Book Review: The Dragons of Eden by Carl Sagan

I just completed reading a book called The Dragons of Eden by an eminent scientific writer Carl Sagan. I picked up this book randomly from a book store. I have read Carl Sagan before, Cosmos - the book which opens up windows to scientific thinking, mathematics and of course astronomy, was very exciting and i would say my first scientific novel. I have also seen the movie Contact, which is based on a book by the same name, and its good.
So Dragons of Eden also promised a lot. Many times i have had discussions with my friends on topics like the difference between creativity and the clockwork attitude, comparison of artificial intelligence (computers) with human brain, evolution of human beings, what are dreams, why do we need to sleep, reproduction and many others. All these topics deal with biology and the way we perceive things around us. You can come up with so many different hypothesis to explain the above mentioned questions. What Carl Sagan does in this book is that he comes up with various scientific experiments that have been conducted and based on these he has discussed various hypothesis. These experiments seem to fit right in and corroborate these hypothesis.
The book is well written and is easy to understand. The reader can ignore the technical terms and look at the underlying logic or may be understand some terms from the appendix given at the end of the book.
This book was written some time around 1975 and i was amazed by the level of knowledge that Carl Sagan was able to extract at that time. A lot of new experiments have been conducted after 1975, but still the content of this book is very refreshing and by no means out dated. Carl Sagan prophecies that in future the level of understanding of human brain will be much greater and hence can provide answers to some ethical questions facing mankind like the definition of death, the legal issues of abortion, understanding of various cultures - including extra terrestrial life forms and animals. He also discusses computer gaming (imagine in 1975) and the way it can help spread an interest in science.
The price of the book in India is Rs. 250 and the book is published by The Ballantine Publishing Group.
Recommendation: Don't miss it if you have scientific bend of mind - it may answer a lot of questions.