Scan barcode
A review by pedanther
The Good Book: A Secular Bible by A.C. Grayling
reflective
slow-paced
3.5
There were parts of this that were definitely worth reading. I wish they'd been properly attributed, so I knew who to thank for them.
I have mixed feelings about the "Secular Bible" conceit. It works as a way of drawing a potential reader's attention; I might not have ever heard of this book if it had been called something more restrained, and the series of events that led to me having this copy would never have happened. But I don't feel like the efforts to mimic The Style of The Bible achieve anything useful, only to distance the reader and give the impression that the work of one man is trying to drape itself in the borrowed finery of a major cultural artifact created by many hands over the course of centuries.
(Of course, while the compilation is the work of one man, the text isn't - but that brings us back around to the fact that I wish the one man had chosen a different format that included proper attribution. Some of the more distinctive bits are susceptible to being Googled, but there are other bits that I'd really like to know whose words they really are.)
Moderate: Child death, Death, Fatphobia, Infidelity, Racism, Rape, Sexism, Slavery, Suicide, Torture, Xenophobia, Grief, Cannibalism, Murder, Alcohol, Colonisation, War, and Classism
Minor: Adult/minor relationship and Miscarriage
The content warnings largely pertain to the section "Histories", which is derived from Herodotus' histories of the Greco-Persian Wars and includes accounts of atrocities both on and off the battlefield, and to the section "Acts", which is derived from Plutarch's biographies of famous Greek and Roman leaders.