Suggest NON-FICTION books for our next official discussion

DWill · Unread post Sat Dec 06, 2008 11:46 am

For me the two best prospects are Beyond Culture and Bad Money: Reckless Finance, Failed Politics, and the Global Crisis of American Capitalism . The second title obviously is very topical and might do something to make me less of an ignoramus about the world of finance. I would also expect Phillips to be a writer who can avoid making this subject dull and technical.

DWill · Unread post Wed Dec 10, 2008 8:03 am

I'd like to make another suggestion. It surprises me to see that BT has not read Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion. Just from my general impression, this has been the most influential and most highly praised book in the category of "the new atheism" to come out in the past few years. Actually, I had thought it was published a couple of years before 2006. It is still a recent book. I make this suggestion partly because I haven't given Dawkins a really thorough hearing and would like to be able
to hear what others have to say about his latest book. I don't think it is necessary to give a lot of info on the book, but just in case, here is a link to a site giving many brief reviews from articulate readers.

http://www.complete-review.com/reviews/ ... lusion.htm

Unread post Wed Dec 10, 2008 9:28 am

35 Jan., Feb. & Mar. 2007 The God Delusion

Mr. P · Unread post Wed Dec 10, 2008 9:53 am

Chris OConnor wrote:35 Jan., Feb. & Mar. 2007 The God Delusion

Yep...that was the last discussion that drew me in!

realiz · Unread post Wed Dec 10, 2008 2:25 pm

DW

I'd like to make another suggestion. It surprises me to see that BT has not read Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion. Just from my general impression, this has been the most influential and most highly praised book in the category of "the new atheism" to come out in the past few years.

After reading a few of these reviews , I suspect this book is very similar in tone to godless:

" (...) As far as theology goes, Dawkins has an enormous amount in common with Ian Paisley and American TV evangelists. Both parties agree pretty much on what religion is; it's just that Dawkins rejects it while Oral Roberts and his unctuous tribe grow fat on it. (...) There is a very English brand of common sense that believes mostly in what it can touch, weigh and taste, and The God Delusion springs from, among other places, that particular stable. At its most philistine and provincial, it makes Dick Cheney sound like Thomas Mann." - Terry Eagleton, London Review of Books

"(A) very uneven collection of scriptural ridicule, amateur philosophy, historical and contemporary horror stories, anthropological speculations, and cosmological scientific argument." - Thomas Nagel, The New Republic

"In spite of the evidence that holding religious belief has become part of human nature through natural selection, Dawkins looks upon it as superfluous and the root of much violent evil. But however clever his reasoning (and it is clever), The God Delusion sounds like a personal vendetta, complete with elitist undertones and some uncomfortably dictatorial passages. In the preface, he expresses the hope that religious readers who open the book will be atheists when they put it down. That is academic arrogance -- and shows negligible insight into the way humans behave." - Margaret Cook, New Statesman

"Dawkins is, of course, quite right to express horror at Biblical fundamentalism, especially in the neocon form that centres on the book of Revelation. But it is not possible to attack this target properly while also conducting a wider, cluster-bomb onslaught on everything that can be called religion. Since this particular bad form of religion is spreading rapidly in the world, we urgently need to understand it: not just to denounce it but to grasp much better than we do now why people find it attractive. It is not enough to say, as Dawkins does, that they are being childish." - Mary Midgley, New Scientist

Unread post Wed Dec 10, 2008 7:46 pm

I'll look through this thread tonight and try to get the poll up too.

Unread post Wed Dec 10, 2008 9:39 pm

My recommendation would be God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything by Christopher Hitchens.

If not Hitch, Darwin's After Tamerlane is a superb book which would strongly justify wider readership and expansion of the thread already started.

I think Edward Said could wait, as could something about Leonard Cohen.

Grim · Unread post Wed Dec 10, 2008 9:59 pm

Hmmmm...while another book with a religous topic is very interesting, I have foundd that the particular topic of faith has not had a probelm finding its share of time in the forums. I still support my two choices of Bad Money or The limits of State Action. I think that the forums would benefit from more political discussion and a little less religious exchage.

Too often religious disscusions become little more than a place to express personal feelings depending if religion is important to the contributors involved or not. I feel that politics and the economy has a more reasonable scope and gives the greatest oppourtunity for the exposing of true wisdom and thought as opposed to a continuation of the model which would involve further expressions of slanted opinion and personal biases, which, while not without a host of real life examples seem to serve little than to create self-feeding cycles of opinion or the somewhat pseudo-revolutionary personal narrative of deep dissatisfaction.

Suggest NON-FICTION books for our next official discussion

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