THE SHATTERED SKULL: A Safari to Man's Past

On July 17, 1959, Dr. and Mrs. Louis Leakey, who had been prospecting prehistory in the Olduvai Gorge of East Africa for 28 years, found part of the skull of what may have been a near-man--the fabled Missing Link of the Sunday supplements. Although the title would lead you to expect more information about this Zinjanthropus, there is actually very little. So little, in fact, that nowhere in the book is there even a line drawing or a photograph of the skull. The body of the book is given over to a very personal description of how Mrs. Perkins and her husband, the famous zoo director Marlin Perkins, travelled to the Gorge from the time they left the U.S. Although Mrs. Perkins writes well and clearly, there never has been much of a juvenile market at either the buyer or the reader level for impressionistic travel writing. The information given on Africa, on the recovery of fossils and on Olduvai Gorge is too superficial to supplant other available materials. This cannot be compared to the book, co-authored by the Perkins, ""I Saw You from Afar"" (1965, p. 239, J-77).