Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

This book is a major disappointment, and it is interesting that so many reviewers conveniently ignore the worst parts of the book, as if they based their reviews on the book jacket summary. Unfortunately, what lie within the pages of the book, and undermine the points author Richard Dawkins is trying to make, are pages and pages of political ranting. The book promises to offer a journey from the human branch of the evolutionary tree to the beginning of microbial life. Are the editors at Dawkins' publisher so in awe of this self-important, bookish, and musty professor that they have lost any sensibility of what makes a good narrative? While the premise could be promising (hey, let's write a book inspired by Chaucer's Canterbury Tales that examines important parts of the evolutionary family tree between humans and bacteria, whatever....), the execution is a long-winded, rambling, and oftentimes ranting bore. Dawkins can hardly find a cohesive narrative amid his pursuits of tedious tangentials, and resorts to shallow political criticism in place of real storytelling (OK, we got the point: Dawkins has a seemingly congenital hatred of President George W. Bush, and actually wastes space on dead tree pulp dissecting Bush's pronunciation of the word "nuclear," yawn....). Most distastefully, he also questions whether former Secretary of State Colin Powell is really a black man, as if he could wish away his racist harborings with a discussion of semantics. Perhaps his book would be much more interesting if he could actually tell a more sober story about the significance of DNA similarities in humans and apes (his intellectual equal in the political sphere). Too bad Carl Sagan isn't still alive to write an interesting and engaging story about evolution. Instead, we're stuck with this tiresome bore. Dawkins offers a huge injustice to a fascinating topic.