Synopses & Reviews
The first collection of essays from renowned scientist and best-selling author Richard Dawkins.
Richard Dawkins's essays are an enthusiastic testament to the power of rigorous, scientific examination, and they span many different corners of his personal and professional life. He revisits the meme, the unit of cultural information that he named and wrote about in his groundbreaking work The Selfish Gene. He makes moving tributes to friends and colleagues, including a eulogy for novelist Douglas Adams; he shares correspondence with the evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould; and he visits with the famed paleoanthropologists Richard and Maeve Leakey at their African wildlife preserve. He concludes the essays with a vivid note to his ten-year-old daughter, reminding her to remain curious, to ask questions, and to live the examined life.
About the Author
'Richard Dawkins taught zoology at the University of California atBerkeley and at Oxford University and is now the Charles Simonyi Professorof the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford, a position hehas held since 1995. The Wall Street Journal said his \"passion is supportedby an awe-inspiring literary craftsmanship.\"The New YorkTimes Book Review has hailed him as a writer who \"understands theissues so clearly that he forces his reader to understand them too.\"Among his previous books are The Ancestor\'s Tale, The Selfish Gene,The Blind Watchmaker, Climbing Mount Improbable, Unweavingthe Rainbow, and A Devil\'s Chaplain. Dawkins lives in Oxford with hiswife, the actress and artist Lalla Ward.'