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are “false choices.”

    This is an altogether remarkable bowl of word salad, containing morsels of almost every tasty treat from the All U Can Eat buffet at the Hofstadter Cafe. Especially piquant is that passage about “priestly experts” and about how liberals—or liberal fascists—use science to discredit traditional religion, as though, somewhere in a laboratory, physicists are studying the faintest echoes of the big bang and thinking, at first, not of the Nobel Prize and the nifty trip to Stockholm, but, rather, “Bite me, Jehovah!”
    The general does not improve at all when it moves into the specific. Goldberg asserts that Woodrow Wilson—admittedly,a hopelessly overrated president—was nothing less than “the twentieth century’s first fascist dictator.”
    Glorioski.
    It seems that Wilson was a Progressive, and Goldberg sees in the Progressive movement the seedbed of American fascism which, he argues, differs from European fascism, especially on those occasions when he needs it to differ because he has backed up his argument over his own feet. Anyway, Wilson brought the country into World War I. Therefore, Progressives love war.
    Of course, Wilson’s evil scheme was briefly derailed by a filibuster in the Senate in 1917. The filibuster was led by men who’d come from the same Progressive politics that had produced Wilson, most notably Robert La Follette of Wisconsin. It was so effective that Wilson memorably fumed against the tactics of “a small group of willful men” and fought for (and won) a change in the Senate rules that provided for the cloture system we have today. Every person involved in this episode—which involved no less important an issue than whether the United States would slide toward a war—was a Progressive. Caught in his astonishing assertion about Wilson, Goldberg deals with the filibuster by not dealing with it at all. This is no longer the admirable cri de coeur of a valuable American crank. It’s just a long-winded explication of an idea that’s wrong.
    What Goldberg is to political history, Mitch Albom is to eschatology. Albom’s first breakthrough was
Tuesdays with Morrie
, an altogether unobjectionable stop-and-smell-the-roses memoir concerning his weekly conversations with a dying college professor. From these talks, the author learns valuable lessons about dealing with his fellow human beings.
    Not content with passing along life lessons from real people, Albom branched out into the afterlife with
The Five People You Meet in Heaven
, a brief meditation on the great beyond that is what Dante would have written had he grown up next door tothe Cleavers. It is the story of Eddie, who dies unexpectedly in an accident on the job at an amusement park. Eddie finds himself in heaven, which looks very much like the amusement park he has left behind. He first encounters the Blue Man, who explains to him what heaven is all about. The Blue Man, it turns out, is a guy who died of a heart attack after the youthful Eddie ran out in front of his car chasing a ball. In his life, Eddie was not aware that this had happened. The Blue Man explains that, even though he’s in heaven, Eddie’s not getting off that easily. He is handed the kind of emotional ab-crunching that the three spirits gave Ebenezer Scrooge one Christmas Eve.
    There are five people you meet in heaven…. Each of us was in your life for a reason. You may not have known the reason at the time, and that is what heaven is for. For understanding your life on earth … People think of heaven as a paradise garden, a place where they can float on clouds and laze in rivers and mountains. But scenery without solace is meaningless. This is the greatest gift that God can give you: to understand what happened in your life. To have it explained. It is the peace you have been searching for.

    This makes Rick Warren read like St. John of the Cross. Compare it, for example, to the description of the New Jerusalem wrought by the