Rating: 
Summary: A great book
Review: A very good introduction to memetics. Quite speculative in the last chapters, but the author acknowledges it (at least she must be praised for her honesty !). Her tendency to apply memetics to almost any subject can be disturbing, and I haven't been quite convinced by some of her points, but her ideas are always challenging and makes you wondering. She doesn't have all the answers, but she asks an awful lot of good questions !
Rating:
Summary: At play in the fields of the memes
Review: Blackmore romps across the memetic landscape like a puppy after a butterfly, and it is only when she worries over a bone of contention here or there that the results are less than delightful. If you read this book as an explication of sound scientific principles, you may be misled and -- worse! -- put off by tedious bone-worrying. So feel free to skip the occasional bit of tedium (I'm thinking particularly of material in the chapter "Three problems with memes") and go for the big ideas: why our brains are so big, why we talk so much, and most importantly, who we think we are.I'd read nothing about memes before The Meme Machine and only a little about Universal Darwinism, but I found that Blackmore explained the principles well enough for argument's sake. When she hits her stride toward the latter half of the book, proof by hand-waving becomes the rule, and that's all to the benefit of the idea fest. The ideas in the final chapters about memes of the self are well worth entertaining though sometimes self-contradictory (pun intended). I can admit to having an experience of self-shifting that can only be described as mystical -- enjoyable for me, but some might find it disturbing to have fundamental concepts of "selfness" discarded. For more ideas along these lines, I'd recommend The Invented Reality, ed. by Paul Watzlawick, and The User Illusion by Tor Nrretranders. At the risk of making The Meme Machine sound like a pop-psych book (it's not), I'd add that the meme's-eye view allowed me to see that I had acquired world-view beliefs that were unhelpful and even psychologically destructive. "Meme-izing" these beliefs isolated them and rendered them harmless. Memes can indeed behave like psycho-viruses, but understanding memes offers a cure.
Rating: 
Summary: This is the best book on memes
Review: but this does not mean much: all books on memes are garbage! With the meme thing, Dawkins created a monster: what was originally little more than a joke has turned into an industry!
To summarize the basic objections to meme theory:
1) Memes have no obvious biological basis.
2) Even if Memes existed, it is not clear that they reproduce with enough fidelity to make a Darwinian selection process possible.
3) Effects like the exponential growth of new ideas do not prove that replicators similar to genes are involved, because exponential growth is an obvious feature of cultural transmission.
Worst of all, memes are mostly a semantic trick. Semantic tricks of this kind are the worst enemies of clear thinking: pseudoscientific language covers an absence of substance.
A clear indication of a pseudoscientific field is the proliferation of unnecessary neologisms. This book is a great example (from the Index): memotype, "memetic driving", "memetic engineering", memeplex, "meme pool", "meme buttons", "meme fountain", etc., ad nauseam.
Rating:
Summary: It could have been a fiver!
Review: By allotting them more substantiality than they deserve, writers tend to forget that memes (and thus memetics) are nothing more than a certain kind of ideas, opinions, or (whether true or false) knowledge. Lies and misapprehensions can form them as well as workable truths. Lies are more catchy because they require only an emotional response from recipients for their adoption. Truth has the disadvantage of requiring attempts to make proof, which actually puts it in the weaker position. Proponents of the "selfish gene/selfish meme" phenomenon may be on the right track by placing the study of idea replication under its own heading, but seem to have forgotten these are merely components of life and human existence. Of course it is true that we must use whatever nature provides to us in order to survive as animals upon this planet, but we must appreciate a mentality that enables us to enhance the quality of our lives, if we so choose it. We always have the choice to make, whether to follow an emotional course based on misapprehensions and lies and disavow all else, or whether to pursue stark, workable truths. Such truths represent useful memes we can learn to recognize and apply if we so choose, rather than feel we are 'used' by them. Our role requires us not to view ourselves as victims, whatever problems life has us face, but to learn to manage reality's components, discover our place in the grand scheme of things, and purposefully pursue whatever roles destiny has handed us-even if it turns out that destiny requires us to make that choice. Stephen Hawking makes a noteworthy example I can point to: Almost completely paralyzed, he has overcome odds most people would find overwhelming to succeed at his interests. While rabbits or small fish might have to accept that they are prey, our large brain has discovered that for us,in many cases, it is a matter mostly of attitude by which we can force our circumstances to yield to our desires. Susan's book is a worthwhile source of information on the subject of memetics, an almost necessary read at this stage of our knowledge, if one can overlook the often justifiable victim's stance she took to finish it. It has to be left to experiment and future investigators to determine exactly what roles memes (and genes) occupy in our lives.
