Richard Dawkins' suggestions for life-changing books

[Tammuz]

Good Minds Suggest—Richard Dawkins's Favorite Life-Changing Books

Voyage of the Beagle by Charles Darwin
"On the Origin of Species is too obviously life changing, so I choose instead Darwin's first book, Voyage of the Beagle. There is a fresh breeze blowing through this memoir, the robust energy of the young naturalist foreshadowing the genius that he would become, gestator of arguably the greatest idea ever to occur to a human mind."

Pluto's Republic by Peter Medawar
"Peter Medawar is the foremost scientific essayist of the 20th century. With no presumptuous aspiration to imitate him, I'm reasonably certain my writing style was influenced by the patrician insouciance of Medawar's prose, the sort of wit that makes you want to seize the book and rush out into the street to show somebody—anybody. The savage humor with which he destroyed the theologian Teilhard de Chardin also changed me more directly: I blush to admit that until I read the famous Medawar review (perhaps the greatest negative book review ever written), I was temporarily fooled by 'that tipsy, euphoristic prose poetry which is one of the more tiresome manifestations of the French spirit.' (Only a Nobel Prize winner could get away with that sort of thing, but you can't help laughing.)"

The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark by Carl Sagan
"You'd expect this bible of scientific skepticism to be dry, cold, Gradgrindian even. Instead it is poetic, imaginative, tinted with Carl Sagan's wonder at the magic of reality, the poetry of the real world, which is science."

The Sword of Honour Trilogy by Evelyn Waugh
"The great mystery is how so profoundly sensitive a writer of beautiful English could have been such an apparently shallow, even unpleasant, man: a jingoistic snob who not only converted to Catholicism but—worse—took it seriously. Maybe it was all a pose. Whatever is the case, I reread his books again and again, mesmerized by the chiseled craftsmanship of every sentence. I could have chosen any of his books, but The Sword of Honour Trilogy is substantial enough to deserve a special place in a list of life-changing books."

Uncle Fred in the Springtime by P.G. Wodehouse
"P.G. Wodehouse is my escape from the cares and sleep-disturbing troubles of life. I understand totally why Hilaire Belloc was able to nominate him as the greatest writer of English then living, and I know all too exactly what Evelyn Waugh meant when he said, 'Mr. Wodehouse's idyllic world can never stale. He will continue to release future generations from captivity that may be more irksome than our own.' I love so many of his books, but Uncle Fred is perhaps the most releasing of all."

 

[rousseau]

The Demon-Haunted World is a good read for people who like pop science. I never finished it, but got what Sagan was throwing down after a few sections.

I'd add a few titles by Dawkins himself, namely The Selfish Gene. Although in some cases I think these books on evolutionary genetics can be better off going unread.

 

[lpetrich]

Peter Medawar vs. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin's The Phenomenon of Man: The Phenomenon of Man
He states about it "The Phenomenon of Man stands square in the tradition of Naturphilosophie, a philosophical indoor pastime of German origin which does not seem even by accident (though there is a great deal of it) to have contributed anything of permanent value to the storehouse of human thought." He spends much of the rest of the review describing how vacuous it seems to him.