The potent thesis of John Gray's short and eloquent new volume is: "If you want to understand atheism and religion, you must forget the popular notion that they are opposites."
Author of some 20 books, Gray is a public intellectual unafraid to enter the fray and here does so against many of the most cherished beliefs of secularists, leftists, and bien pensant establishment. This makes the book surprising because Gray is himself an atheist, but he is more vexed by bad atheistic thinking than by religious belief and practice.
On a scale of 1 to 10, I'd judge the lucidity of the writing to be a 10. Seven Types of Atheism is packed full of sentences like these about Arthur Schopenhauer: "Nor was his selfishness altogether unappealing. For anyone weary of self-admiring world-improvers, there is something refreshing in Schopenhauer's nastiness." Besides a stray intellectual slip up here and there—oddly, the big one is about Eric Voegelin, whom the author admires—this is a consistently good read, brisk and conceptual at the same time.
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