By the author of Christ Stopped At Eboli, this somewhat iconoclastic inquiry into the idolatries of man has the exceptional beauty of prose which distinguished the first book, ""a sensuous and musical sorcery of logic and magic"". The translator, in his preface, gives a summation of the book, which is difficult to define, as ""a fearless, ruthless, criticism of everything man adores; himself and his woman, his individual and collective self, the mass and the race, the class and the state, their freedom and slavery, their peace and their wars"". For this is an examination of man's primal passions; his religion and its sacrificial, tyrannical nature; his love for woman, and the servitude it demands- but a love which is also ""the touchstone of liberty""; the state, an idol which can exist only through slavery; artistic expression and language as witnesses of the corresponding civilization; the mass, as opposed to the individual, ""a non-existence; a shapeless death"".... Not a destructive book, nor a non-believer's, this indicates the attaching, enslaving forces, their values as well as their restrictive influences in man's attainment of freedom. Not for a general audience, but an appreciative one.