Thanks to alert reader Michael, I’ve made my first visit to the Dublin Review of Books site, where you can read a review of Christopher Hitchens’s last book, Mortality. The review is by Seamus O’Mahony, who seems uniquely qualified for the task: Seamus O’Mahony is a physician with an interest in medicine and literature. He […]
Jane Goodall’s observations of the chimps at Gombe is perhaps the most famous work in primatology in the 20th century, and she’s rightly famous for her meticulous observations, her absolute dedication to her fieldwork, her discovery of many traits in our closest relatives that were thought unique to humans, and her tireless work on biological […]
On the occasion of Susan Jacoby’s new book, The Great Agnostic: Robert Ingersoll and American Freethought (nice discount at Amazon!), she’s interviewed by Five Books‘ Sophie Roell on the topic of “Atheism”. It’s a really nice interview and I’ll leave it to you to read it and see what five books on atheism Jacoby recommends […]
Anthony Grayling has a new pro-humanism and anti-religion book available now in the U.S. on Kindle for $15.39 (£9.78 in the UK) and, in the U.S, after Mar. 14 in hardback for a price to be determined (you can order it now in the UK for £10.78): The Amazon site gives a summary: There have […]
Good Lord, is Mark Vernon, of “holy rabbit” fame, still writing for the Guardian? And why? In their columns he regularly takes up the cudgels against science: as an ex-Anglican priest, he simply can’t help but cheer when someone disses science, no matter how bad a job they do. And so each year Vernon gives […]
I’ve just finished physicist Sean Carroll’s new book, The Particle at the End of the Universe (subtitled: How the Hunt for the Higgs Boson Leads Us to the Edge of a New World), and want to give it two thumbs up. As far as I know, it’s the only popular account of the Higgs Hunt […]
Nancey Murphy is a well-known theologian and philosopher of religion who is a Professor of Christian Philosophy at the Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena, California. She’s also an ordained minister in the Church of the Brethren, was on the board of advisers of the Templeton Foundation, and has written and edited numerous books, one of […]
Most of the contents of the Times Literary Supplement are behind a paywall (a few pieces are free in each issue), but you can at least see the latest Table of Contents here. In that issue I’ve reviewed E. O. Wilson’s new book The Social Conquest of Earth, in which he claims that major features of […]
Last October I mentioned that the famous philosopher Thomas Nagel had produced a new book that proclaimed the falsity of neo-Darwinian evolution. I’ll quote from my earlier post: As I’ve mentioned before, the respected philosopher of mind Thomas Nagel has joined the ranks of Darwin-dissers with the publication of his new book Mind and Cosmos: Why the […]
The Sunday New York Times Book Review always appears online on Saturday, and this week’s issue has reviews or blurbs about two books of interest. The first is Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief by Lawrence Wright, reviewed by Michael Kinsley, editor at large at The New Republic. You may remember Wright […]
