Reviews

Hell and Damnation: A Sinner's Guide to Eternal Torment by Marq de Villers

kevin_shepherd's review

4.0

A positively heavenly presentation of the history and evolution of the concept of Hell, spanning some five thousand years of recorded human history. De Villiers is both a scholar and a skeptic and I, for one, found his approach as entertaining as it was educational.

“As the Middle Ages progressed, ...Satan became a creature with a bifurcated penis as long as an alder bush and made of iron, with scales and semen as cold as ice, who mated with an ever-increasing number of witches, anus and vagina at once (bifurcation has its advantages...)”

barrybj's review

informative slow-paced

2.75

well researched and often interesting, but held back by an authors voice that can often slide into snide and irritating rather than clever and irreverent. The middle part on torture slogged on and the epilogue felt like getting lectured to by a 15 year old and seemed unable to really comprehend how faith develops and why people need it, instead simply trying to disprove it in a way that felt less academic and more like petty jabs at anyone with a religious belief system. While this along with some faulty pacing and strange choices in translations for ancient texts (using a highly anachronistic 1920s translation of enkidus final speech to gilgamesh threw me off so hard i had to put the book down for a bit) holds the book back from being anywhere near a favorite, it is a thourough and often fascinating text that is worth using if you're doing research or just find the subject of hellish torture interesting.

biblio_lore's review

This was actually very interesting and a fun read but it was a touch dense for what I’m looking for right now. Will return to it later. 

karak's review

3.0

How do you classify a book written as non-fiction about a fictional place?

bookhookgeek's review

2.0

According to the blurb on the back, this book is "urbane" and "funny", but it actually turned out to be rather dry and boring.