Today’s New York Times Book Review has a review by Bill Clinton of Robert Caro’s latest (and fourth) volume in his ongoing biography of Lyndon Johnson. Readers here will know that I consider this as one of the two best political biographies of all time, the other being William Manchester’s unfinished biography of Winston Churchill. The latest […]
Friday’s New York Times contained a discussion by Maud Newton of a publishing phenomenon, Pastor Todd Burpo’s bestelling book (written with Lynn Vincent), Heaven is for Real. I wrote about this book thirteen months ago. It recounts how Todd’s son Colton, four years old at the time, suffered a burst appendix, and how his “near death experience” involved […]
Yesterday’s New York Times Book Review has a review by Molly Worthen, a writer and professor of religious history, on When God Talks Back: Understanding the American Evangelical Relationship with God, by Tanya Luhrman, a psychological anthropologist who has also written on psychiatry. Lurhman studied one evangelical and charismatic sect (the Vineyard Christian Fellowship) for […]
Most of you surely know of Victor Stenger, a physicist who has written several books on science and atheism, including God: The Failed Hypothesis and The New Atheism, both of which I liked. His main thrust is, like Dawkins, to regard the notion of God as a scientific hypothesis, and then apply the tools of […]
This week the New York Times reviews two biology books, one of which I’ll be reading for sure. The one I’ll probably give a miss is in today’s Book Review section: The Great Animal Orchestra, written by musician Bernie Krause and reviewed by Jeremy Denk, a concert pianist and blogger. The review is mixed: After […]
If I try to name the three best political biographies I’ve read, two of them are by Robert Caro. The first is The Power Broker (1975), a biography of Robert Moses, a master planner responsible for transforming New York through the construction of many bridges, buildings, and expressways. He was also ruthless and a master […]
I have a confession. I was not keen on Lawrence Krauss’s new book on the origin of the universe, A Universe from Nothing: Why there is Something Rather Than Nothing. I couldn’t share the chorus of approbation and acclaim for the book, and wondered if I, as opposed to everyone else, was blind to its […]
Because it contains a really nice essay by physicist Sean Carroll,”Does the universe need God?” (online for free), I was interested in buying The Blackwell Companion to Science and Christianity, edited by J. G. Stump and A. G. Padgett (Wiley). But now I see that it’s going for the absolutely ridiculous price of $199. And there’s another reason […]
At least half a dozen readers have called my attention to John Gray’s review in The New Statesman of Alain de Botton’s new book, Religion for Atheists: A Non-Believer’s Guide to the Uses of Religion. de Botton, you’ll recall, is the guy who wants humanists and atheists to adopt the trappings of religion—weekly meetings, sermons, […]
I found an old review on my computer today—one I’d written for the Times Literary Supplement in 2007. The book under review was Avoid Boring People: And Other Lessons from a Life in Science, by J. D. Watson, and my title was, obviously, “Unlucky Jim”. (Watson had just been dismissed as director of the Cold Spring […]
