By the Book (40 page)

—
Isabel Allende

Reading is rereading just as writing is rewriting. Any worthwhile book took many, many drafts to reach completion, and so it would make sense that the first time the reader works her way through the volume it's more like a first date than a one-time encounter. If the person was uninteresting (not worthwhile) there's no need for a repeat performance, but if they have promise, good humor, hope, or just good manners, you might want to have a second sit-down, a third. The joy of reading is in the rereading; this is where you get to know the world and characters in deep and rewarding fashion.

—
Walter Mosley

I'm rereading
The Portrait of a Lady
, which I do every few years to remind myself that there really is such a thing as elegance, in life and in prose—and to remember how much devastation can unfold around it. I am moved by Henry James's ineffable sadness, the belief that human experience is full of loss and that high morals don't stand a chance. I don't entirely agree with that point of view, but I find it galvanizing.

—
Andrew Solomon

I reread [Janet] Malcolm's
Psychoanalysis: The Impossible Profession
just to remind myself how nonfiction is supposed to be done. I love how ominous her writing is. Even when she is simply sketching out the scenery, you know that something wonderful and thrilling is about to happen.

—
Malcolm Gladwell

[The book I most like rereading is one] I've had for over fifty years called
The Armed Forces Officer
. It was written by Brigadier S. L. A. (Slam) Marshall. After World War II he was commissioned to review the actions of our soldiers and provide a historically based book of guidance for army officers. It is one of the finest leadership books I've ever read and was given to every officer back then. It was always with me and is right in front of me now. It once went out of print, and I was able to persuade the Pentagon to reissue it with a new cover and an update. The book has received more updates and can now even be found on Amazon. Right next to it is
The Professional Soldier
, by Morris Janowitz. It was published in 1960, two years after I became an officer. It is a sociological analysis of the military officer at that time. I learned that the average senior army officer was white, a West Pointer, rural, and an Episcopalian from South Carolina. I nailed one out of five. In my early years in the army, my focus was on learning about and understanding my chosen profession. I was studying to be a good lieutenant. And, of course, the Bible.

—
Colin Powell

Richard Dawkins

What's the best book you've read so far this year?

I've been reading autobiographies to get me in the mood for writing my own and show me how it's done: Tolstoy (at one time my own memoir was to have been called, at my wife's suggestion,
Childhood, Boyhood, Truth
); Mark Twain; Bertrand Russell; that engaging maverick Herb Silverman; Edward O. Wilson, elder statesman of my subject. 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. He is out to enlighten and explain, and therefore has no need or desire to language it up like those obscurantist philosophers, often of “Continental” tradition, for whom obscurity is valued as a protective screen, or even admired for its own sake. I once heard of a philosopher who gushed an “Oh, thank you!” when a woman at a party said she found his book hard to understand. Dennett is the opposite. He works hard at being understood, and makes brilliant use of intuition pumps (his own coining) to that end. The book includes a helpful roundup of several of his earlier themes, and is as good as its intriguing title promises.

Who are your favorite contemporary writers and thinkers?

I've already mentioned Dan Dennett. I'll add Steven Pinker, A. C. Grayling, Daniel Kahneman, Jared Diamond, Matt Ridley, Lawrence Krauss, Martin Rees, Jerry Coyne—indeed quite a few of the luminaries that grace the
Edge
online salon conducted by John Brockman (the Man with the Golden Address Book). All share the same honest commitment to real-world truth, and the belief that discovering it is the business of scientists—and philosophers who take the trouble to learn science. Many of these “Third Culture” thinkers write very well. (Why is the Nobel Prize in Literature almost always given to a novelist, never a scientist? Why should we prefer our literature to be about things that didn't happen? Wouldn't, say, Steven Pinker be a good candidate for the literature prize?)

You have written several books on science and secularism. What other books on the subject would you recommend?

Look at the list of those who obsessively attack Sam Harris and you'll get an idea of what a dangerously effective writer he is: clear, eloquent, penetratingly intelligent, suffers no fools. Much the same could be said of Christopher Hitchens, and the attacks on him have increased now he is no longer around to fight back. 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.

You were born in Kenya and spent your early childhood there. What kinds of books did you read while growing up in Africa?

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. Beginning before the coming of the white men, she takes us readers into the Kikuyu world and mind so successfully that when the British finally arrive, we find their ways as quaint and alien as if they were invading Martians. We feel at home in an economy pegged to the goat standard (as I put it in my introduction to the Penguin reprint of the book), and we share the tribal indignation that rupees cannot, as promised, be “changed into goats.” Huxley's descriptive powers rival Steinbeck's, with the added subtlety that her metaphors and imagery are drawn from the Kikuyu mind. The pasture “gleamed like a parrot's wing.” A felled tree “tottered like a drunken elder.”

