Joël de Rosnay

A very simplistic look at life and the origin of the cosmos, set up as interviews by a journalist with three scientists. It is interesting that a quest for the meaning of life didn't lead our journalist to any biologists, since they are the people who study life. Instead, we get a physicist, a chemist, and an anthropologist, which means we get biological theories filtered through the lens of non-biologists. In addition, the journalist is determined to find an actual meaning for life, and seems to prefer to answer that meaning in a divine creator. Her attempts to put a divine creator into the mix are met with skepticism by the scientists, though there is a lot of waffling and non-overlapping nonsense generated. In the end, the book is weak not just because it is nearly 20 years old (the science is general enough that it might not matter too terribly), but because it really doesn't go anywhere outside the interest zone of the journalist who generates the questions. The speculation - not, not speculation, certainty - that we will be living extra-terrestrially in some not-too-distant future also grates; first because it isn't as likely as they suggest, and second because we don't have any right to take our messy selves out to screw up another world before we've figured out how to live without destroying everything around us.… (more)