February 2008
The Book Club meets once a month (usually the second Tuesday of the month) in Castlebar Library at 8.00pm. Check events page for next meeting. (Previous Book Club selections)
Book for February meeting, 2008
The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins
Richard Dawkins, who holds the interesting title of “Charles Simonyi professor of the public understanding of science” at Oxford University, is a master of scientific exposition and synthesis. When it comes to his own specialty, evolutionary biology, there is none better. But the purpose of this book, his latest of many, is not to explain science. It is rather, as he tells us, “to raise consciousness,” which is quite another thing.
The nub of Dawkins’s consciousness-raising message is that to be an atheist is a “brave and splendid” aspiration. Belief in God is not only a delusion, he argues, but a “pernicious” one. On a scale of 1 to 7, where 1 is certitude that God exists and 7 is certitude that God does not exist, Dawkins rates himself a 6: “I cannot know for certain but I think God is very improbable, and I live my life on the assumption that he is not there.”
What Dawkins brings to this approach is a couple of fresh arguments — no mean achievement, considering how thoroughly these issues have been debated over the centuries — and a great deal of passion. The book fairly crackles with brio. Yet reading it can feel a little like watching a Michael Moore movie. There is lots of good, hard-hitting stuff about the imbecilities of religious fanatics and frauds of all stripes, but the tone is smug and the logic occasionally sloppy..........
But it is less edifying when he questions the sincerity of serious thinkers who disagree with him, like the late Stephen Jay Gould, or insinuates that recipients of the million-dollar-plus Templeton Prize, awarded for work reconciling science and spirituality, are intellectually dishonest (and presumably venal to boot). In a particularly low blow, he accuses Richard Swinburne, a philosopher of religion and science at Oxford , of attempting to “justify the Holocaust,” when Swinburne was struggling to square such monumental evils with the existence of a loving God. Perhaps all is fair in consciousness-raising. But Dawkins’s avowed hostility can make for scattershot reasoning as well as for rhetorical excess. Moreover, in training his Darwinian guns on religion, he risks destroying a larger target than he intends.
Despite the many flashes of brilliance in this book, Dawkins’s failure to appreciate just how hard philosophical questions about religion can be makes reading it an intellectually frustrating experience. As long as there are no decisive arguments for or against the existence of God, a certain number of smart people will go on believing in him, just as smart people reflexively believe in other things for which they have no knock-down philosophical arguments, like free will, or objective values, or the existence of other minds.
....... If the after-death options are either a beatific vision (God) or oblivion (no God), then it is poignant to think that believers will never discover that they are wrong, whereas Dawkins and fellow atheists will never discover that they are right.
The New York Times, Jim Holt
In The God Delusion he (Dawkins) displays what a formidable adversary he is. It is a spirited and exhilarating read. In the current climate of papal/Islamic stand-off, it is timely too.
There is no hesitancy or doubt here. Dawkins comes roaring forth in the full vigour of his powerful arguments, laying into fallacies and false doctrines with the energy of the polemicist at his most fiery. "My earlier books did not set out to convert anyone ... this book does," he declares. Its tone is chattier than usual, given to conversational asides, even urgent pleadings - "Please, please raise your consciousness about this!" he begs about the religious indoctrination of tiny children. And should you doubt his intent, an appendix lists "friendly addresses for individuals needing support in escaping from religion". The words "humanist", "rationalist", "secular", "atheist" dot those addresses. Dawkins is, if he will excuse the word, on a crusade.
Around the world communities are increasingly defined as Muslim, Christian, Jewish, and living peaceably together is ever harder to sustain. Champions of each faith maintain its superiority to the rest. Recent remarks by Pope Benedict XVI show the man in his true colours: an absolutist pointing up with intellectual precision the incompatibility of Islam and Christianity. He did this long before he was Pope, writing the declaration of John Paul II that all religions other than the Catholic faith were defective. Since his election he has demoted efforts at rapprochement with Islam and, on a visit to Auschwitz, failed to address the papacy's collusion with Nazism. The Pope is, of course, held to be infallible by the Catholic church. Islam's response to all this - "if you dare to say we're a violent religion, then we'll kill you!" - compounds not only the idiocy of rival dogmas but also the dangers. Islam's sharia law invests the law of the land with its own religious and often brutal priorities. Apostasy is punishable by death, as is homosexuality. Christian observance is put under increasing pressure. Dawkins is right to be not only angry but alarmed. Religions have the secular world running scared. This book is a clarion call to cower no longer. Primed by anger, redeemed by humour, it will, I trust, offend many.
