Rating: 
Summary: Some Kind of Wonderful
Review: I picked this up because I'm a Rick Moody fan and he wrote this "heretic's bible"'s "Book of Jonah." It's as good as I hoped -- maybe one of his best stories -- and alone worth the price of the book, but the whole thing turned out to be a delicious surprise, almost like a great novel, even though the chapters by outside writers like Moody trade off with chapters by the two main authors, Manseau and Sharlet. Their chapters are called "psalms," and even though these psalms are nonfiction journalism, they're like poems describing all the fascinating ways people love god or hate him or her or check the box marked "other." Their trip across America, from a church near Ground Zero not long after September 11th to rural strip club where all the strippers are religious prophets is inspiring, and the other writers they bring in to join them are provocative. My favorite is Moody's, but don't miss any of them. I'm not religious, but Killing the Buddha makes me believe in the power of stories.
Rating:
Summary: Some Kind of Wonderful
Review: I picked this up because I'm a Rick Moody fan and he wrote this "heretic's bible"'s "Book of Jonah." It's as good as I hoped -- maybe one of his best stories -- and alone worth the price of the book, but the whole thing turned out to be a delicious surprise, almost like a great novel, even though the chapters by outside writers like Moody trade off with chapters by the two main authors, Manseau and Sharlet. Their chapters are called "psalms," and even though these psalms are nonfiction journalism, they're like poems describing all the fascinating ways people love god or hate him or her or check the box marked "other." Their trip across America, from a church near Ground Zero not long after September 11th to rural strip club where all the strippers are religious prophets is inspiring, and the other writers they bring in to join them are provocative. My favorite is Moody's, but don't miss any of them. I'm not religious, but Killing the Buddha makes me believe in the power of stories.
Rating:
Summary: Signs of Wonder
Review: I saw the authors of this read last night in Portland. I liked them as readers, and they seemed like good folks, so I went home started reading, and except for some sleep, I haven't been able to put it down since. Manseau and Sharlet set out like pilgrims without a destination and returned with this tale of amazing sights (a Buddhist food fight, "prophets in pasties," a gathering of military pagans) and profound insights about the nature of belief they manage to relay without preaching. This ought be enough, but interspersed with scenes from their journey, they have included 13 chapters of new "scripture," books of the bible re-written by novelists like A.L. Kennedy and Francine Prose. I was disappointed by a couple of them, but mostly they are are beautiful, worth a book themselves. And yet what makes this book something of a miracle is that this interweaving of voices seems so seamless. Manseau & Sharlet say in the introduction their aim was "cacophony," but in that they failed -- there's a wonderful harmony to the way all the pieces of this story of what Americans believe flow together. I have two more chapters to go, but "the spirit moved me" to recommend this book now to "heretics" and true believers and the rest of you who are like me, book lovers who belong to the church of great writing and terrific stories..
Rating:
Summary: brillant and unexpected
Review: I'm not usually interested in explicitly spiritual or religious writing, but I loved this book, perhaps because it's unlike anything that's usually described by the impoverished term "spiritual" or shelved in the religion section in your local bookstore. The stories in this book range from precise yet emotionally intense reportage, to challenging essays on theology, to absorbing fiction, to sensual, stream-of-consciousness prose. I particularly loved the contributions of Eileen Myles, Darcey Steinke, and April Reynolds. Manseau and Sharlet's treatment of contemporary beliefs especially impressed me--they manage to be both empathetic with the faithful they encounter, yet also sensitive to what is strange, raw or just plain hilarious about their belief systems. Presenting a contemporary pagan festival alongside meditations on the books of the Old Testament allows Sharlet and Manseau to avoid the pseudo-objectivity of social science and the hysteria of political journalism on religion in order to show belief in action--arbitrary, contradictory, and still meaningful.
Rating:
Summary: Buddha-rific
Review: I've been a long time fan of the website and bought this book for a friendfor his birthday. To be honest, I started to (carefully) read the Heretic's Bible before presenting it to my pal. I have every intention of borrowing it when he's done and never returning it. I suggest you do the same. Finally a voice for this generation that I can get behind without qualification -- in the single voice of a Chorus of (the coolest,
snarkiest, most arrogant, most humble) Angels kind of way...
