What I understood to be amusing on an intellectual level fell flat when it hit my stomach. What I knew ought to be thought provoking would send me on a quest to line up the dates of his forefathers lives with the end of mine.

I couldn't help but see my grandfather’s story in the backdrop of his. I was reading about Dawkins’ life but I was thinking about my grandfather death. If my grandfather’s story were ever written, it would be a story pieced together from the perspective of those in the background in which the characters in Dawkins’ memoir are the foreground.

I understand that one need not identify with a text or an author to appreciate the work. It is clear to me that my inability to lose myself in this memoir (which according to me is the true test of a memoir) is a result of my personal features, history and nationality.

His memoir left me ambivalent, uncertain and with a renewed commitment to reread The Selfish Gene and figure out if I too belong to the class of individuals who mistake the entire organism as the “fundamental unit of natural selection.”

I love the shit out of his other work. I am an especially big fan of the ruthlessness with which he disposes of religious arguments. I will finish the damn memoir and then I will listen to one of the world’s foremost intellectuals reflect on his life in person. And I will be inspired and feel incredibly privileged and many of you will be jealous.

That is pretty damn glorious.

Recommendation: 

You should read the memoir. The first 168 pages you can skim. The chapter titled “Learning The Trade” is where you begin to get insight into the Richard Dawkins we think we know.