The New York Times offers a review of several books on science and religion today, including a new screed by Dawkins, Daniel Dennett’s book from a little while back, and several books attempting to find common ground between science and religion, by Francis Collins, Owen Gingerish, Joan Roughgarden, and E. O. Wilson. This is probably in the top ten least useful book reviews you’ll read this year.
The problem isn’t with the subject matter, though I’m sure some at ScienceBlogs will object to the very concept of all save the Dawkins and Dennett. The problem is that they’re trying to talk about seven different books in two lousy screens worth of text. This is just about enough space to let you know that these books exist and have been published, but not quite enough to tell you whether any of them are actually worth reading.
There’s a nice article to be written doing an extensive compare-and-contrast between these, with a discussion of the relative merits of each, and some evaluation of what they have to say about the topic. This is not that article.
You are probably right. The reviewer would have time only to provide jist of what’s common in all these books and what’s not common. It is like introducing books to the reader rather than reviewing it.
Freeman Dyson reviewed Dennett’s book in the NY review of books, thought he did an excellent job:
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/19090
Yeah, the Dennett has been out for a while, which was a little surprising.
Really, this sort of “take seven sort-of-recent books and discuss them together” thing is much more a New York Review of Books kind of piece, and they actually do it right, giving each book a reasonable amount of space.
Agreed, what I also like about the NY review is that the articles are usually as much about the reviewers as they are about the books reviewed, Dyson’s piece is a case at point.