Reader Luke sent me this notice, and no, I didn’t know of Richard’s new book. The cover is below along with the Amazon blurb, to wit:
Including conversations with Neil DeGrasse Tyson, Steven Pinker, Matt Ridley and more, this is an essential guide to the most exciting ideas of our time and their proponents from our most brilliant science communicator. Books Do Furnish a Life is divided by theme, including celebrating nature, exploring humanity, and interrogating faith. For the first time, it brings together Richard Dawkins’ forewords, afterwords and introductions to the work of some of the leading thinkers of our age – Carl Sagan, Lawrence Krauss, Jacob Bronowski, Lewis Wolpert – with a selection of his reviews to provide an electrifying celebration of science writing, both fiction and non-fiction. It is also a sparkling addition to Dawkins’ own remarkable canon of work.
Click on the screenshot to go to the Amazon site:
You may know this already, but Richard Dawkins’ new book Books Do Furnish A Life was published yesterday (in the UK at least). I was delighted to see that the last chapter before the epilogue is his glowing review of WEIT!
Just pre-ordered it in PB on amazon.ca. Available June 29 in Canada.
Hey, the EDIT function is working again!
Me too! And I had a $50 gift card, so got it for “free”. Yes! I love the cover.
There’s also a new video on youtube where Matt Ridley interviews Dawkins about the book.
Mat Ridley is ‘problematic’ – Northern Rock & climate change, which is a real pity.
Thanks for the link!
There is no TRUTH there are only probabilities.
Is that a truth?
Ha!
… universally acknowledged?
There are some probabilities so well-established that they round up to TRUTH — matters which are, to borrow S.J. Gould’s phrasing, “confirmed to such a degree that it would be perverse to withhold provisional assent.”
Yes but some things are more probable than others — by a lot! — and fortunately we can use the tools of science to tell the difference.
I thought that probability and the rest of statistics had been cancelled because Galton Pearson and Fisher had been discovered to be not-exactly closeted eugenicists, and therefore the mathematical verities they discovered were actually contingent on the direction of the wind.
Lordy* alone knows what we’re going to do when Cardano’s misdeeds are uncovered and we have to discard (sorry) the rules of any and all card (sorry! ) games and the tattered remains of probability theory. Things will come grinding to a halt as every universal joint in the universe is impounded by the Thought Police
*a cat who lives along the street from me.
Now that is an excellent name for a cat.
Testing the edit function …
… nope!
didn’t work for me this morning either.
The edit function has been a bit wonky for me for a few days. Mostly it seems to work, but since FFv.88 came out my editor-assistance tool (which allows me to paste in pre-defined elements like HTML bold and italic codes) gets pasted almost anywhere on the page but the edit box.
Quite peculiar. How the code is allowed to paste into a differently-owned part of the document is somewhat worrying. I’d expect ownership permissions to knock that idea on the head.
Must be a pleasant surprise to find a review of your work in Dawkins’s new book, especially given its pride of place — as clean-up hitter. Always finish strong is as true in publishing as it is in closing argument as it is show biz.
Dawkins can really write a review. Excellent.
And Coyne can really write a book.
This should be a very good read. I’ll put it near the top of my reading list.
A play of on Anthony Powell’s Books Do Furnish a Room.
“The only kind of truth that works.”
Ah, this is excellent, Dawkins style writing – because there’s been noises made – by quite intelligent figures – about different flavors of truth.
Thank you, Richard Dawkins!
Cool. Cool review too.
No reviews on the Guardian website of the book as of yet. The culture doesn’t so much cancel as ignore