Understanding Evolution and Ourselves

This is an extraordinary book. There is nothing quite like it in the literature. What Dennis Littrell does is review some of the great tomes of evolution, especially recent evolution, written by some of the most glittering luminaries and critique them in a way that few people can. Littrell has the knowledge, but more importantly, he has the freedom to candidly and insightfully evaluate and criticize what evolutionary biologists, evolutionary psychologists and others from similar disciplines have written. The book is divided into six chapters: Human Evolution, Evolution vs. Creationism, Evolution Writ Small, Evolutionary Psychology, Evolution in General, and Evolution and the Future. There is an index of titles and another index of authors reviewed. Most of the famous names in evolutionary biology are here, such as Richard Dawkins, Jared Diamond, Niles Eldredge, Stephen Jay Gould, Richard Lewontin, Bobbi S. Low, Ernst Mayr, Ian Tattersall, Edward O. Wilson, Richard Wrangham, and of course Charles Darwin, and about eighty-five more including outstanding science journalists such as Matt Ridley, Nicholas Wade and Richard Wright. Littrell writes in a lively, often satirical style that stings his targets and delights his readers, but most significantly, his reviews inform. In many respects this book amounts to not just an introduction to the excitement of what is happening in evolutionary biology today, but can be seen as a course in evolution for the general reader. Don’t miss this book!

In addition to devoting many years to the study of biological evolution, I've been a soldier, a newspaper reporter, a high school English teacher, a day trader and a poker professional. I've written literally millions of words in my career as a writer, and think of myself primarily as a writer. My work has appeared in popular publications like Playboy and Smoke magazines and in literary journals where it has won some minor awards. My novel A Perfectly Natural Act gained royalty publication from G.P. Putnam's in 1973 and was brought out in paperback the following year by Pinnacle. First Artists was considering an option on it when they went defunct. The novel would make a rather good movie. (Maybe I'll write the screenplay one of these days.) Additionally, I've written over fifteen hundred reviews (over a million words in all!) for various Web sites, most notably Amazon and the Internet Movie Database. Some of my reviews are among the best appearing anywhere (or so I have been told). Over the years I've also written about a dozen book-length manuscripts. My project now is to present perhaps half of these manuscripts before the public in book form. I am also putting together book-length collections of my reviews. I was graduated from UCLA in 1969 with a major in Political Science and minor in English Literature.