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.

Too bad Gould didn't have the epiphany that Stephen Hawking had. In _A Brief History of Time_ he mentioned a book of cosmology he wrote in the early Seventies. He called it "highly technical and quite unreadable", and hoped that he had learned to write more clearly since then.

I have worked my way, at considerable effort, through the tome in question. That alone should give me commenting rights. So...

Although I will admit that at times SJ Gould wrote like Al Gore on quaaludes, the fact is that David Barash is guilty of having decided what would be the most provocative thesis for his review, and then deliberately interpreted and selectively excerpted everything Gould wrote within the context of that Weltanschauung.

A convenient rhetorical approach, perhaps, but bad scholarship (or reviewership).

Tragically, there is no way you will be able to decide which of us is correct without reading the 1300+ pages (I'm giving you a break and not including the appendices and notes in the required reading section).

I haven't even finished War and Peace yet!

Knock, knock.

Who's there?

Warren.

Warren who?

War and Peace, by Leo Tolstoy.

Har har HAR har snork. Oh, I crack me up.