Reviews
Interesting idea: take Bible literalists literally; see how much of the book’s many empirical claims are anywhere near right, re: cosmogony, hygiene, heredity, migration. Couple cool results – Today, each [Amish] mother has, on average, half a dozen children, and the community is growing at almost 10 per cent a year… At that rate the Amish could, by the middle of the next century, have a population equivalent to the whole of today’s United States... Many saints died in ‘the odour of sanctity’, a sweet smell supposed to mark the departure of the soul. The scent is that of acetone, made in the liver as its capital runs out. – but unstructured, often unclear, and tiring, in the main. Minus a half for having no citations for any of its thousand claims.