Dennis Littrell

Hard Science and the Unknowable: Reviews by Dennis Littrell

Publisher Marketing: "Hard Science and the Unknowable" is another extraordinary book from Dennis Littrell. There is nothing quite like it in the literature. What Littrell does is review in depth 117 popular science and pseudoscience books covering a range of topics from aliens and UFOs to cosmology and particle physics. The result is a collection of essays that informs and gives meaning and relevance to our lives against the grandeur of the cosmos. The book is divided into eight chapters beginning with "Aliens, SETI and UFOs" through "Futurists" and ending with "Metaphysical Science." Tomes by some of the august scientists of our time including Steven Weinberg, Richard Feynman, Stephen Hawking, Carl Sagan, Brian Greene, Sir Martin Rees along with some of our best science journalists including Ben Bova, Marcus Chown, Joel Achenbach, and K. C. Cole are examined with a critical eye. Some of the eye-popping ideas of best-selling futurists such as Ray Kurzweil, Francis Fukuyama, Bruce Sterling and others are explored and critiqued. Littrell introduces the reviews and writes an afterword for each chapter. There is an index of titles and another index of authors reviewed. Littrell writes in a lively, often satirical style that stings his targets and delights his readers, but most significantly, his reviews inform. Don't miss this book! Contributor Bio:  Littrell, Dennis In addition to devoting many years to the study of biological evolution, I've been a soldier, a newspaper reporter, a high school English teacher, a day trader and a poker professional. I've written literally millions of words in my career as a writer, and think of myself primarily as a writer. My work has appeared in popular publications like Playboy and Smoke magazines and in literary journals where it has won some minor awards. My novel A Perfectly Natural Act gained royalty publication from G. P. Putnam's in 1973 and was brought out in paperback the following year by Pinnacle. First Artists was considering an option on it when they went defunct. The novel would make a rather good movie. (Maybe I'll write the screenplay one of these days.) Additionally, I've written over fifteen hundred reviews (over a million words in all!) for various Web sites, most notably Amazon and the Internet Movie Database. Some of my reviews are among the best appearing anywhere (or so I have been told). Over the years I've also written about a dozen book-length manuscripts. My project now is to present perhaps half of these manuscripts before the public in book form. I am also putting together book-length collections of my reviews. I was graduated from UCLA in 1969 with a major in Political Science and minor in English Literature.