The author makes it clear that he intends this book to be an easy read, and something of a digest of the main arguments concerning 'biblical nonsense'. Unfortunately, he is not really qualified to do it. Yes, he knows his bible: no, he doesn't appear to know the considerable wealth of literature written about it. Don't get me wrong - I'm an atheist, and frankly the bible is no more than a curiosity to me (albeit one that carries extraordinary cultural weight) - but I do object to paying money for a 'man-in-the-pub' argument! This is not a good book: the critiques of biblical stories are quite facile and superficial, the language is clumsy and full of malapropisms.

If you're interested in the 'dark side' of the bible - its many contradictions and astonishingly brutal world-view - then there are much better places to read about it. The anti-religion stance of writers like Dawkins and Hitchens is an obvious place to start, but I would also recommend something like Armstrong's 'The Case for God', which invokes criticism of the bible in order to demonstrate the difference between the merely human manufactured artefacts of religion (the bible, she argues, being amongst them), and what Armstrong considers 'the truth about religion' [interesting how even this very considered and informed religious argument still relies on despotic absolutes!].

Read this for a bit of craic - but choose something else for substance.