I have a nominee for your Bad Book Review contest. Frankly, I think Rolling Stone's Matt Taibbi's blog post/ review of Terry Eagleton's recent book Reason, Faith and Revolution could easily qualify for "The I Don't Get it Award", "Most Sarcastic-Aren't-I-Wicked Award", and "The Best I-Missed-the-Point –Entirely Comment/Review," but if it has to be nominated in just one category, it probably belongs under "Most Hateful Signed Review/Blog Comment." Taibbi himself, I think, is a somewhat inconsistent writer-- I've enjoyed some of his stuff, but not a whole lot of it. But he frankly doesn't seem to understand Eagleton's point, which is that much of the "New Atheism's" dismissal of religion entirely is based upon a limited understanding of history, art, literature, and theology in general. Instead, Taibbi's offers up lines like these:
"Like almost all great defenders of religion, Eagleton specializes in putting bunches of words together in ways that sound like linear arguments, but actually make no sense whatsoever."
"Anyway this is the kind of stuff that permeates Eagleton’s work: a lot of masturbatory semantics and naked goalpost-moving buried in great gnarled masses of old-world sneering and unnecessary syllables."
"[Eagleton and Stanley Fish] seem determined to prove that the quality of not believing in heaven and hell and burning bushes and saints is a rigid dogma all unto itself, as though it required a concerted intellectual effort to disbelieve in a God who thinks gays (Leviticus 20:13) or people who work on Sunday (Exodus 35:2) should be put to death."
[This despite Eagleton's own criticism of American fundamentalism that "thinks gays... should be put to death."]
"If you ever want to give yourself a really good, throbbing headache, go online and check out Eagleton’s lectures at Yale, upon which the book was based, in which one may listen to this soft-soaping old toady do his verbose best to stick his tongue as far as he can up the anus of the next generation of the American upper class."
This last line is actually my favorite, as it reveals that Taibbi apparently knows nothing about the guy he's writing about. People may like or dislike Terry Eagleton, but the man's devoted his academic career to Marxist literary theory and politics. He's not gonna... y'know... do that to the upper class.
Anyway. This "review" (I'm not sure if it can properly be called that, as it occurs to me that Taibbi at no point claims to have read the book he's criticizing) remains a favorite of mine for its vituperative stupidity and anti-intellectualism.
You can find the full review here:
http://trueslant.com/matttaibbi/2009/05/07/god-talk-stanley-fish-blog-nytimescom/
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