A concise and useful book of evolutionary science.
A lively addition to the literature on the “unfathomable mystery” of human beings.
With the genetics revolution in full swing, a steady stream of books explains the role heredity plays on our development and behavior with the proviso (most authors agree) that it is not the sole influence. In their contribution to the genre, Tattersall and DeSalle (co-authors: A Natural History of Beer, 2019, etc.), both scientists at the American Museum of Natural History, deliver a highly learned lesson in what we do and don’t inherit from our parents. “We all come into the world,” they write, “with the potential to absorb any language or set of cultural norms…yet by an early age, we may have absorbed an unshakeable perspective on the world that is completely incompatible with that of members of other societies (or even, occasionally, of our own).” Genes have a great deal to do with this, so the authors rock no boats by beginning with Gregor Mendel, whose discovery of simple, single gene inheritance has the advantage of being easy to understand but the disadvantage of explaining little because essentially all inherited traits result from the complex interaction of many genes. Discoveries of the gene for (…homosexuality, violence, religion, IQ, etc.) make headlines but turn out to be wrong. Evolution proceeds through the selection of organisms whose traits give them a reproductive advantage. Plenty of brilliant researchers have contributed to understanding this process, and the authors show little patience with a few whose theories and books seem to simplify matters and have convinced many colleagues. These include works that attempt to explain evolution as the result of competition between units of heredity—e.g., Richard Dawkins’ The Selfish Gene. Tattersall’s legions of fans will recognize his contribution in the eloquent history of the evolution of Homo sapiens, both in body and brain. Genomicist DeSalle delivers an intelligent lesson in the basics of heredity and population genetics, although readers will have to pay close attention.
A concise and useful book of evolutionary science.Pub Date: April 3, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-64313-026-2
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Pegasus
Review Posted Online: Feb. 3, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.
Maya Angelou is a natural writer with an inordinate sense of life and she has written an exceptional autobiographical narrative which retrieves her first sixteen years from "the general darkness just beyond the great blinkers of childhood."
Her story is told in scenes, ineluctably moving scenes, from the time when she and her brother were sent by her fancy living parents to Stamps, Arkansas, and a grandmother who had the local Store. Displaced they were and "If growing up is painful for the Southern Black girl, being aware of her displacement is the rust on the razor that threatens the throat." But alternating with all the pain and terror (her rape at the age of eight when in St. Louis With her mother) and humiliation (a brief spell in the kitchen of a white woman who refused to remember her name) and fear (of a lynching—and the time they buried afflicted Uncle Willie under a blanket of vegetables) as well as all the unanswered and unanswerable questions, there are affirmative memories and moments: her charming brother Bailey; her own "unshakable God"; a revival meeting in a tent; her 8th grade graduation; and at the end, when she's sixteen, the birth of a baby. Times When as she says "It seemed that the peace of a day's ending was an assurance that the covenant God made with children, Negroes and the crippled was still in effect."
However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1969
ISBN: 0375507892
Page Count: 235
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 14, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1969
SEEN & HEARD
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
