Nothing: Something to Believe in

Books on atheism are red-hot this year, and Lallis adds something fresh to the mix: rather than being an angry apologetic, its an engaging personal account of non-belief. Raised in Chicago and New York to free-thinking parents who seem to have provided little supervision, Lalli had sporadic encounters with religion at her friends churches and synagogues as a child. A disastrous high school ski trip turned her off completely when religious students tried to convert her with manipulative tactics. In college, she fell in love with a fellow agnostic, whom she married after a brief stint of what she calls living in sin. Although Lalli got along well with her Christian mother-in-law, her self-righteous sister-in-law and her husband were a different story, and much of the memoirs second half explores serious family tensions. I got the feeling that I had to respect them for their religion but they were not going to return the favor, Lalli writes. Although Lalli doesnt come across as being quite as open-minded as she claims herself to be, she does see herself as an equal-opportunity agnostic, as skeptical about a tarot reading as she is about Christian platitudes. This memoir is well-written and often acerbically funny, an edgy quest for meaning outside the boundaries of organized religion.