Here are some recent book reviews. For more, see http://tim223.xanga.com/category/book-reviews/

Return of the God Hypothesis, by Stephen Meyer
This excellent book looks at evidence of fine-tuning in the universe (habitability of Earth, fine-tuning of physical constants and "Big Bang" parameters, etc), and concludes that it makes more sense that the Earth & universe was designed by an Intelligent Designer who is transcendent, that is, not limited to physical time and space... i.e., by God. This follows up on his excellent books Signature in the Cell and Darwin's Doubt. Overall this is a great book, and mostly readable. He does delve into some very heavy physics topics when talking about the theories of the beginning of the universe from alleged "quantum fluctuations" or a multiverse, but he uses almost no math to keep it readable for non-specialists. He covers all the standard objections, which is very valuable... things like the anthropic principle, Hawking's imaginary time scenario, oscillating universe, panpsychism, the multiverse theory with its physical and philosophical problems, the "God of the Gaps" accusation and Bayes theory. He talks about Boltzmann brains. He covers all the major people and their theories, in a very readable way, with little photos of each person. This book is about as good as it gets for covering the secular universe-origin theories and showing why they don't work and are actually anti-scientific. He weaves his own story through the book, including his interactions (and debates/conversations) with some of the key people. A couple small caveats - Meyer is not necessarily a young-earth creationist, so his apparent views on the Big Bang and age of the universe do not mesh quite easily with the Bible. However, most of this book is still useful for young-earth creationists, and it is helpful to read the evidence cited in support of the Big Bang (and the theory's problems too). Also, Meyer's style is very slow and deliberate and even redundant at times, so there were some pages which repeated the same idea 3 or 4 times as he slowly developed it... The style could be condensed in a future revision to make it shorter and more readable. But it is still a valuable read, even perhaps for group discussion.

Too Good To Be False: How Jesus' Incomparable Character Reveals His Reality, by Tom Gilson
This book's main point is that Jesus' character is unique (astonishing divine self-conception and authority with deep humility, moral purity, generosity, and love, including mixtures of traits which would normally be a turn-off in most people (e.g. never admitting making a mistake) which somehow attracted people to him), and unlikely to have been concocted by a group of later authors (and even if they tried, unlikely for all the different authors to have merged successfully into a coherent biographical portrait across multiple books, audiences, locations, and times). The book brought up some very interesting things about Jesus in the gospels, such as that He was never said to have "faith" in God (which would be unusual for a respected religious teacher), and that He never talked about God as "Our Father" (only "My Father" or "your Father"... the one exception is when his disciples asked him about prayer and he told them to pray, "Our Father"... the implication being that His Son-Father relationship was different than our relationship with God). I enjoyed this book and recommend it to others, but I think that most skeptics would not be convinced by its reasoning. Christians would probably enjoy it more. It is very easy to read, with lots of little anecdotes and quotes.