THE PORTABLE ATHEIST
Christopher Hitchens, editor
Da Capo Press 2007. Soft cover, 499 pages
As a political liberal, I don’t like Hitchens. Once farther to the left than I, he became a conservative in his dislike of Bill Clinton. He reacts to liberals the same way I react to George W. Bush. But I recognize good writing when I see it, and Hitchens has the magic. This book (“Essential Readings for the Nonbeliever”) is different in style from Hitchens’ bestseller GOD IS NOT GREAT, but it is as thoroughly enjoyable.
Hitchens selects 47 essays for inclusion. Their authors are a wide, wild range
of philosophers, poets, scientists, writers, and nearly every one else .
Hitchens writes an introduction to each essay – I was a little disappointed here; I wished that he had located each in time and place. Some he did, some he didn’t.
I won’t discuss each; not enough bandwidth among other reasons (and some I
just didn’t enjoy). But I’d like to mention a few, those in a special class for their scintillating wit and impeccable logic.
Mark Twain’s selection, Thoughts of God, is a rollicking critique of the
housefly as an example of “intelligent design.” None of us could have planned the fly, he says, none could have constructed it, and “no one would have considered it wise to try, except under an assumed name.” Pure Mark Twain, he goes on in this vein for three pages. Among several conclusions he comes to is that if the housefly is the product of intelligent design, then the designer is not too intelligent. The bigotry re atheists at the time was so strong, this work could not be published until after Twain’s death.
Three essays by Richard Dawkins (Why There Almost Certainly is no God, Gerin Oil, and Atheists for Jesus) reveal this author’s sheer brilliance in thought and writing. (Dawkins’ THE BLIND WATCHMAKER is the best book on evolution I’ve ever read.) Among other things he discusses is the common misunderstanding of evolution: that complex things come about by chance. They don’t. They come about by natural selection, a process that is inherent in the biological world. One of his neat statements: “However statistically improbable the entity you seek to explain by invoking a designer, the designer himself has got to be at least as improbable.”
Michael Shermer contributes a wonderful pastiche entitled Genesis Revisited A Scientific Creation Story. These 2-1/2 pages are witty, iconoclastic, and funny – in places howlingly so. It’s worth reading under any circumstances. I don’t want to spoil it, but to give you the flavor, I’ll quote the first few lines: “In the beginning – specifically on October 23, 4004 B.C., at noon – out of quantum foam fluctuation God created the Big Bang, followed by cosmological inflation and an expanding universe. And darkness was upon the face of the deep . . .”
I’ve not mentioned a lot of the contributors: David Hume, Darwin, HL Mencken, Carl Sagan, Martin Gardner, HP Lovecraft, Daniel Dennett, and the list goes and goes. It’s impossible to read this in continuous fashion; too much of it requires stopping and musing. You’ll want to put this volume into your library.
--Reviewed by Les Cole
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THE RESERVE
Harper Collins, New York, 2008, 287 pages$24.95
Russell Banks never writes the same novel twice. His previous novel The Darling told the first person story of a female American radical during the 1960's. Cloudsplitter, a novel of John Brown, takes place before the American Civil War. Rule of the Bone is a hard-edged story of teen angst, travel and sex, a sort of hard-edged Catcher in the Rye .
The story opens with a young woman looking out over a body of water, reminiscent of the opening of John Fowles' The French Lieutenant's Woman . In this case the scene is a lake in the Adirondacks rather than the Atlantic. On this lake, artist Jordon Groves (based rather loosely on illustrator Rockwell Kent) lands his pontoon bi-plane, which sets off a series of incidents full of failed marriages, sexual obsession, and madness. All of this is played out against a backdrop of the 1930's, the Spanish Civil War, class consciousness, and the emerging practice of psychoanalysis.
Any summery of the plot sounds faintly ridiculous and forced. Yet the characters remain always interesting and alive. Banks patterned Venessa, who opens the novel, after a mistress of Hemingway, a stunningly beautiful woman who was more than a little crazy. Yet her actions, often spontaneous and bizarre, never cross the line to unbelievable. The artist Jordon takes on the mantle of a Fitzgerald character. Certainly the doomed protagonist reminds one of Gatsby, although a Gatsby with a more realistic view of women, even the ones who interest him sexually.
And perhaps we must look to that author as the inspiration for this novel. While Banks style is a bit plodding, he has created a story full of vibrant characters who are as much a part of their age as were those of Fitzgerald.
The Reserve has met with mixed reviews. The New York Times (Jan. 29, 2008) complained that the book moved along in "a hokey, herky-jerky fashion that never lets the reader forget that Mr. Banks is standing there behind the proscenium, pulling the characters' strings." The San Francisco Chronicle said "Banks spins an overwrought, not always convincing narrative that evokes - distantly - Theodore Dreiser's 'An American Tragedy.'" On the other hand, The Boston Globe thought "'The Reserve' may well be the best - and darkest - work of fiction written to date about the storied region of high peaks, glacial lakes, and vast forests covering an area nearly the size of Massachusetts."
Certainly The Reserve is an entertaining novel, although it fails to reach the heights of The Sweet Hereafter , Banks' most affecting book. Still, the novel proves enjoyable, and often his descriptions of the Adirondacks is pure poetry. At one point, a house burns down, and smoke "...undetected by humans anywhere, within the Reserve or without, making it the private knowledge only of the animals and birds residing in the Reserve, the deer and bears and coyotes, the bobcats and fisher cats, the foxes, martins, and mink, the hawks and eagles and ravens on the rock-topped peaks."
--Reviewed by Jim Hitt
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