After delivering an entertaining account of his not-terribly-arduous youth and progression up the ladder of scientific...
Dawkins (b. 1941), having written best-sellers on his favorite subjects including evolutionary biology (The Selfish Gene, 1976) and atheism (The God Delusion, 2006), turns to the traditional autobiography.
Born in Nairobi, Kenya, the author grew up in a happy family, his father an agricultural specialist in the British Colonial Service who returned to England in 1949. Dawkins delivers an amusing and thoughtful if often unflattering account of himself during his education at upper-class British prep schools. “I cannot deny a measure of unearned privilege when I compare my childhood, boyhood and youth to others less fortunate,” he writes. “I do not apologize for that privilege any more than a man should apologize for his genes or his face, but I am very conscious of it.” Entirely submissive to peer pressure, he enjoyed bullying unpopular classmates and pretended to know less than he did because academic achievement was scorned. Despite this unprepossessing background, he was admitted to Balliol, the most prestigious Oxford college, where he studied animal behavior under the inspiring Nobel laureate Niko Tinbergen. After a decade of intense research and deliberation, Dawkins narrowed his focus to the genes that produce this animal behavior, which led to his groundbreaking theory that it is genes, not the organism, that govern evolution. This remains controversial, but it propelled him to a flourishing career as a scientist, educator and media personality, although the media (but not this book) emphasizes his atheism over his scientific accomplishments.
After delivering an entertaining account of his not-terribly-arduous youth and progression up the ladder of scientific academia, Dawkins ends with the publication of The Selfish Gene, but most readers will eagerly anticipate a concluding volume.Pub Date: Sept. 24, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-06-222579-5
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 6, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2013
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
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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