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A Devil's Chaplain: Reflections on Hope, Lies, Science, and Love
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.
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.
263 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2003
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March 31, 2015
la dimensione ideale di Dawkins e' il saggio lungo, anche perche' gli argomenti trattati necessitano un approfondimento che il saggio breve non consente. Nondimeno, questa raccolta di saggi brevi apparsi su varie pubblicazioni mantiene il fascino e la lucidita' che l'A. riesce immancabilmente a infondere in tutti i suoi scritti. Taluni scritti, peraltro, sono inquadrabili correttamente solo se si sono letti i suoi precedenti libri. Come sempre, personalmente concordo con quasi tutto quello che Dawkins scrive. In questo caso, concordo anche sul fatto - che egli stesso riconosce - che l'articolo apparso a sua firma dopo l'11 settembre e riportato in questo libro e' decisamente sopra le righe.
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