Though the science can get a little lite, this offers an informative, readable introduction to recent scholarship on the...
An anthropologist ponders the better angels of our nature—the ones armed with paintbrushes, notebooks, cameras, and plowshares.
According to Fuentes (Chair, Anthropology/Univ. of Notre Dame), an essential component of human nature is our ability to work the trove of materials made available to us by virtue of our “symbolic inheritance.” Our creativity is thereby an essential component of what makes us human; so, too, is our ability to work together in creative ways for creative ends, for what the author calls a “cocktail of creativity and collaboration.” The condensed tail of evolution, in that scheme, has a vulnerable gaggle of newly terrestrial simians figuring out how to fend off hunger, predation, illness, and other threats existential and otherwise while filling our lives with meaning and hope, allowing our kind “to reshape their world, thereby reshaping themselves.” It’s a pleasing vision and one decidedly more optimistic than the naked-ape-with-guns portraits of a past generation of anthropologists. Still, it’s one that requires only a few case studies to wrap up, and regrettably, part of the author's creativity turns on saying the same thing in numerous ways, with multiple variations on that trope that working together is a good thing and one that distinguishes us from other animals, which “do some ratcheting and scaffolding, but…lack the human combination of discovery, innovation, cooperation, and information transfer.” The diverse studies in creativity are good ones, though, encompassing everything from conflict resolution to learning how to use fire to cook—not just red meat, but fish and vegetables as well. Fuentes frowns on a few predictable things, like racism and war, but also on the paleo diet.
Though the science can get a little lite, this offers an informative, readable introduction to recent scholarship on the anthropology of creativity.Pub Date: March 14, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-101-98394-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: Dec. 25, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2017
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
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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