Rating: 
Summary: Nice place to start
Review: For a readable and interesting expansion of Blackmore/Dawkins' meme theory called tenetics, see Ian McFadyen's Mind Wars!
Rating: 
Summary: very poor in itself...
Review: I happen to have read a few articles on memes before getting started with this book. After reading it, I still have this love hate relationship with the whole concept of memetics.
At times, I find the concept enlightning. Ideas presented by Dr. Blackmore on gene/meme coevolution in shaping the human brain and in developing a language are the main strength of this book. Thinking about human culture as a group of memes that shape the thought of its members seems to make a lot of sense. But the question remains, does common sense equal Science?
Obviously not. There is hardly any evidence that would substantiate the presence of memes as replicators. Maybe it would have been much more scientific to say that memes in human culture is an extension to the Baldwin effect. It could also be that memes "go off" sometimes and set selectional pressures on organisms reaching outcomes that would not be predicted by sociobiology and evolutionary pschycology.
Until a biological correlate for memetics is found, memetics can only be regarded as a social theory. For it to make it into biology, alot of work should be done. However, if one day this replicator was found, Dawkins, Blackmore and Dennett will be Golden. Their memes would be immortalized in the cultures of generations to come.
Rating: 
Summary: This explains so much!
Review: I violently disagreed with Susan Blackmore's premise, but by the time I got to the chapter on Altruism, I realised I was wrong. This is the single most thought-provoking book I've read since Robert Wright's The Moral Animal.
Rating:
Summary: very poor in itself...
Review: if you would like to read something on memes one of the best books (Virus of the Mind: The New Science of the Meme
by Richard Brodie )
it seems to me realy something clear about this new model or contruct or life paradigm.i may say something about susan b. book, it seems the truth about memes,like maybe one preacher telling one ot the gospel, ``subliminal authorrity manipulation``i would not say that.there is no deep reality(bohr)there is no chair(watzlawick).brodie is aware and a very clear with no preachings.another splendid quamtum... Liane Gabora home page on the net.
Rating:
Summary: Stretching the facts to fit the theory: a scientific nemesis
Review: If you're not familiar with the terms "memes" or "memetics" or havent stumbled onto books by Richard Dawkins this would not be a bad place to figure out what this relatively fresh scientific fuss is about.
A meme is an idea that "seeks" to occupy a brain, use it as a host and then as a tool to spread. Many memes form memeplexes and memeplexes in turn form behaviors. The more powerful a meme is the better its chances to be "hosted" (accepted) and thus spread regardless of its usefullness or not and regardless of its "goodness" or "badness": if it's strong enough it will be replicated and spread.
This, in a nutshell, is the theory about memes and memetics presented in this book.
In my opinion it doesnt take too much convincing for this theory to appear pivotal in the process of understanding the works of the human brain. It is so strikingly obvious that this is exactly what's going on in the every day wars of the minds around "our" world that what is actually interesting is to what extend this process stretches.
And while S.Blackmore does a great job in laying out her theory and explaining memetics she does eventually fall into the great trap such scientific theories are prone to: overgeneralising and dogmatising.