The Guardian, Joan Bakewell, Sept. 2006
Fire in the Blood by Irene Nemirovsky (trans. by Sandra Smith)
The most impressive piece of fiction published in Britain in 2006 was written in France in 1942. When it appeared in English translation last year, Irène Némirovsky’s Suite Française was received with both acclaim and astonishment. Acclaim, because it was a masterpiece. Astonishment, because of the remarkable way its manuscript had survived: snatched up by her daughters when they fled the family home to escape being sent to their deaths in Auschwitz as their parents had been; kept in hiding with them throughout the war; stored unread for decades; looked at only in 1996 when it was about to be handed over to a war archive.
Miraculously, it now turns out that another unpublished work by Némirovsky – Fire in the Blood – was also saved. A literary find of the same quality as Suite Française, it fascinatingly complements it. Where Suite Française’s two completed sections (Storm in June and Dolce) contrastingly chronicled the fall of Paris to the Nazis in 1940 and the occupation of a village deep in the French countryside by German soldiers, Fire in the Blood focuses on prewar life in the same dour rural community.
As in Suite Française, Némirovsky’s intense responsiveness to the country that became her adopted home in 1919, after the Russian revolution drove her and her parents from St Petersburg, is perceptible on every page. So is her fruitful absorption in French literature. Her novella’s clear-eyed sexual realism and the mixture of down-to-earth practicality and sensuous evocation it brings to its portrayals of the countryside call to mind Colette (a native of the Burgundy region where it is set). Its acquisitive, distrustful landowners sunk in taciturn routines, beneath which desperations and long-held animosities seethe, wouldn’t be out of place amid the claustrophobic provincial households of François Mauriac’s novels.
Deceptively quiet and simple-seeming at first, Fire in the Blood takes you into a vividly realised rural world. Green vines quiver in the breeze. Ripe fruit drops gently into the grass. An autumn sunset flames above sodden, tilled fields. Crows circle round snow-laden trees in the bleak winters when life withdraws into the lonely farmhouses. These seasonal and agricultural rhythms provide the backdrop to a story of what transpires when human mating and fertility go awry. ....In a book fuelled with images of fire and embers, Némirovsky brilliantly depicts a closed-in, inward-looking community, then gives what happens in it universal resonance by exhibiting not only what people do to each other but what the passing of time does to us all.
The Sunday Times, Peter Kemp, Sept 2007
The novella is a model of storytelling, with each surprise appointed its appropriate place. One guilty façade after another is stripped away, but the ending has to be ambiguous. These wretched men and women will go on hoarding their money, and distrusting their neighbours as much as they distrust themselves. What a hellish Arcadia Némirovsky conjures up, and with what refinement and subtlety, even as the fire in the blood ignites and destroys.
The Independent, Paul Bailey, October 2007
The translation is lovely - sharp and poignant. In the end it is neither farce nor muttering claustrophobia. Nemirovsky's voice is not loud, flamboyant or morose. It is clear and steady. It is the steadiness, the slow burn that does the work.
The Guardian, George Szirtes, Sept. 2007
Some useful book club links (external links: open new window)
- Reader's Area of this site
- Reader's Review site with active discussion board
- Book Group Links: A selection of sites compiled by the Salt Lake City Library.
- Great Books Foundation: The grandfather of them all
- Reading Group Choices Online: Over 550 guides from publishers. 150 can be printed from the site
- Reading Group Guides: A very useful selection of reading group guides from Random House Publishers
- Writer's Resource site for writers of all abilities