Review of E.O. Wilson's New Novel

nytimes.com

16 points·mhb··5 comments

That was an exceptionally well-written review - '[S]muggling gems of empirical knowledge across the literary border...' is a wonderful phrase. Book sounds great. Ordered.

Perhaps I am too used to non-book reviews (I generally just go by what I've heard is good, with books). It read like a summary. I stopped reading halfway through because I was pretty sure I was getting spoilers I didn't want to get.

Is this really what a good book review reads like? I couldn't even spot a firm recommendation before I stopped (although implicitly the reviewer seems to have enjoyed it).

It was by Barbara Kingsolver, a great author and biologist in her own right.

Sociobiology, as a unifying theory of behavior, is profoundly more nuanced than any simple construct about men and women. But sound bites have consistently oversimplified it and raised the ire of a public ever eager to mistake an observer’s statement of “This is” for a moralist’s “This is what should be.”

What is the current landscape of this area of thought?

nature vs. nurture

determinism vs. freewill

behaviorism vs. moralism

and so on...

I would be interested to know how to categorize what I believe, and know what camp that puts me in.

I wonder about her assertion that scientists rarely write novels: I wouldn't be at all surprised if the proportions of published novels written by trained scientists was greater than the proportion of trained scientist in the general population.

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