An impressive overview of Dawkins’ life's work, written with the freshness of youthful vigor.
The second volume of the acclaimed evolutionary biologist’s autobiography.
Dawkins (An Appetite for Wonder: The Making of a Scientist, 2013, etc.) begins this installment with the bewildering experience of attending a celebration of his 70th birthday when he still felt, at least spiritually, like a 25-year-old. At the close of the first volume, he had just published his groundbreaking book The Selfish Gene (1976). His metaphorical personification of the gene as the agent of natural selection raised a furor at the time and is still controversial. As Dawkins is at pains to explain, he intended to compare economic-utility functions that maximize profitability with the successful reproduction of genes over generations. Despite widespread misunderstanding, his intention was not to suggest that they replace the function of individual, decision-making organisms but rather to apply the method of cost-benefit analysis used in economics to the process of natural selection. The author also explicitly distances himself from genetic determinists who attempt to explain human behavior mechanistically—e.g., attributing a specific behavior to a genetic predisposition, as might be the case with a putative aggressive gene. Dawkins refers readers to his 2004 book The Ancestor’s Tale: A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Evolution, in which he discussed his recent views about higher-level genetic cooperation. The Selfish Gene and his spirited defense of atheism, The God Delusion (2006), are his most controversial works, and many readers will welcome his belated attempts to heed criticisms of his unnecessarily abrasive style when debating religious opponents. However, Dawkins justifiably boasts about his publishing success: “through nearly 40 years, not one of my twelve books has ever been allowed to go out of print in English.” Though the narrative could have used some pruning, the author provides an entertaining portrait of his life and times, including the quaint customs still in practice at Oxford.
An impressive overview of Dawkins’ life's work, written with the freshness of youthful vigor.Pub Date: Sept. 29, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-228843-1
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 3, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2015
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 horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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