Rosio Pavoris

Richard Dawkins: How a Scientist Changed the Way We Think is a collection of essays by various people who have been influenced by Richard Dawkins, some famous, some less so. Well, maybe they’re all famous; I recognised about half of them, anyway, including Marian Stamp Dawkins (his first wife), Daniel Dennett, Steven Pinker, Michael Shermer, Matt Ridley, and Philip Pullman.
Mostly the essays try to explain why Dawkins has been so influential, and some of them predictably border on the masturbatory.

By necessity, a book titled after a famous scientist who’s been in the news a lot recently, and with his face on the cover, is bound to primarily attract the audience of people who lack the attention span or the mental capacity to actually read Dawkins’ works themselves (he may be excellent at making thing accessible, but he still assumes his readers have a working brain), but who still want to appear erudite to their equally vapid friends—I have a fair number of these people in my immediate family—and the contents of many of these essays reflect that.

Still, at least two or three of them are quite interesting, but only insofar as they actually touch on new research inspired by Dawkins’ work (which, for the purposes of these essays, mostly seems to be just The Selfish Gene). They’re a poor substitute for Dawkins himself, but if you don’t have the time to actually read real books, these essays are short enough to at least convey some general impressions.
On the whole, though, I wouldn’t recommend picking this one up.