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Loading... The Oxford book of modern science writingby Richard Dawkins
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will love Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book.  nwhyte | Sep 29, 2009 |  This review was also published, in a slightly enhanced & more comfortable format, at my blog between drafts. This is a great book, but it will cost you. Right after I finished reading it, I ordered three or four books from its featured authors right away, and put several more on my wishlist. And as to how length and time are relative, this book is its own highly distinguished example: the excerpts from scientific fields I know next to nothing about were much too short, while those from scientific fields I have a little more knowledge, or had even read the books the excerpts were taken from, were much too long. So there. And I really, really loved it that my personal hero Richard Dawkins did not write just some plain old foreword, but introduced each and every author and excerpt, with background knowledge and sometimes amusing, sometimes thought-provoking anecdotes. One peeve, though, and not an unexpected one: these far too long, and far too annoyingly unfunny excerpts from the writings of Peter Medawar. (At some time in the future, I must give it a try and write to Richard Dawkins in the hope of being able to disabuse him of at least some of his grim notions about postmodernism.) But shortly after the Medawar Annoyance, everything was made up for by an equally long, carefully chosen, and wonderful essay by Stephen J. Gould. gyokusai | Oct 18, 2008 |  no reviews | add a review
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(retrieved from Amazon Fri, 24 Apr 2009 07:58:17 -0400)
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I'm not a fan of Dawkins' views on religion, but as editor of this book he has done a fine job; it clearly makes a difference that he is writing about topics he knows and likes, and his introductory pieces to each extract are informative and often self-deprecating.
I was less sure that the book actually works as a concept. The selected pieces are necessarily extracts rather than complete works, and the result feels more like a scrapbook than an anthology. Certainly none of the pieces is bad, and several of them made me want to seek out more by that author (from the sublime - Albert Einstein's thoughts on God - to the ridiculous - Francis Crick's advice to avoid gatherings of more than two Nobel Prize winners). But the nature of the book means a succession of changes of pace, some of which are rather jarring. This contains a number of chunks out of various excellent books about science but doesn't quite end up being one itself. (