Dalton

I’m an undergraduate biophysics student, so I already have a wide base of information about genetics. And I still found this book enjoyable. It did two things for me:
1) It helped define what is meant by “fittest” in evolution. Corner a geneticist and ask him to define fittest and you’ll get a lot of hand ringing and not much else. Here are some really good examples of what survives and why.
2) Gives clear evidence of human evolution. Talking about human evolution really brings it all home. Understand the pressures that changed different human populations in a really fascinating part of our history.
All of this is done in a way that is entertaining and personal.

Never. This book is a collection of non-sense consultant-speak. From demography to neuroscience, she doesn't actually understand anything that she's talking about. It's just buzz BS and consultant "exercises" to "beak out of your current way of thinking!" Reading this was genuinely a waste of time.

This book is not the same arguments you've heard before. Usually a book about evolution gives all of the old arguments and then adds the new data at the end. Dawkins gives a unique and thoroughly modern argument for evolution. I felt as if I was hearing the story for the first time. This book reminded me why evolution isn't just true but beautiful.

This book took a critical look at the role of corporation and their effect over the last 500 years. But it's a bit light on what you can actually do to change things. Corporations are myopic and self interested in a way that humans aren't. And they are sucking value out of the world. However, I don't think the solutions he proposes are up to the task of fixing the problem.
He's right in saying that the internet is not a panacea. But he's unduly pessimistic about what's happened to the internet in the last 12 years. The hardcore internet (open, unstructured) has decreased an as a relative proportion of whats going on on the internet, but has increased in absolute terms. The emergence of the user friendly (sometimes cooperate) internet is not a sign that the hardcore one is dieing. As long as we have net neutrality the hardcore internet will be going strong.