Customer Reviews

Optical Allusions

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My 9 year old read it straight through. My 5 year old has had me read him a chapter every night a few times through, even though most of it has to go over his head. Lots to appeal to different educational levels than the one it was intended for. Good science, well presented, & highly entertaining.

"Optical Allusions" is quirky and funny, with plenty of wicked, irreverent wit wed to a compelling, carefully presented case for the evolution of vision. The comic book style episodes used to illustrate natural and sexual selection, the biochemistry of sight, and the like, are punctuated by pages of straight text that, with patience and accessibility, fills in the scholarly blanks left open in the story. It's an ideal marriage of form and function, carbonated with absurd, edgy story-telling. I loved this book, and if I were a high school biology honors teacher, I would not hesitate to use it as a text. My only quibble is that there were a few typos I found distracting--"bosses" rather than the intended "boss's," for example. I expect to see that sort of thing in creationist writing, frankly, but when otherwise brilliant books like "Optical Allusions" and Prothero's stunning book, "Evolution: What the Fossils Say and Why it Matters" have careless mistakes in them, it bugs me--I suppose because I see any imperfection in the arguments for or presentation of evolutionary theory as possible grist for the forces of ignorance.