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The Death of Adam: Essays on Modern Thought
by Marilynne Robinson
from Picador
Customer Reviews:
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Avg. Customer Rating: 4.5 / 5.0 
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I Suppose It's Good For Me 
Our author takes the position that not only are we the product of the "dumbing down of America", but we've allowed our thought processes to become "dumbed down" as well. She then gives us a series of essays to prove her point, essays that are peppered with obscure words utilizing their most obscure meanings! I ran for my Websters soft cover dictionary, but had to resort to my unabridged for most of them. She does make some good points about how inacurate research has developed some long-held ideas resulting... more info
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Arrogant, resentful, and pointlessly polemical 
This will be a very critical review, but it is an honest one, and I hope it can get a hearing here.
From reading these essays, I get the impression that I would very much enjoy a wide-ranging discussion of books, ideas, and religion with the author, subject to one condition outside my control--that she deemed me a worthy interlocutor rather than classing me with the mass of idiots and prigs she seems to consider just about all of her contemporaries in these pages. It's an unlikely condition, I judge... more info
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A Quest for Adam
Overall a worthwhile read, in somewhat of a personal confessional mode. Weak discussion of Darwin and implications of his works. Some thoughts are totally vexatious: see chptr. Family, and comment in para 2, pg 95. "..increased availability of skilled labor will lower its value.." and lead to "erosion of prosperity". Really?
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Too good to be typecast. 
I have only read two of the essays in The Death of Adam; Darwinism and Family, yet, on the strength of these, I have no reservation in endorsing the book as a whole.
The greatest impediment to sensible discourse is the unwarranted typecasting, or affixing of labels, which typifies the debate on current intellectual issues. One finds an example of it amongst the reviews of this book; Robinson is described as a "conservative" and the case is closed without much further ado. Besides being patently false,... more info
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