Leticia's Reviews > God: An Anatomy

Despite a fascinating topic well-argued... I found this slightly hard work and was relieved when I finished it. The book’s core thesis—that the god of Judaism and Christianity was for many centuries understood to be a divine but physical being, with a body, bodily functions, passions, and relationships with other gods—is very quickly explained and totally convincing, which means that the next several hundred pages don’t quite have the urgency that persuasion, or unfolding of an argument’s layers might have brought. Every individual passage is very well written, there is a staggering amount of history and myth packed neatly into every chapter, it is often funny and surprising, but perhaps because it is arranged by topic/body part rather than chronologically, with no narrative to order it, as a whole it feels a bit bloated and fragmented. We jumped between places, eras and pantheons so frequently that I don’t think I could actually recount any of the history or mythology I read about to another person. I admit that a more conscientious reader might not experience these issues.