A number of years ago on another blog this review was published. Hitchens has now passed from this life, but I’ve left the review exactly as published before sans the introduction. Christopher Hitchens is, quoting the inside cover of god is not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything: “a contributing editor to Vanity Fair and a visiting professor of liberal studies at the New School…He was named, to his own amusement, number five on a list of ‘Top 100 Public Intellectuals’ by Foreign Policy and Britain’s Prospect.” The New Yorker calls him, “An intellectual willing to show his teeth in the cause for righteousness” (the last being an odd choice of terms to say the least), while the Village Voice lauds Hitchens as “American’s foremost rhetorical pugilist.” The best place to summarize this book is by beginning with a quote from its final two pages: Religion has run out of justification. Thanks to the teleschope and the microscope, it no longer offers an explanation of anything important….Confronted with undreamed-of vistas inside our own evolving cortex, in the farthest reaches of the known universe, and in the proteins and acids which constitute our nature, religion offers either annihilation in the name of god, or else the false promise that if we take a knife to our foreskins, or pray in the right direction, or ingest pieces of wafer, we shall be “saved.” If is as if someone, offered a delicious and fragrant out-of-season fruit, matured in a painstakingly and lovingly designed hothouse, should throw away the flesh and the pulp and gnaw moodily on the pit.