David Barash has a fairly critical review of Steven Jay Gould’s final book (though not of the man himself). Summary: it was too long, it badly needed an editor, he simply ignored valid criticisms rather than responding to them, he has a final indulgence in some pet (and silly) theories, and the author was too full of himself right to the end. Warning: the review itself is not short.

I probably won’t be reading the book myself any time soon, but at fourteen hundred pages, I probably wouldn’t have been anyway.