Category: Reviews
Homosexuality in the Mormon Church
Same-Sex Dynamics Among Nineteenth-Century Americans: A Mormon Example, by D. Michael Quinn. (Urbana, Ill.: University of Illinois Press, 1996) 410 pp., 21 photographs, cloth $29.95. Outing historical individuals as homosexual or lesbian is a rather risky task, even more so if a strongly organized religion is involved. D. Michael Quinn, a former history professor at …
Twinkle, Twinkle
The End of Science, by John Horgan (Reading, Mass.: Addison Wesley, 1996) 308 pp., cloth $24.00. Over the millennia countless hours of human time have been spent wondering what stars are. Then something weird happened. Science found out. Now we know what stars are made of, how big they are, how old they are, how …
The History of Freethought
Freethought Across the Centuries: Toward a New Age of Enlightenment by Gerald A. Larue. (Amherst, N.Y.: Humanist Press, 1996) y + 516 pp., index included, cloth $27.95. Those who would like to pronounce funeral rites over the Enlightenment that emerged in Europe and America in the days of Ben Franklin, David Hume, J. S. Bach, …
The Search for Connection Between Two Worlds: An Odyssey
The First Man, by Albert Camus. ‘frans. by David Hapgood. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995) 325 pp., cloth $23.00. …. Struggling against the wall that separated him from the secret of all life, wanting to go farther, to go beyond, and to discover, discover before dying, dis-cover at last, in order “to be,” just …
Books in Brief
Good Natured: The Origins of Right and Wrong in Humans and Other Animals, by Frans de Waal (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996) 296 pp., cloth $24.95. This is an important book for secular humanists. The most telling objection to a secular view of reality and the absence of gods is this argument: why would any …