Tolle Lege!.

The book was slightly different then what I expected. It's a survey book that broadly covers poetry, prose, painting, philosophy, dance and science after the time of Nietzsche and his pronouncement that "God is dead". It looks at each topic separately and he'll spend a couple or so pages on a person within each topic and than quickly moves on to another person within that topic.

I know so little about most of the people (writers, poets, painters and philosophers) he covers in the book. I enjoyed learning about all those people whose thoughts and works I know so little about (William James, James Joyce, other writers, all the poets he mentions, and almost all the artist are people I've ignored through out my life). I don't have the ability to understand what they were saying or trying to say with their works, but now I got a feel by having read this book.

The book doesn't really have an overriding narrative that ties everything together. The author tries to show how each person mentioned (and there's probably over 200 who are mentioned and their works are discussed) handles the big questions in life. Most of them don't even seem to be atheist in the strict sense of the word. They all were worth learning about.

This book is a delight to read on the kindle. When he mentions a painting or a poem, for example, I could easily do a Google search on it and read the whole poem or look at the painting. I downloaded 20 or so of the books he mentions (which were free) and put them on my kindle.

The book is a great survey of recent thought, but it's not what I fully expected because of it's lack of an overriding narrative tying the pieces together because he constantly jumps around from person to person.