“The idea came to me in the summer of 1992 as we were celebrating the 500th anniversary of Columbus’s arrival in the New World. I was trying to decide whether or not I wanted to read this and I saw an interview where the author implied the book was an apologia for Christopher Columbus: The narrative is woven between the thread of Emilio’s recovery post-mission and the thread of time leading up to and including the mission. We’re told right from the beginning that horrible, scarring things happened to Emilio and everybody else died. The main characters are Emilio, a Cuban Jesuit priest, Jimmy, a physicist at SETI, Anne, a friend and pupil of Emilio’s, and Sofia, a Sephardic Jewish computer scientist. The Sparrow is about a Jesuit mission to an alien planet called Rakhat. On the other hand, this is a first contact story with religious themes, so I was kind of intrigued… I got in the habit of tuning out Christian stuff by skipping out on Christmas plays in elementary school. I’m Jewish and not terribly religious, so when I hear a book is about Catholic priests, I’m immediately turned off. If this book wasn’t chosen for book club, I would have never picked it up.
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