Word: seltzers
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Goldstein’s novel flits between two storylines in the life of affable academic Cass Seltzer, one in his present, the other in his past. Presently, Seltzer is contemplating an offer to assume a post at Harvard University, having achieved unexpected fame with his book, “The Varieties of Religious Illusion.” The combination of this secularist tract—and its appendix refuting 36 arguments for God’s existence—with Cass’s clear-eyed empathy for religious belief has turned him into an overnight celebrity, dubbed by Time...
...novel’s flashback plotline explains how Seltzer came to write such a book, recounting his trajectory from life as a long-suffering graduate student in the humanities to becoming personally concerned with matters of faith. Under the tutelage of Jonas Elijah Klapper—a Harold Bloom caricature—Cass visited New Walden, a cloistered Hasidic enclave where men and women walk on different sides of the street and modernity has yet to intrude. There Cass meets Azarya, a child prodigy who at the age of six has derived complex mathematical proofs without any formal education...
...said to have been catapulted to a Harvard professorship when a mainstream publisher picked up his research on the psychology of happiness—a favorite subject of some of Harvard’s actual psychology lecturers, from Daniel Gilbert to Tal Ben-Shahar. And while the fictional Cass Seltzer did not debate Sir Jonathan Sacks, the Chief Rabbi of Britain, at the London Jewish Book Festival, Goldstein’s husband, Harvard icon Steven Pinker, did in 2005. These adapted details of academia make Goldstein’s story that much more compelling, and her not infrequent satirical skewers...
Murray also used the event to award Yakov Berenshteyn ’10 with a $1,000 scholarship for engineering excellence and Professor of Computer Science Margo I. Seltzer ’83 with the Capers and Marion McDonald Award for Excellence in Teaching and Mentoring...
...Cass Seltzer, the main character of your book, is seen as an “atheist with a soul.” Do you also see yourself this...