Shy, stuttering Danny Burke is developing an unruly messiah complex. With the other fifth-grade misfits at his Long Island Catholic school, he mounts his doomed production of "The Passion of Christ" the day before Easter vacation, 1973, and turns the small, sleepy town of East Islip on its head. This moving and darkly comic novel is bound to make many readers squirm--if not at first, then certainly at last ... "Reading The Beginning of Calamities almost requires peering through fingers; you want to know what happens next, yet can't bear to look." The Weekly News