Category: Reviews

A number of books on the theme of faith and reason have been published lately. I just finished one of them, The God Delusion, by Richard Dawkins. This book give...

Daniel Gilbert’s book Stumbling on Happiness is not about happiness so much as it is about why our pursuit of happiness so often has disappointing results...

My younger son recently discovered Annie Dillard’s books and recommended several of them to me, including For the Time Being. Before I had a chance to rea...

Martin Seligman is the founder of the Positive Psychology movement, a shift in attention to the psychology of functional rather than dysfunctional states of min...

I just finished reading Judith Rich Harris’s new book No Two Alike: Human Nature and Human Individuality. Harris is an independent scholar whose controver...

I recently read On Desire: Why We Want What We Want, by William B. Irvine. The subject is related to happiness, because getting (or not getting) what we want or...

This weekend I finished The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason, by Sam Harris. Most of the book is about the dangers that uncritical faith...

Jared Diamond described humans as “the third chimpanzee” in his book with that title, written 20-some years ago. Frans de Waal, an eminent primatolo...

Not to hurt or humble the animals is our first duty to them, but to stop there is not enough. We have a higher mission, to be of service to them whenever they r...