Challenging essays that some readers may find a bit too challenging.
Further debate on an evergreen scientific field.
As Dartmouth anthropology professor DeSilva wryly notes in the preface to this collection, sometimes, for a variety of reasons, “even the very best scientists in the world—in this case, Charles Darwin himself—err.” In his Descent of Man, Darwin “presented hypotheses to be tested,” as they are here. In this “tribute to how science operates,” 10 contributors revisit Descent on the 150th anniversary of its publication in a “quest for understanding the origin, biological variation, behavior, and evolution of humans.” Janet Browne provides a helpful, general overview of the book and the scientific times in which it was published. At a time when the “fossil record of human evolution was practically nonexistent” and the discovery of DNA decades away, Alice Roberts notes that it “seems perhaps extraordinary that Darwin could have deduced so much from so little.” Suzana Herculano-Houzel writes that “nonhuman primates…and more recently birds have been awarded higher cognitive status than even Darwin himself might have suspected.” Brian Hare believes that, “amazingly, [Darwin] anticipated most major elements of modern theories of human sociality, cooperation and morality,” and Yohannes Haile-Selassie suggests that “Darwin was probably not correct about the sequence of evolutionary processes that led to what we recognize today as human.” Kristina Killgrove points out the relative ease with which researchers can “poke holes” in many of Darwin’s ideas. Exploring the tricky topic of Darwin’s thoughts on race and racism, Agustín Fuentes concludes that he was a “biased human being who’s at least a little bit racist.” Citing Darwin’s belief that women were inferior to men, Holly Dunsworth ruefully writes that Descent’s “scientific value is impossible to untangle from the oppression that it inspired.” Each of the contributors adds something valuable to the conversation, but readers not well-versed in the scientific principles may be left adrift.
Challenging essays that some readers may find a bit too challenging.Pub Date: Jan. 12, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-691-19114-0
Page Count: 232
Publisher: Princeton Univ.
Review Posted Online: Sept. 7, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2020
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
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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