Books by author: Sam Harris

After reading Letter to a Christian Nation, I recommended that my book club read The End of Faith. This turned out to be a bad move. Where Letter is terse, polished, and hard to argue with, Faith is a pedantic mess. Harris makes most of the same points in both books, but this one is dull and unconvincing, especially at the end where Harris seems to be arguing that the whole world should convert to Buddhism.

Read Letter to a Christian Nation, but skip this one.

Religion is a huge problem in the world today, and a good part of the problem boils down to the fact that religious fundamentalists believe that any one who does not share their specific branch of fundamentalism is wrong and their lives are inherently worth less. Harris builds from this and points out how much of a problem this poses, not just in the Middle East, but also in middle America.

Letter to a Christian Nation is a fairly elegant work, to which I found myself nodding regularly in considered agreement. It's much better than his larger work The End of Faith.