So both books on the science reading list, which means I am seriously striking out with this list. Both were listened to on audiobook, and those narrators did nothing but add to the misery of listening to the writing of these books.

Naomi Klein can't write a damn narrative to save her life but she can nag and nag for up to 80+ minutes at a given time. There was some good info given in between the nag sessions, but the first chapter was over 80 minutes and was just the prologue. She is too damn long-winded and can't seem to end a point. And from what it sounded like when I listened to the narrator, Klein must use a WHOLE LOT of EXCLAMATION POINTS!!!!!!!

Rachel Carson's writing is way too flowery, so the science gets lost. There is little to no narrative, just scene after scene describing the landscape and then a dystopian nightmare of dead insects and birds due to chemical spraying. It was just repetitive. The narrator read the book as if she was reading a lullaby or cozy mystery, with little to no variation in her tone. It was a great way to fall asleep....but I don't need help falling asleep.

Edward Wilson has crafted another winner with "SOUTH ATLANTIC REQUIEM."

William Catesby, the redoubtable and resourceful veteran MI-6 agent, polyglot, and ever faithful servant of Her Majesty's Government, takes center stage once more. The time is 1979. A new Conservative government has taken power in Britain and is set on shaking things up. And that entails substantial cuts in the defense budget.

There is also a military dictatorship in Argentina eyeing a group of offshore islands -- the Falklands -- that have been under British sovereignty for close to 150 years. The Argentines have long regarded these islands as theirs - las Malvinas. But they have been reluctant to challenge British power for decades. That is, until the change of government in Whitehall. The Prime Minister - Margaret Thatcher - doesn't regard the Falklands as vital to Britain's strategic interests. There are some low level talks between the British and Argentines that hint at putting into place a gradual turnover of the Falklands to Argentina.

Catesby has been made head of operations in South America. Events between 1979 and early 1982 lead to a simmering crisis between Whitehall and Buenos Aires. After Thatcher has ordered the withdrawal of a Royal Navy ship (HMS Endurance) -- which had been patrolling the waters surrounding the Falklands -- the ruling Junta in Argentina busies itself with making plans to seize the Falklands. Catesby has -- through the use in Buenos Aires of a young, savvy, assertive Cambridge graduate (Fiona Stewart - who also displays a facility for languages) he had hired as a part-time agent to keep tabs on the Junta -- kept his ears alert to subtle changes in the political climate. Miss Stewart for a time provides MI-6 with valuable intelligence -- through contacts she has developed among some members of the Argentine government and military (many of them young officers, one of whom - a naval aviator and champion polo player - she falls in love with; the feelings are mutual). But the situation changes and Catesby's intelligence source fades to black --- for reasons that one can discover as the story progresses.

The novel goes on to provide some very revealing insights into how it was that Argentina and Britain went to war over the Falklands in the Spring of 1982. As someone who lived through that time and has some memory of that conflict, I very much enjoyed the way Wilson showed how events unfolded from a variety of personalities and perspectives in the UK, Europe, South America, and Washington.

All in all, "SOUTH ATLANTIC REQUIEM" was a thoroughly satisfying, exciting, and sobering Cold War novel.

Currently $1.99: The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club, by Dorothy L. Sayers.  The Golden Compass (aka Northern Lights), The Subtle Knife, and The Amber Spyglass, by Phillip Pullman.  Jack of Shadows, by Roger Zelazny.  Cheaper by the Dozen, by Frank Gilbreth and Ernestine Gilbreth Carey.

Currently $2.99: Three James Herriot Classics (All Creatures Great and Small, All Things Bright and Beautiful, and All Things Wise and Wonderful), by James Herriot.  Brideshead Revisited, by Evelyn Waugh.

Currently $3.99: And the Band Played On, by Randy Shilts.  Silent Spring, by Rachel Carson.

Edward Wilson has again crafted an engaging, well-paced, and thrilling novel that brings back William Catesby, a sentimental yet coldly efficient agent in Britain's MI-6. Shuttling from West Germany to London, to Havana, and onward to Washington between October 1960 and the final week of October 1962 (when the world was on the brink of nuclear war), Catesby is given a thankless, yet vital task. That is, to make clandestine contacts and "offer Moscow a secret deal to break the deadlock" between it and Washington. One of the observations he makes during his service in Havana is the following: "The most interesting aspect of international relations wasn’t the conflict between enemies, but the conflicts between allies. You only had to go to an embassy cocktail party to see those conflicts in the flesh. It was easier for Western diplos to talk to the Russians than to talk to each other."

Cross, double-cross, love, the clear and present threat of war balanced against the preciousness of peace . Taken together, all these elements faithfully evoke the spirit of the early 1960s. Wilson has this uncanny skill for blending in fiction with history that will have the reader wondering how much more there may have been to the Cold War beyond what is the common narrative surrounding it today. Read "THE MIDNIGHT SWIMMER" and be amazed.

