Walter never explains precisely why our species stands alone, but few readers will complain at the end of this engrossing,...
About 27 humanoid species roamed the Earth since splitting off from their ape ancestors 7 million years ago; more are turning up, but only one remains. Science journalist and former CNN bureau chief Walter (Thumbs, Toes, and Tears: And Other Traits That Make Us Human, 2006) delivers a mixture of fact, research and conjecture that describes how this happened.
Anthropologists define humans as primates who walk upright, but the author focuses on another fundamental, if bizarre, difference—human species deliver children prematurely. Traditionally, teachers explain that this allows passage of our increasingly large skull and brain through the birth canal, but there is more to it. We are not only born as fetuses, but we keep infantile ape features (near-hairlessness, flatter faces, higher foreheads, a straight big toe) into adult life. Carrying the analogy further, Walter emphasizes that humans not only have an extended physical childhood (gorillas reach adulthood at 11), but we preserve the mental qualities of childhood: curiosity, adaptability, and the love of play, new experiences and experimentation. Our victory was not preordained, and three other brainy species shared the planet when the first Homo sapiens appeared 200,000 years ago. The first breakthroughs, tools and fire, occurred over 1 million years earlier, and we did not seem an improvement. More than another 100,000 years passed before Homo sapiens’ burgeoning neural connections passed a tipping point that produced the language, culture, creativity and technology that enabled it to rule the world. The author offers a short epilogue about the “next human,” writing, “short of another asteroid collision or global cataclysm, we will almost certainly become augmented versions of our current selves.”
Walter never explains precisely why our species stands alone, but few readers will complain at the end of this engrossing, up-to-date account of human evolution.Pub Date: Jan. 29, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-8027-1756-6
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Walker
Review Posted Online: Nov. 13, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorkerstaff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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