Category: Reviews
Happily Never After
No Country for Old Men. Written and directed by Ethan and Joel Coen. Distributed by Miramax Films and Paramount Vantage. 2007. 122 minutes. The Coen brothers’ adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men turns its back on Hollywood’s sappy, happy-ending film formula. Of course, not all moviegoers seem to appreciate this. The story …
Something about Nothing
Nothing: Something to Believe In, by Nica Lalli (Amherst, N.Y.: Prometheus Books, 2007, ISBN 978-1-59102-529-0) 271 pp. Paper $17.00. Looking for a carefully reasoned philosophical treatise defending atheism and attacking theism? Then this isn’t the book for you, nor does author (and Brooklyn art educator) Nica Lalli pretend to be offering such weighty material. But …
A Broader Horizon
Infidel, by Ayaan Hirsi Ali (New York: Free Press, 2007, ISBN 978- 0-7432-8968-9) 353 pp. Cloth $26. The issue of Islam and women’s rights is both a hot topic and a neglected one—a subject some people worry about and others ignore or sweep under the carpet. It is, in fact, an issue on which progressive …
A Secular Humanist Primer
What Is Secular Humanism?, by Paul Kurtz (Amherst, N.Y.: Prometheus Books, 2007, ISBN 978-1-59102-499-6) 62 pp. Paper $9.95. What Is Secular Humanism? is not an argument in support of secular humanism. Rather, it is a fairly concise statement of the principles secular humanism espouses and a response to allegations that secular humanism is less moral, …
Toward a Robust Scholarship of Secularism
Secularism and Secularity: Contemporary International Perspectives, edited by Barry A. Kosmin and Ariela Keysar (Hartford, Conn.: Institute for the Study of Secularism in Society and Culture, 2007, ISBN 0-979816-0-0) 168 pp. Paper $10. Secularism is conspicuous in today’s news, sometimes by its presence and sometimes by its absence. Sociologist Barry Kosmin and demographer Ariela Keysar …
Seeing the Light
Blind Spots: Why Smart People Do Dumb Things, by Madeleine L. Van Hecke (Amherst, N.Y.: Prometheus Books, 2007, ISBN 978- 1-59102-509-2) 256 pp. Paper $18.00. Madeline Van Hecke displays her extraordinary talent for written communication as well as psychological savvy in her book, Blind Spots: Why Smart People Do Dumb Things. Van Heck discusses ten …
Books in Brief
Religion and the Human Prospect, by Alexander Saxton (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2006, ISBN 1-58367- 133-1) 240 pp. Paper $19.95. This astonishing book offers a profound and novel vision of religion’s place in human life. Alexander Saxton brings his historian’s perspective to such disparate fields as sociology, theology, and evolutionary psychology, weaving a credible, …
Standing Up to God
God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything, by Christopher Hitchens (New York: Twelve Books, Hatchette Book Group, 2007, ISBN 13:978-0-44-657980-3) 307 pp. Cloth $24.99. Given that you have already read reviews of God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything and are likely read the book, too, I am here to offer an unusually personal …
An Embarrassing Misrepresentation
Jesus of Nazareth, by Joseph Ratzinger, Pope Benedict XVI (New York: Doubleday, 2006, ISBN 13: 978-0-38-552341-7) 374 pp. Cloth $24.95. In universities, future clerics, both Roman Catholic and Protestant, receive an introduction to historical criticism of the Bible. They learn the two languages in which it was composed—He brew and Greek—in order to read the …
Reason and Politics
The Assault on Reason, by Al Gore (New York: The Penguin Press, 2007, ISBN 13: 978-1-59420-22-6) 308 pp. Cloth $25.95. In the wake of his successful book and Oscar-winning documentary film, An Inconvenient Truth, former U.S. representative, senator, vice president, and winner of the 2000 presidential popular vote Al Gore has given us The Assault …