This is a remarkable wide-ranging book, so grand in scope that it is hard to realize that it is the author's first full-length publication. It is remarkable not only for its style, which is a sheer joy to read, full of word-play and irony and passion and weird anecdotes, but for the brilliance of its central thesis and the erudition with which that thesis is developed. It is also an important book, for it deals with a subject that is of central interest to anthropologists, historians, and historians of religion today--the subject of Otherness.