Rico's Book Club

Having heard Sam Harris speak about his book The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason on CSPAN recently, I highly recommend it for all but the most religiously addled. If we are ever going to break the pattern of religion-driven hatred and violence that has distorted history and repeatedly destroyed civilization since well before Zoroaster and the Pillar of Fire (what, you thought Harry Potter invented it?), it is clear and rational thinking like his that will do it.
(Hell, the book's just the winner of the 2005 PEN Award for nonfiction, but what the fuck do they know?)

The entire issue of faith (which is driven, primarily, by our individual and communal fear of the unknown, including the mysteries of birth and death) will be revisited in these rants from time to time.

Until then, hey, it's my Book Club, so fuck Oprah. Even picking Night by Elie Wiesel (which, by total coincidence, I happened to read recently, before she thought of it) can't scour out the bad taste of A Million Little Lies, the title of which, apparently, was more truthful than the contents. As Ambrose Bierce would have reviewed A Million Little Lies, "the covers of this book are too far apart"...
But I cannot wait until Oprah's millions of faithful (there's that word again) minions try and gag down Night, a personal description of the horrors of the Holocaust by Wiesel's brilliantly acid pen. It's a tough book to swallow but, like all purgatives, good for you. If you haven't read Night, try. Unless you're one of those benighted Holocaust-denial fools, in which case I send you to Andy Rooney's 60 Minutes riposte to their story on a Holocaust denial author, in which Rooney read excerpts from his Stars & Stripes reportage the day he first went into Dachau in 1945.
Once you've digested Night, watch the famed movie Night and Fog or, for the real thing, the interminably horrifying but compelling Shoah.
If, after all that, you still want to deny the Holocaust ever happened, I'll pay for a ten-digit tattoo on your forearm and a one-way ticket to a little town in Poland called Oswiecim...