City of the Good
by Michael Bell, Princeton, 360pp, £25
I like it when a book opens with an epiphany. Michael Bell, a sociology professor at the University of Wisconsin, is in the Sistine Chapel, looking upwards. Like all those around him, he is wonderstruck by The Last Judgment. But then he starts to make an inventory of what isn’t there: “No animals. No forests. No gardens, aside from Adam and Eve being evicted from Eden . . . No farming. No eating. No laughing. No sex. No politicians. No people of colour. Almost no women.” Heaven seems “a starkly limited place”. What troubles Bell most is the implicit declaration that “this was all for the good”.
