Where Dawkins Got Weird

The Magic of Reality: How We Know What's Really True by Richard Dawkins
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This one was pretty disappointing. Decent information. Weird tone.

For the record, I really like Richard Dawkins as a science writer. Okay, sure, his autobiography was unreadable, and he's lately been talking publicly like any other aging British transphobe, and I wish he'd just not touch that subject anymore so that I can try to overlook and maybe even forget his blockheaded support for intolerance--but I love virtually everything he's written explaining evolution and science in general. He usually does a brilliant job of leading the reader through complex science and history, making the complicated quite simple, and usually does this in an entertaining way. This does not feel like those books.

First of all, there's no indication that this is a book for younger people, whether you read the blurb or any other summary of the book, but you're about a page in when you realize it is. This is a book for kids. That's okay with me; I read books for kids. Non-fiction books for kids can be awesome. I'm interested in how he'll present the scientific process and various bits of evidence for young people, and maybe I'll find some value in it. Well, not this one.

Here's a random bit to demonstrate a little about the language he uses:

DNA is the genetic information that all living creatures carry in each of their cells. The DNA is spelled out along massively coiled "tapes" of data, called "chromosomes." These chromosomes really are very like the kind of data tapes you'd feed into an old-fashioned computer, because the information they carry is digital and is strung along them in order...

It's not bad. But you get it, right? This is for kids, and the example is just wrong, even for 2011 when it was written. Sometimes it sounds like he's talking to a circa 1950 kid, and other times you'd think he's actually picturing a Victorian child reading this book. His condescension is so awkward, so off-putting, I wonder if he even knows any young people anymore. The information is solid, I'll give him that, but he bounces back and forth between too dumbed down and too advanced to connect properly with a reader of any age at all.

The concept is nice--introduce each chapter with myths and magical stories about the topic (first humans, speciation, atomic structure, life in the universe, things like that) and then follow with the scientific take on it, explaining how we know what we know. How do we use carbon 14 to date things, and why does it work? What is a rainbow, and how can we use the spectrum to analyze the makeup of distant stars? Good topics. Solid explanation.

Just kinda weird tone. Put me off all the way through. Maybe that's why the publisher doesn't clue the potential reader/buyer into the intended audience.

I may overstate the case. Other readers might read it and think nah, it's not that bad. But I'm not going to try to get any tween or teen to read this book. I'll hand them The Ancestor's Tale or Climbing Mount Improbable, maybe one of the other ones, because those might be harder to read but they don't make you cringe while you do it.

View all my reviews