To an extend, memetics do provide an adequate explanation for human behavior, but on the other hand, they leave certain areas as dark as they were before memetics were conceived. For example, memetics do not provide an explanation as to why memes that actually work towards our self-destruction as a species get copied anyway. Stating that they are replicated because "they are strong" is too simplistic because
a) masses of people might not replicate such memes yet they do prevail because of the structure of our societies
b) what does it say about our "intelligence" (the very same intelligence that helps us understand memes) if we do indeed copy self-destructful memes?
It is especially about this second question that this book and in general the theory about memetics fails to be fulfilling the way memetists would wish for.
I would personally have no problem to entertain the idea that our "intelligence" is way overrated and that our brains are majorly flawed but such an idea is not offered to me as an option in this book, and not only that, but the exact opposite is basically at times claimed and at other times implied in the "Meme machine". Memes do exist (massively so) and do influence what we are and what we do (undeniably so). But where is the line drawn and is there such a line?
Memetists state that such a line probably does not exist and that memes are directly and solely responsible for every human behavior that we see around us. That would be too holistic and too nihilistic at the same time. Why do i say that?
Well, for starters it is actually totally hilarious that we are actually a species that admits it can only use a sorry 5% of its brain and yet with this 5% it claims to understand the other 95% as well. Memetists (and scientists alltogether) seem to somehow overlook this "tiny", "little" detail not only when they examine the human brain but also when they take on other, bigger (??) issues on, such the universe and so forth.
The theory that seems to be a great dogmatic aspect of our current science: "there's only what meets the eye" (and memetics stands on exactly that premise when you analyse it down to its core) is one that never convinced me and actually, the more i read and acquire what little knowledge i can as a human the more inplausible it becomes. This is not the view of a theist (I'm very far from that) but the view of a realist, whatever realism my personal 5% usage of my brain allows me to. Understanding what memes are and how they work will help you understand our current predicaments more than anything. The fact that most of the time we imitate without discrimination, without applying judgement is obvious but is it our nature? What if we taught children how to NOT imitate in such a pathetic way or how to filter and process every single thought that goes or gets created in their brains? What would happen then and where would that put the whole memetics theory? To finish things off, i do recommend this book. I do in no way recommend to accept it in the overwhelmingly dogmatic fashion it presents itself.
Memetics are useful and we need them in our effort to understand. But if we try to turn them into another scientific religion we will achieve the exact opposite.
Rating:
Summary: A must-read for anyone serious about memetics
Review: In the most exciting memetics book to come out in years, Susan Blackmore extends the memetics model back into its murky origins and out into an uncertain future. If there were just one really pithy idea in here to make me think about whole new applications of memetics, I'd tell you to buy this book. If it was just a fleshed-out summary of the best ideas in memetics, including Dennett's, Dawkins's, and my own, I'd tell you to buy this book. If it simply related the academic origins of cultural evolution to modern memetic theory, I'd tell you to buy this book. But Blackmore does all this and more. The Meme Machine is a must-read for anyone serious about memetics. Was the evolution of altruism, one of the most hotly debated topics in evolutionary biology, actually driven by meme evolution? Blackmore makes a case that it might have been. How about our big brains? More than just a survival aid, Blackmore shows how brain size selection might have been driven by -- you guessed it -- memes! This book is such a work of thought and love that I can even forgive Dr. Blackmore for dismissing my entire philosophy of life in two words (p. 241). As Oscar Wilde said, the only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about. Blackmore's background in the study of parapsychology gives her a good step or two outside the ivory tower, which seems valuable to gain a healthy perspective on memetics. And she ends her book as I did mine, with an unavoidable inquiry into the meaning of life. If self is an illusion -- if ego is merely an artifact of evolution -- what is to be done? While she doesn't purport to come up with the answer, she, like me, suggests that we all ask ourselves the question. --Richard Brodie, author, Virus of the Mind: The New Science of the Meme
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