Also, if you can make it to one of their readings, you won't be
disappointed. Both Sharlet & Manseau deliver laugh-out-loud performances and they're surprisingly approachable (and easy on the eyes).
Rating: 
Summary: A heretic's bible - created for heretics, by heretics.
Review: In this revamp of the Bible, Manseau and Sharlet write psalms from their impressions of their road trip through the USA, and 13 "books" of the Bible are written by American writers from diverse persuasions. Each chapter provides a unique and individual discourse on the divine.
In psalm 36:1, Sharlet and Manseau encountered a young girl in Heartland, Kansas who explained to them, "Monotheism is a mirror that offers only one reflection; Paganism is a spinning disco ball, a thousand glittering possibilities". After reading this book it is apparent that even monotheism has thousands of glittering possibilities. For every shared concept of Divinity, there is a myriad of distinct cosmologies bubbling up through humanity, each a universe of it's own.
It seems we all have our own unique ways of coming to terms with God, our origins, the miraculous... often breaking out of one religious dogma only to fall for another kind of spiritualized mind-snare.
Tragic, chaotic, surreal, and often hilarious.
Rating:
Summary: This book tells it true
Review: The writers are all preachers here. Preaching the gospel of the truth of the soul. The truth of the eyes and ears and fingers and tongue. The truth of experience. Of odd questions and sublime answers. Or maybe the other way around. It'll set your head spinning. In the best possible way.
Rating:
Summary: In celebration of heretics
Review: This often times hilarious but always serious journal of a spiritual journey across America in search of Buddha is worth reading. The book is a collection of experiences, impressions, and encounters with reality as the authors travel across the American continent looking for the various incarnations of Buddha along the way.The religious community has nothing to fear from the work of Manseau and Sharlet. They do not attack any religion, but rather they celebrate the spiritual venture many of us seem to be working toward. At the same time, they have an incredible collection of stories to keep us open minded about where we might encounter our own Buddha. If you don't have time to travel America, grab this book, sit back, and kill the Buddha vicariously.
Rating:
Summary: Journey to the Heartland
Review: Upon finishing this book, the first word to mind was "Fantastic" -- both for its conception and the way Manseau and Sharlet brought it off. Using the Bible as structure, they've written of eccentric spiritual quests far from mainstream American religion, the "psalms," as well as having given license to a host of distinguished writers to spin their own versions of various "books" of the Bible. The result, a "Heretic's Bible," a veritable feast for the open mind and literary appetite. Traveling up and down the land, the authors' stops included a Buddhist monastery in the Appalachians, a cowboy church in West Texas, and a witches' gathering in Heartland, Kansas. With keen eye, uncanny ear, humor and respect, their narratives of this exotic spiritual journey was the most liberating literary experience I've had since first reading Michael Herr's "Dispatches," arguably the classic account of how Vietnam GI's felt and talked about life in the combat zone. Among the biblical books alternating with the psalms, several of the most notable include Rick Moody's astonishing, modern re-interpretation of Jonah, Peter Tractenberg's brilliant rendition of Job, a very gritty Exodus by Francine Prose, and Melvin Jules Bukiet's recasting of Ezekiel as an irreverent carousel operator in New York's Central Park. The characters inhabiting Manseau and Sharlet's stories are mostly ordinary people -- the wife of a Walmart manager, a prison chaplain, a Colorado trooper, waitresses, L.A. street kids, Army lifers, and Kinko clerks. Some I found quite unforgettable -- George the rodeo riding preacher, the Calvinist stripper who calls herself Kennedy "because I wish I could've slept with Marilyn," and Elowen Graywolf the witch. Together, all of them have sought unusual paths to spiritual self-fulfillment. But I detected something else as well -- beneath their sacred dramas, they seem to be individuals simply seeking community in places without bookstores, inventing their own scriptures, fashioning alternate realities to set themselves apart from the atomized, homogenized society of their everyday world. Terrific book.
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