[lit-ideas] 'Would you like anything to read?'

The New York Review of Books is having its Winter sale. There are some
good titles here, cheap. If you don't have Iona and Peter Opie's The
Lore and Language of Schoolchildren, can you pick up a copy for under nine
bucks. Worth it. The collection of Richard Lewontin's essays that appeared in TNYRB would be a good bet too. He's great at puncturing the inflated claims of scientific popularizers.
'In these nine essays covering the history of modern biology from Darwin to Dolly the sheep... Lewontin combines sharp criticisms of overreaching scientific claims with lucid expositions of the exact state of current scientific knowledge?not only what we do know, but what we don't and maybe won't anytime soon. Among the subjects he discusses are heredity and natural selection, evolutionary psychology and altruism, nineteenth-century naturalist novels, sex surveys, cloning, and the Human Genome Project. In each case he casts an ever-vigilant and deflationary eye on the temptation to look to biology for explanations of everything we want to know about our physical, mental, and social lives.' 

http://www.nybooks.com/nyrb/wintersale

Robert Paul
reed.edu


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