Follow the Money: A Month in the Life of a Ten-Dollar Bill by Steve Boggan (Union Books, £10.99)
An Englishman journeys to the centre of America in order to follow a single $10 bill around the country for 30 days. As it passes from one hand to another, he encounters redneck racists, local rock stars, and a father and daughter who like to shoot deer with bows and arrows. He muses delicately on rural flight and the recession, while drinking copiously and making firm friends with nearly everyone he meets.
A stunt travelogue of this sort depends heavily on style; luckily, Boggan has constructed a hugely endearing narrative personality. One morning after is described thus: "I felt like a computer booting up in the Arctic." Occasionally the prose descends into touristy vagueness, but mostly his raconteurship has you chuckling as the author ill-advisedly microwaves his underwear, delightedly discovers a "drive-thru bottle shop", and generally behaves, in refreshing contrast to the exhausting get-up-and-go of the travel genre, with a lovably shambolic lassitude. "It was 4.10. I had set out my clothes to dry, taken a walk, endured a steam bath and lain down for a nap. That was a full day by anyone's standards." I don't know how he crammed it all in.
Sin: The Early History of an Idea by Paula Fredriksen (Princeton, £16.95)
The earnestly nice evangelicals Steve Boggan meets at one point might well have taken a dim view of his escapades in other places. But "sin" has meant different things in the past. This elegant monograph traces "dramatic mutations" in the concept from Jesus to Augustine, along with changing ideas about time, the cosmos, the devil, divine justice, and the human body. (According to one early theologian, Jesus "ate and drank in a special way, without evacuating food".)
Fredriksen recomplicates the relationship between early Christianity and Judaism, and offers sharp close readings of the Gospels, the Gnostics et al. She draws out the profound differences between Augustine (who created an "inscrutable and angry god") and Origen (for whom God loves even "the rational soul of Satan"); and she also emphasises the apparent paradox that "ancient monotheism" allowed for many gods beneath the chief divinity – it "addressed the issue of heaven's architecture, not its absolute population". So some early thinkers considered the God of Genesis, the mere "author of matter", to be a lower being than "the supreme deity of pagan philosophy". Still, authoring matter isn't something to be sniffed at as far as a day's labour goes.
Philosophy: All That Matters by Julian Baggini (Hodder, £7.99)
Pagan philosophy has had its moments too. Where most popular overviews of philosophy take the form of a historical narrative with approachable splashes of biographical colour, Baggini's book is thematically organised, plunging the reader rapidly into the analysis of truth and reality, from Aristotle and Plato to Locke, Kant, Ryle and Wittgenstein; and thence to metaphysics (the study of "the fundamental nature of reality", including causation and free will), religion, the self, aesthetics, political philosophy and ethics.
Baggini is an efficient (and amiably opinionated) sketcher of the major ideas, and names Life of Brian as one of his recommended "philosophical films" in a playful set of appendices. The book usefully praises "the intellectual virtues of rigour, subtlety and mitigated scepticism", and offers a particularly incisive defence of "abstract" thought – an adjective normally used these days as a term of abuse. Thinking abstractly can be a hard day's work too, or so I'm told.
