KEY POINTS:
The dust jacket claims this to be the most politically incorrect book ever published and it might be. Journalist Ian Wishart, breaker of the Winebox, scourge of David Benson-Pope, hounder of Helen Clark's husband, has unloaded the whole sweep of his suspicions this time.
Be warned. The West is doomed. Wishart watched the attack on the Twin Towers and wept for Christendom.
It is doomed not by Islamofascism but by its fatal weakening from within, poisoned "by seductive and destructive philosophies and social engineering that within the space of a generation have intellectually crippled the greatest civilisation the world has ever seen".
Goodness, as Sharon Crosbie used to say.
Wishart takes on some big targets: Karl Marx, Charles Darwin, Richard Dawkins and many easier ones: gay rights, safe sex, abortion, the anti-smacking campaign, liberal education, the mainstream media.
They are all infected by the rot that set in when the theory of evolution challenged God's creation and unproven Darwinism was adopted by science and education much as religion had been accepted previously.
Wishart's chapter on evolution will be his most interesting for anyone who has not previously encountered the case for intelligent design.
The theory of evolution, he says, faces the problem that nothing in the fossil record so far supports it. Despite a century or more of digging, we have found no remains that prove it is possible for one species to turn into another.
The intermediate specimens that abound on the flow charts of evolution simply haven't turned up among the biological detritus of eons found in the ground.
There are many examples of environmentally-induced characteristics within species, which Darwin noticed, but virtually no evidence for the extrapolated theory that species can mutate into creatures quite different.
This matters to Wishart because "if you believe that (species can evolve), then you'll believe life is not special and mankind is the master of all her surveys. You'll believe there is no God and free yourself and your family from any moral code."
He is an unusual moralist. The book does not offer any detail of his own religious faith or moral code. He is a journalist, his focus is outward, on the things other people think and write, not on his own thoughts.
Moral journalism can work in a magazine article but it does not work in a book. Readers willing to devote as much time and concentration as a book invites need more than declamatory prose.
They need to be gently acquainted with a mind that is going to challenge them and they need to feel they are going to enjoy the journey. Intellectual honesty is usually enough to meet those requirements. The sense the writer is going to open his mind to the subject, acknowledge awkward truths, grapple with them and come to an honest conclusion is usually enough.
Wishart, unfortunately, is not that sort of writer. He is a man of impatient certainties. His prose is vocal, definite, scathing and quickly tedious.
If the chapter on evolution is the best of the book, the one devoted to a demolition of Richard Dawkins' book, The God Delusion, is the weakest.
Academic atheists are at their most vulnerable on the subject of religion because they think they need only their powers of reasoning to write about it. Invariably they manage only to expose their ignorance of it.
But Wishart's attempt to reason against Dawkins is just as trite.
"He (Dawkins) poses the idea that someone must have designed the designer ... He forgets one very important little fact. Time. Time only exists within the four walls of our universe. Dawkins, sitting inside the universe, assumes that the laws of physics, chemistry, biology and time must apply to God as well ... "
Enough already.
It is almost a relief to move on to the politically incorrect rants, against "safe sex" campaigns and a long attempt to deny the fact that Aids has been largely confined to homosexuals.
Wishart is a trifle obsessed with homosexuals and the book keeps coming back to them. On gay adoption: "I find it highly doubtful that many gay men really and truly fancy the idea of being parents - it wouldn't fit the lifestyle. A child is not a bichon frise."
Not that he is for more heterosexual activity either. Again it is hard to know what he is for. "What two 'consenting' adults do behind closed doors may nonetheless have a major flow-on impact on other people - family members, emergency service workers, taxpayers."
So what does it all mean in the end? A vast conspiracy to undermine Western civilisation, Wishart says in rather desperate epilogue.
"Is that such a hard concept to get your head around? Is it really that hard to believe as human history teaches over and over again, that the lust for power is the primary driving force in the world . . ? Wake up."
It sounds like he knows the book has failed. In the end, Eve's Bite is no more than the author's bile.
* Howling At The Moon Publishing
