

Review of E.O. Wilson's New Novel - mhb
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/11/books/review/Kingsolver-t.html?ref=books

======
microcentury
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.

~~~
devinj
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).

------
euroclydon
_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.

------
MaysonL
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.

