An Appetite for Wonder: The Making of a Scientist

In the first volume of a projected two-volume memoir, evolutionary biologist and ethologist Dawkins (fellow, emeritus, New College, Univ. of Oxford; The God Delusion) looks back on his life from childhood through the publication of his first and most famous book, The Selfish Gene, in 1976. It's a mixture of lighthearted anecdote (when Richard was a young student, his French teacher wrote on his report card that he had "a wonderful facility in escaping work"), straightforward narrative, and the author's opinions, of which Dawkins has never been short. On almost any issue—his sister's comfort blanket, the fatuity of prayer, the fraudulence of the Book of Mormon—Dawkins's skeptical mind works away, laying out rationales for his judgments. Ultimately, this is a self-portrait of an intensely alive man whose radical positions are the logical outgrowth of his skeptical, science-based approach to almost everything. Dawkins does not paint himself as perfect, but he doesn't let himself become mired in self-doubt—the book has a peppy, positive tone to it. His memoir is more about science than atheism, although both topics crop up.