On reading this again after a couple of decades, I am struck with how brilliantly it is written. The subtlety and incisiveness of Wilson's prose is startling at times, and the sheer depth of his insight into human nature something close to breath-taking. I am also surprised at how well this holds up after all these years. There is very little in Wilson's many acute observations that would need changing. Also, it is interesting to see, in retrospect, that it is this book and not his monumental, Sociobiology: The New Synthesis (1975), that continues to serve as an exemplar for later texts. For example, Paul Ehrlich's recent book on evolution was entitled On Human Natures (2000), the plural in the title suggesting that it was written at least in part as a reaction to Wilson. I also note that some other works including Matt Ridley's The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature.(1993), Robert Wright's The Moral Animal: Evolutionary Psychology and Everyday Life (1994), and more recently, Bobbi S. Low's Why Sex Matters: A Darwinian Look at Human Behavior (2000), are organized intellectually in such a manner as to directly update chapters in Wilson's book.

On Human Nature was written as a continuation of Sociobiology, greatly expanding the final chapter, "Man: From Sociobiology to Sociology." In doing so, Wilson has met with reaction from some quarters similar to the reaction the Victorians gave Darwin. Wilson's sociobiology was seen as a new rationale for the evils of eugenics and he was ostracized in the social science and humanities departments of colleges and universities throughout the United States and elsewhere. Rereading this book, I can see why. Wilson's primary "sin" is the unmitigated directness of his expression and his refusal to use the shield and obfuscation of politically correct language. Thus he writes on page 203, "In the pages of The New York Review of Books, Commentary, The New Republic, Daedalus, National Review, Saturday Review, and other literary journals[,] articles dominate that read as if most of basic science had halted during the nineteenth century." On page 207, he avers, "Luddites and anti-intellectuals do not master the differential equations of thermodynamics or the biochemical cures of illness. They stay in thatched huts and die young."

In the first instance, he has offended the intellectual establishment by pointing out their lack of education, and in the second his incisive expression sounds a bit elitist. But Wilson is not an elitist, nor is he the evil eugenic bad boy that some would have us believe. He is in fact a humanist and one of the world's most renowned scientists, a man who knows more about biology and evolution than most of his critics put together.

I want to quote a little from the book to demonstrate the incisive style and the penetrating nature of Wilson's ideas, and in so doing, perhaps hint at just what it is that his critics find objectionable.   In the chapter on altruism, he writes, "The genius of human sociality is in fact the ease with which alliances are formed, broken, and reconstituted, always with strong emotional appeals to rules believed to be absolute" (p. 163). Or similarly on the next page, "It is exquisitely human to make spiritual commitments that are absolute to the very moment they are broken." Or, "The genes hold culture on a leash. The leash is very long, but inevitably values will be constrained in accordance with their effects on the human gene pool" (p. 167). He ends the chapter with the stark, Dawkinsian conclusion that "Morality has no other demonstrable ultimate function" than to keep intact the genetic material.

In the chapter on aggression, he posits, "The evolution of warfare was an autocatalytic reaction that could not be halted by any people, because to attempt to reverse the process unilaterally was to fall victim" (p. 116). On the next page, he quotes Abba Eban on the occasion of the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, "men use reason as a last resort."

In the chapter on religion, he argues that the ability of the individual to conform to the group dynamics of religion is in itself adaptive. As he avers on page 184, "When the gods are served, the Darwinian fitness of the members of the tribe is the ultimate if unrecognized beneficiary."

It is easy to see why some people might be offended at such a frank and penetrating expression. But one of the amazing things about Wilson is that he can be bluntly objective about humanity without being cynical. I have always found his works to be surprisingly optimistic. He has the ability to see human beings as animals, but as animals with their eyes on the stars. In the final chapter entitled, "Hope," Wilson presents his belief that our world will be improved as scientific materialism becomes the dominate mythology. Note well this point: Wilson considers scientific materialism, like religion and the macabre dance of Marxist-Leninism, to be a mythology. His point is that there is no final or transcending truth that we humans may discover; there is no body of knowledge or suite of disciplines that will lead us to absolute knowledge. There are only better ways of ordering the environment and of understanding our predicament. He believes that toward that end scientific materialism will be a clear improvement over the religious and political mythologies that now dominate our cultures.

No one interested in evolutionary psychology can afford to miss this book, even though it was written the 1970s. It is a classic. Anyone interested in human nature (yes, one may profitably generalize about human nature, as long as one understands what a generalization is, and appreciates its limitations) should read this book, one of the most significant ever written on a subject of unparalleled importance.

--Dennis Littrell, author of “Understanding Evolution and Ourselves”