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 […]
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 Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False. I am eager to read this, but haven’t yet had a chance because I’m travelling and reading Sophisticated Theology™ (this […]
Update: Over at Cosmic Variance, Sean Carroll nicely picks apart (“unpacks,” to use the odious jargon of postmodernism) one part of Plantinga’s argument: the claim that science, like religion, ultimately rests on faith. As we all know, this is a base canard whose force depends on conflating two disparate ways to construe faith.” Among Sean’s […]
I haven’t seen a bad review of Hitchens’s last book, Mortality, about his struggle with cancer. It collects his Vanity Fair pieces on Tumorville and has a foreword by his editor Graydon Carter and an afterword by his wife Carol Blue. There’s another positive review by Lorenzo Milam at reason.com that includes this statement, which […]
In today’s New York Times Christopher Buckley appraises Hitchens’s last book, Mortality (you can buy it for $13.79 on Amazon). It’s short (104 pages), and collects the 7 pieces about his cancer Hitchens wrote for Vanity Fair, plus a last chapter of unpublished jottings, some of which I’ve posted before. Here’s another: “My two assets […]
I’ve been criticizing James Shapiro’s HuffPo columns on neo-Darwinism (he sees it as all wrong) for a while now, but only recently noticed that for some time Larry Moran has been making more thorough criticisms of Shapiro’s columns and his recent new book at Moran’s website Sandwalk. You can find Larry’s comments collected here. As […]
In Sunday’s New York Times Book Review, author and editor Daniel Menaker evaluates Sam Harris’s new book in a review called, “Have it your way.“ I hoped Menaker would engage Harris’s arguments, for book reviews are boring if they merely regurgitate the book’s contents. And though I agree with Sam’s thesis and think his book […]
Today’s New York Times reviews Gregg Allmann’s new autobiography, My Cross to Bear. Reviewer David Kirby gives it a qualified thumbs-up, but is horrified by the drugs and drink ingested by Allmann and his band-mates: At the height of their success, the band members walked onto the jet they’d just acquired to find “Welcome Allman […]
The latest issue of The New York Review of Books contains an appraisal of Ed Wilson’s new book, The Social Conquest of Earth, by Steven Mithen, a professor of archaeology at the University of Reading. Mithen seems a strange choice given that he’s not an evolutionary biologist, but it turns out that his expertise enabled […]
Over at Prospect magazine, Richard Dawkins reviews E. O. Wilson’s new book, The Social Conquest of Earth, in an essay with the double-entendre title, “The descent of Edward Wilson.” If you think Richard’s incursion into atheism has eroded his ability to explain biology in an engrossing way, be heartened: this is a good review. Well, […]