I was much too young to read this literary tour de force during my African childhood, though I have read it many times since and am proud of my achievement in persuading Penguin Books to restore it to print. However, just as Elspeth Huxley immersed herself in Kikuyu life to produce her masterpiece, 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
,
Where the Leopard Passes
, and others are fables of animal wiles and trickery, a kind of African Brer Rabbit and Brer Fox. Kalulu the rabbit is the cunning hero of most of the stories, perennially outwitting Nkandwe the jackal, Fisi the hyena, Nyalugwe the leopard, and others. The names of the characters are actually species names in the local family of languages, one of which I knew as Chinyanja, so that was an added bond.

Did you identify with any fictional characters as a child? Who was your literary hero?

I didn't know children were expected to have literary heroes, but I certainly had one, and I even identified with him at one time: Doctor Dolittle, whom I now half identify with the Charles Darwin of
Beagle
days. This gentle, kindly naturalist, who could talk to nonhuman animals and commanded godlike powers through their devotion to him, is nowadays unfashionable—and even banned from libraries—because of suspected racism. Well, what do you expect? Hugh Lofting was writing in the 1920s, and the ubiquitous racism of England at that time can be seen in so much fiction, including Agatha Christie, Sapper (
Bulldog Drummond
), and many other popular writers for all ages. This is not to excuse it, but Lofting's racism was paternalistic rather than malign and, in my opinion, sufficiently outweighed by the admirable anti-speciesism of all his books.

What book has had the greatest impact on you?

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. So I'll go, less obviously, for a 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. It was
The Black Cloud
that first pumped my intuition about information theory and the idea of the arbitrariness of the medium by which information is apprehended. I understood, too, the potential difficulty of separating out individuals from the group in which they are embedded. Is a beehive a colony or a superorganism? If human brains were joined telepathically by high-speed data transmission links, would we become one massive individual? The plot engagingly illustrates the way in which discoveries are simultaneously made more than once in radically different ways. But above all the novel bequeathed to me the haunting idea of “the Deep Problems” of existence and origins, questions which the human mind was never evolved to understand.

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. Watson, in particular, has a list of quirky imperatives such as “Don't take up golf”; “Work on Sundays”; “Hire spunky lab helpers”; and “Avoid being photographed.”

In general, what kinds of stories are you drawn to?

I'm not an aficionado of science fiction, but I've already appreciated a novel that pumps scientific intuition. Arthur C. Clarke and Isaac Asimov, too, exemplify that kind of good science fiction, unlike slack-jawed fantasy where the writer dreams heedlessly away without respecting the decent constraints of science. Another first-class example of the right sort of science fiction is Daniel F. Galouye's
Dark Universe
. Here the intuition being pumped concerns mythology and the origins of religion. A people who, for reasons that emerge, lost light at some remote part of their history and now live in perpetual darkness, retain “light” in their language but only in mythic allusions to a lost paradise from which they have fallen. They worship things like “Great Light Almighty,” “Oh, thank Light,” “For Light's sake!,” and their pantheon includes demonic figures who engineered the fall from Light's grace. The demons are called Strontium, Cobalt, and the arch-devil Hydrogen Himself. Go figure, as Americans say.

I also enjoy social satire of the Evelyn Waugh, Aldous Huxley, Kingsley Amis, Michael Frayn kind. Witty observation of the way people are and the way they talk, the sort of sharply penetrating perceptiveness that makes me want to run into the street and hug somebody with sheer delight.

What books might we be surprised to find on your shelves?

Depending on how naïvely literalistic you are, you might be surprised to find the Bible. The King James Version, of course, and not so much on my shelves as continually off my shelves, because I open it so often: sometimes to quote it, sometimes for sheer literary pleasure—especially Ecclesiastes and the Song of Songs.

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. Not that either Obama or Cameron are superstitious or supernaturalists, but they need to develop a less obsequious attitude to their constituents who are. Robert Axelrod's
Evolution of Cooperation
is salutary for anybody involved in settling disputes and trying to foster cooperation. Indeed I wrote in my foreword to the revised edition: “The world's leaders should all be locked up with this book and not released until they have read it. This would be a pleasure to them and might save the rest of us.
The Evolution of Cooperation
deserves to replace the Gideon Bible.”