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| The Good Book: A Humanist Bible
| | A.C. Grayling
| A book of extraordinary audacity from a remarkable thinker--a secular bible drawn from the wisdom and humanity in the world's great literature.
The Good Book is an inspired work of insight, wisdom, solace, and commentary on the human condition drawn from the world's great humanist traditions of thought and literature, Western and Easter alike. Consciously following the design and presentation of the Bible, in the beauty of its language and its arrangement into short chapters and verses, acclaimed philosopher Anthony Grayling has crafted an epic stimulating narrative that ultimately reveals how life--a good life--should be lived.
Inspired by the thinking of Herodotus and Cicero, Confucious and Mencius, Montaigne, Bacon and so many others, Grayling has distilled the work of hundreds of authors and more than one thousand texts using the same techniques of editing, redaction, and adaptation that produced the holy books of the Judeo-Christian and Islamic religions. Their wit and yearnings, love and consolations are shaped into fourteen constituent parts that recall the Bible in structure--Genesis, Wisdom, Parables, Concord, Lamentations, Consolations, Sages, Songs, Histories, Proverbs, The Lawgiver, Acts, Epistles, and The Good. Opening with meditations on the origin and progress of the world and human life within it, Grayling then focuses on the questions of how life should be lived, how we relate to one another, and how vicissitudes are to be faced and joys appreciated.
For a secular age in which many find that religion no longer speaks to them, The Good Book is a literary tour de force--a book of life and practice invoking the greatest minds of the past in the perennial challenge of being human.
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