Books recommended by Richard Dawkins

Richard Dawkins Books He Recommends - 13 Reads


Richard Dawkins

Check out 13 of the greatest books on different topics suggested by this prominent scientist.
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Books from Richard Dawkins

War and Peace

What do you plan to read next?“War and Peace.” Oh dear, I set myself up for that, didn’t I?
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Books from Richard Dawkins

The Evolution of Cooperation

Robert Axelrod’s “Evolution of Cooperation” is salutary for anybody involved in settling disputes and trying to foster cooperation.
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Books from Richard Dawkins

The Demon-Haunted World

If you could require the president to read one book, what would it be? And the British prime minister?I’d take the following two books, hand one to each of them, then ask them to swap books so they end up reading both: Carl Sagan’s “Demon-Haunted World” is the best antidote I know to superstition and pseudoscience.
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Avoid Boring People

What books would you recommend to an aspiring scientist?Both Peter Medawar and James Watson have written books on this. Called, respectively, “Advice to a Young Scientist” and “Avoid Boring People,” these are not their authors’ best books, but they offer memorable hints for success in the vocation of science.
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Advice To A Young Scientist

What books would you recommend to an aspiring scientist?Both Peter Medawar and James Watson have written books on this. Called, respectively, “Advice to a Young Scientist”
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Books from Richard Dawkins

The Black Cloud

Work of science fiction, Fred Hoyle’s “Black Cloud.” In many ways a deplorable book (the hero, with whom we are supposed to identify, is obnoxious, aggressively rude, sexist and a terrible role model for scientists), I nevertheless learned more science from it, at a formative age, than one ever expects from a work of fiction.
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On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, Or, The Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life

The obvious, and true, answer is Darwin’s “Origin,” but I didn’t read the book itself until after its message had changed my life by secondary routes.
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The Long Grass Whispers

Geraldine Elliot listened to the folk tales of the Ngoni people further south (where I lived after my family moved from Kenya), and she produced a beautiful series of children’s books which I adored. “The Long Grass Whispers.”
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Red Strangers

The greatest novel to come out of Kenya is, in my admittedly limited opinion, one of the great novels of the English language, and it is lamentably neglected by literary connoisseurs: Elspeth Huxley’s “Red Strangers,” a saga sweeping through four generations of a Kikuyu family, based on the author’s sympathetic and lifelong familiarity with that tribe.
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Attack of the Theocrats

Less well known, but very good in their different ways, are J. Anderson Thomson’s “Why We Believe in God(s),” a psychologically informed analysis of what J. L. Mackie called “The Miracle of Theism,” and Sean Faircloth’s “Attack of the Theocrats!,” a chillingly well-researched unmasking of the contemporary political threat to America’s noble secular tradition.
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The Miracle of Theism

Less well known, but very good in their different ways, are J. Anderson Thomson’s “Why We Believe in God(s),” a psychologically informed analysis of what J. L. Mackie called “The Miracle of Theism,” and Sean Faircloth’s “Attack of the Theocrats!,” a chillingly well-researched unmasking of the contemporary political threat to America’s noble secular tradition.
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Why We Believe in God(s)

Less well known, but very good in their different ways, are J. Anderson Thomson’s “Why We Believe in God(s),” a psychologically informed analysis of what J. L. Mackie called “The Miracle of Theism,” and Sean Faircloth’s “Attack of the Theocrats!,” a chillingly well-researched unmasking of the contemporary political threat to America’s noble secular tradition.
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Intuition Pumps And Other Tools for Thinking

But the best new book I have read is Daniel Dennett’s “Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking.” A philosopher of Dennett’s caliber has nothing to fear from clarity and openness.
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