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 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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