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jon288's review against another edition
3.0
Pretty good, but the abridgement was frustrating, and as it was an audiobook I didn't pay as much attention as I should have
cbh's review against another edition
I found it rather dense at the time I was reading it, and decided to drop it. Although, I certainly plan to grab it in the future, love Dawkins' approach to dialogue.
taxideadaisy's review against another edition
2.0
I wish I could have had a better experience with this book. Having looked at some other reader reviews, it's clear that I'm not the only person who has found Dawkins to be arrogant, condescending, and rude regarding religion and similar philosophic topics. The premise of this book is very clever. It starts off well! But the rate and length of his snarky asides about religion completely ruined the book for me. I plugged along for a while trying to ignore them, rather the way readers may skim long descriptive passages in some genres, but finally I just gave up. The man may be a genius, but he's also an arrogant jerk.
kb_208's review against another edition
5.0
This was quite a pilgrimage indeed. The idea of a book that told of all the evolutionary steps it took to get from the beginning to human is quite a feat, but Dawkins does it justice. The difficulty about a book like this is that our knowledge of the subject is constantly changing and updating and the further back you go the less and less information we have about it. Dawkins does a good job of explaining each "rendevous" points with our common ancestors and about when these events could have taken place. Each chapter also has different stories from different organisms and how certain traits evolved and could have evolved. A lot of it was over my head, but the whole book is dense with amazing information on evolution. This book isn't for a light read, but it's worth checking out.
docpacey's review against another edition
5.0
The sheer amount of information packed into this book would have to be daunting to a reader not initiated into the language of biology, but any fan of Darwin, Stephen Jay Gould or E.O. Wilson (to name a few) will revel in the way that Dawkins journeys from the tip of the branch (modern man) to the trunk of the tree at the beginning of all life on earth.
Each waypoint in the journey is a junction at which another branch of life rejoins ours on the way to the trunk at life's earliest moment, and is an opportunity for Dawkins to explore nearly every aspect of the way science has categorized, discovered, studied and theorized upon the vast diversity of beings that do and have inhabited our planet.
It's an amazing contrast to The Sixth Extinction that I finished just prior.
Each waypoint in the journey is a junction at which another branch of life rejoins ours on the way to the trunk at life's earliest moment, and is an opportunity for Dawkins to explore nearly every aspect of the way science has categorized, discovered, studied and theorized upon the vast diversity of beings that do and have inhabited our planet.
It's an amazing contrast to The Sixth Extinction that I finished just prior.