From the publisher's write-up for this title:
Oh, dear. I just read a couple of reviews on barnesandnoble.com, and "A reviewer" faults the author for too many digs at George W. Bush - not because the reviewer likes Bush (he clearly doesn't), but because he's afraid this will make the book seem dated too quickly. Sigh.The renowned biologist and thinker Richard Dawkins presents his most expansive work yet: a comprehensive look at evolution, ranging from the latest developments in the field to his own provocative views. Loosely based on the form of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, Dawkins's Tale takes us modern humans back through four billion years of life on our planet. As the pilgrimage progresses, we join with other organisms at the forty "rendezvous points" where we find a common ancestor. The band of pilgrims swells into a vast crowd as we join first with other primates, then with other mammals, and so on back to the first primordial organism. Dawkins's brilliant, inventive approach allows us to view the connections between ourselves and all other life in a bracingly novel way....
Oh, well. Just so you know, Dawkins does seem to be riding something of a wave right now - not a huge one, perhaps, but he is making noticable ripples.
An interesting side note: as I go to post, this title is ranked 569 in books at Amazon, and has a Barnes & Noble sales rank of 1,495. You don't usually see quite that much disparity between the rankings on the two sites. It does happen though, especially in nonfiction. But, still, what a difference.
The amazon.co.uk ranking is 659. (Anagrams, anyone? 569/659??? Or would that be something like 'numagrams', this being numbers instead of letters?) By the way, the UK cover is more professional looking than the US cover, in my humble opinion.
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