was fun to learn a little more about ancient Rome and Jerusalem, but at times it seems like the author is obsessed with convincing us just how knowledgeable he is about ancient civilizations.
E-book #2. A disgraced academic, turned NYC lawyer is drawn back into a search for a long lost relic (a golden menorah from the Second Temple) along with his former researchers. Back and forth between ancient and modern Rome and Jerusalem, Jonathan Marcus with the able assistance of his former lover Emili Travia, a wizened Jewish librarian, and a "friend" engrossed in mysticism solves a very complex puzzle. Much like Dan Brown's books.
I saw this book reviewed in the newspaper and had to wait for our library system to get it in. So by the time it arrived, I had forgotten what I'd read about the book.
I actually quite enjoyed it. The book was a quick read, fairly predictable, but well researched and logically presented. I did wonder if it was intended to be the basis for a movie. I could actually picture it: something like the Indiana Jones series. Still, I liked it.
I actually quite enjoyed it. The book was a quick read, fairly predictable, but well researched and logically presented. I did wonder if it was intended to be the basis for a movie. I could actually picture it: something like the Indiana Jones series. Still, I liked it.
This was my favorite read of the entire year. I absolutely loved this book. It had a great melange of history, intrigue, and even a touch of romance. It was so incredibly detailed. The author must have studied quite awhile to learn the intrinsic details about the places he describes, which worries me some, because I'm anxious to read his next book. Hurry up, Daniel Levin!!! Hope this review makes sense, my Nyquil has kicked in!!
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