Dorothy Parker is one of my short story idols. Readers who prefer action over rumination may find her stories dull and forgettable, but for the people watchers and neutral cynics, her writing is the cream of the character-driven crop. I can't read too many of them at once, however, because her deadpan descriptions of less-than-perfect people are, while humorous, also pretty depressing. Four stars because the last half of this edition consists of outdated reviews instead of more wit-infused gold.

This was a compulsory text for my class on Evolution during my undergraduate days, but it stuck firmly in my mind years after I moved on to other fields. Weiner's writing has a journalistic tone, but flows well and kept me consistently interested. He takes the mysticism out of Darwin's Theory of Evolution, describing key modern efforts to research speciation and clarify his ideas centuries after the HMS Beagle landed on the shores of the Galapagos islands. My one gripe with the book is its slight political slant, with anecdotes from researchers about one-upping religious zealots and a final chapter characterizing the bulk of the American public as closed-minded. A more tolerant approach could have opened up the audience to that same public. Otherwise, I highly recommend this book to anyone who wants a clearer understanding of evolutionary theory without the bulky textbooks.