Unrepentant, accessible prose mixed with some cranky arguments, but intellectually engaging and provocative.
This is an examination of Darwinism as a flawed theory fraught with deception, error and questionable morality.
Darwin’s theory of evolution has become the scientific equivalent of the bad penny, consistently turning up where it’s least wanted. More than ever, counter-theorists, opponents and antagonists clamor to unseat the most controversial scientific theory in history with something that seems sensible, like a good pair of shoes. The End of Darwinism is careful to avoid partisanship, steering clear of downright endorsement of the anti-Darwin favorites creationism and intelligent design, but it unabashedly makes its case that evolution—and Darwin’s methodology in particular—is riddled with error and soaked in snake oil. For Windchy, Darwin’s infamy is only underscored by events of the last century since publication of “The Origin of the Species.” For example, evolution’s tag line, “survival of the fittest,” has been adopted by tyrants the world over as scientific justification for genocide and ethnic cleansing. Further, scientists often endorse evolutionary theory but really don’t believe it; textbooks are riddled with phony examples of bad science as “proof” of natural selection; and even mathematicians criticize Darwin’s theory as “nonsensical.” So, why is the theory of evolution, so loved by tyrants and hated by mathematicians, continuing to endure and plague us? For Windchy, the answer is basic—spineless adherence to the “religious sect” that has sprung up around Darwin. His critics recoil at the prospect of public scorn and ridicule, should they speak their opposition. Clearly, the author is not concerned with fallout from the hazards of a free press, and this is a saving grace for the book. Windchy’s scrappy, in-your-face, unapologetic treatment of the subject gives the reader no room to sit on the fence. This book is all-in and makes no compromises for timid apologists or die-hard advocates. The End of Darwinism may not be a game changer in the anti-evolution debate, but it does deliver rib-sticking food for thought.
Unrepentant, accessible prose mixed with some cranky arguments, but intellectually engaging and provocative.Pub Date: Nov. 23, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-4363-8368-4
Page Count: 264
Publisher: Xlibris
Review Posted Online: Aug. 23, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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