Good Book: The Bizarre, Hilarious, Disturbing, Mar

Good Book is a whip-smart, laugh-out-loud tour through a book most people have never read: the Bible.

Like many Jews and Christians, David Plotz had always assumed he knew what was in the Bible. He read parts of it as a child in Hebrew school, and as a teenager while attending a Christian high school. But it wasn't until he picked up a Bible at a cousin's bat mitzvah and became engrossed and horrified by a lesser-known story in Genesis that he couldn't put it down. Good Book is the irreverent, enthralling story of what happens when a regular guy actually reads the book on which his religion, his culture, and his world are based.

David Plotz is the editor of Slate. He has written for the New York Times Magazine, Harper's, Rolling Stone, The New Republic, The Washington Post, and GQ and is the author of The Genius Factory: The Curious History of the Nobel Prize Sperm Bank. He won the National Press Club's Hume Award for Political Reporting and has been a National Magazine Award finalist. He lives with his wife, the journalist Hanna Rosin, and their children in Washington, D.C.

"Hilarious ... It's Cliff Notes for Scripture-screenplay by Plotz, story by God ... In the end, though, the book is made by the spirit of the writer, who on page after page struggles with the divine, or the Bible's picture of the divine, even if it leaves him 'broken-hearted about God.'"

- Rich Cohen, the New York Times Book Review