My worst books of the year: Proof of Heaven: A Neurosurgeon's Journey into the Afterlife (Simon & Schuster), by Eben Alexander.

• Author: Murphy, Ian
• Position: OUR FAVORITE BOOKS OF 2013 - Killing Jesus: A History - Book review

My worst books of the year: Proof of Heaven: A Neurosurgeon's Journey into the Afterlife (Simon & Schuster), by Eben Alexander.

Pure literary snake oil. Full of wild claims, deliberate omissions, and outright disingenuousness, Alexander's "journey into the afterlife" is fundamentally a tale told to separate fools from their money. Alexander purports to have suffered total brain death due to a devastating E. coil infection, and "crossed over" to the afterlife, floating on a magic butterfly, basking in the wonder of divinity, yada-yada-yada.

And you're meant to take this seriously because--damn it, Jim he's a doctor! In reality, Alexander's career has been rife with malpractice suits.

A likely mix of hallucination and brazen opportunism, the only thing Alexander "proves" with this bestseller is that you'll never go broke pandering to America's desperate religious masses.

Rating: 4/5 Benny Hinns

Killing Jesus: A History (Henry Holt), by Bill O'Reilly and Martin Dugard.

Ostensibly inspired by the Holy Spirit, this final installation in O'Reilly/Dugard's quasi-historical assassination porn trilogy is less a work of scholarship than a terrifying projection of the authors' idiocy.

As in Killing Lincoln and...