Mitford, Monks and Mujahideen

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Having already written a lushly illustrated overview of the beliefs and practices of the world's religions (World Religions, also from DK), Bowker turns his attention to God and produces a book chock-full of facts, stories, legends and illustrations about the ways that religious traditions have developed their beliefs in God. Bowker first examines the ideas of Nietzsche, Feuerbach, Freud and others to demonstrate that all individuals and societies grapple with the meaning of God.

In roughly chronological order, Bowker surveys the history of belief in God in animistic religions, Hinduism, Buddhism, Chinese religions, Judaism, Christianity and Islam. He explores various aspects of this belief, such as the meaning of dharma, the concept of wisdom and the nature of pilgrimage. Yet Bowker's book contains numerous problems. First, he never explains what he means by God. Is God the same as the Sacred or the Divine? Without a clearer explanation, many of the religions that he examines Buddhism, for example cannot be said to have a God. Second, does God indeed have a history? That implies that God would have had a beginning and will have an end, which runs counter to the notion that God is eternal and ahistorical.

Third, because he does not provide a clear definition of God, Bowker levels the differences among the world's religions so that it appears that the God of Judaism is the same as the God of Hinduism. At best, Bowker provides a superficial overview of the history of belief in God for the "religion lite" crowd.

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Twenty-three-year-old professional boxer Laila Ali, daughter of Muhammad Ali and Veronica Porche, notes, "I've always been a little suspicious of people who write books the minute they get famous... if I write a book... it's going to have to help people and tell the truth."

Ali attempts to do that, but falls slightly short, offering instead a chronicle of her childhood and career thus far. In a direct, no-nonsense narrative, she discusses her feelings of isolation as her parents focused more on their public face than on family. She endured physical abuse, arrests, stints in jail and stays at a group home. Ali admits she was a difficult child, uninterested in school and sometimes mingling with the wrong crowd, but given the lack of supervision, this isn't surprising.

Ali's honesty is appealing and readers will be sympathetic to her adolescent difficulties. However, her book lacks a strong motivational element. While Ali discusses her own development, she fails to generalize for readers. The chapter headings (referred to as "rounds") suggest a self-help message (e.g., "Developing Independence"; "Coping with Confusion"), yet Ali merely shares her experiences and doesn't offer advice. Some readers will be inspired by the author's words, e.g., "Everyone's story is special" and "Success is built on a foundation of hard work," but had Ali explained more of her decisions rather than simply recording the events of her life, her book would have been a more valuable inspirational tome.

As an editor at London's Observer, Picardie hired her younger sister, Ruth, to write a series of columns chronicling her personal experiences with breast cancer. After submitting only a few essays, Ruth, the mother of two-year-old twins, died at age 33. Justine and Ruth had been exceptionally close, and here the surviving sibling offers diary entries from her own year of mourning between Good Friday 2000 and Easter Sunday 2001.

Picardie is no stranger to death, undergoing an unusual number of losses through illness, accident and suicide, and this excess along with her deep grief over her sister's death leads her on a quest for answers to one of life's most basic mysteries: "Where do the dead go?" Missing Ruth terribly, Picardie realizes, "I didn't expect silence," and begins watching for signs and messages. Urgently seeking communication with "the other side," Picardie visits "spiritualists," scientific researchers and inventors of electronic machines that claim to record the voices of the dead. With obsessive hope and healthy skepticism, Picardie haunts the Internet, flies halfway around the world to a conference of psychic mediums and studies Freud and Jung's unpublished correspondences. She describes her dreams of Ruth and arguments with her rational "imaginary therapist."

Frustrated with Ruth's silence, the author reveals the mourner's secret fear that "she doesn't love me anymore; she doesn't want to talk to me." Originally published by Macmillan in Great Britain, this well-told tale is a deeply touching, intellectually captivating investigation into the elusive nature of love and death.

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