Book Reviews Archives

Book Review: The Greatest Show on Earth by Richard Dawkins

February 23, 2020November 4, 2021Rebekah Kohlhepp

If you only know of Richard Dawkins as a militant anti-theist, then you don’t know Richard Dawkins. In his purest form, the man is an enthusiastic and impassioned science communicator, and one of the biggest fans of Charles Darwin that I have ever read. (And a bigot.) This was made crystal clear to me as I read The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution. I decided to read this book when everyone on the Internet collectively made it known to me that it was an amazing, must-read book.

Book Review: Almost Human by Lee Berger

February 2, 2020October 15, 2023Rebekah Kohlhepp

A few months ago, I reviewed my now-favorite nonfiction book, Lucy: The Beginnings of Humankind by Donald Johanson and Maitland Edey. I had always been curious about human origins, but that book really ignited my interest in the topic of paleoanthropology: the study of ancient hominid fossils. At the end of my Lucy review, I wrote,

Book Review: The Founding Myth by Andrew Seidel

January 19, 2020October 23, 2021Rebekah Kohlhepp

This week I finished Andrew Seidel’s book The Founding Myth: Why Christian Nationalism is Un-American. As is my custom, that means it’s time for a book review! I’m particularly excited about this one, because The Founding Myth is one of the few books that I have rated as five stars on Goodreads—and it’s one the most highly rated books on my whole shelf!

We Read the Entire Bible

January 5, 2020January 18, 2022Rebekah Kohlhepp

It was January 1st, 2019.

It was the middle of the day on a Tuesday, and I was sitting on the couch, probably on my eighth YouTube video of the day, surrounded by (virtual) stacks of resumes. I had gotten married and moved in with my husband a month and a half before, and I didn’t have a job yet. There wasn’t much to do. I remembered an idea I had had before I got married, and that was that when we were settled into our own place, we should probably read the bible together.

Book Review: Did Jesus Exist? by Bart Ehrman

December 8, 2019October 24, 2022Rebekah Kohlhepp

I’ve had an interest in religion and atheism for a long time, especially since I started writing on this blog three years ago. I’ve covered topics like evolution and creationism, the Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod (the religion I was raised in), and a whole lot of thoughts and opinions on religion in general and the existence of God. While I’ve done plenty of research, it still shouldn’t come as a surprise to you that I tend to have my own personal biases when looking at evidence for things like God or evolution.

Book Review: Outgrowing God by Richard Dawkins

November 10, 2019January 6, 2022Rebekah Kohlhepp

One of the first things I did when I wanted to educate myself on atheism was read The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins. Predictable, I know. I was a sophomore at the super-Christian, super-conservative Grove City College and all that I knew was that my professors hated Dawkins, so he must be doing something right. When I bought my own copy of The God Delusion, (the first book in my collection), I kept it hidden inside the cover of another, unsuspicious, book. I was still a closeted atheist at college, but more so to my Lutheran family at home.

Book Review: Lucy by Donald Johanson

October 13, 2019January 6, 2022Rebekah Kohlhepp

I had bought Don Johanson’s Lucy: The Beginnings of Humankind last fall, and my copy is a first edition that I had found at Cleveland’s coolest cat-inhabited bookstore, Loganberry Books. I then realized that not only was there a Lucy exhibit at the nearby Cleveland Museum of Natural History, but that the author of the book, who was also the original founder of the Lucy fossil, had been based out of that museum at the time. We also found out that it was closed for the day and we would have to come back another time.

Book Review: The Reason for God by Tim Keller

September 1, 2019February 19, 2022Rebekah Kohlhepp

Last night, I successfully completed Presbyterian pastor Timothy Keller’s apologetics book The Reason for God: Belief in an Age of Skepticism. I find it fascinating to read through various apologetics books (like The Case for a Creator, Emails to a Young Seeker, and this), and see how they differ and how they don’t. There were a lot of topics in The Reason for God that were familiar, but as with most apologetics books, the author tweaked a thing or two to try to refresh the tired arguments and make them his own.

Book Review: Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari

June 16, 2019January 18, 2022Rebekah Kohlhepp

If you follow me on Goodreads, then you may have seen the painstakingly slow journey I have been on in the past months with Yuval Noah Harari’s nonfiction bestseller Sapiens. It felt a bit like a textbook at times, which contributed to it being a pretty slow read. But it was definitely something that I wanted to read all the way through, because most of its readers have been raving about it since its publication in 2015.

Book Review: Only a Theory by Kenneth Miller

March 31, 2019January 18, 2022Rebekah Kohlhepp

As I mentioned in last week’s post, I’ve been wrapping up another book, and this week I finally finished it! I read Kenneth Miller’s Only A Theory: Evolution and the Battle for America’s Soul, which arose from the 2006 court case Selman v. Cobb County School District.

This dispute began innocently, with textbook publisher Prentice Hall and a run-of-the-mill biology textbook. Frustratingly, but not surprisingly, the religious climate in Georgia at the time made teaching honest biology harder than it should be. The Cobb County School District included with every biology textbook a sticker: