Accessible, valuable popular anthropology.
Big brains, opposable thumbs, and tool use made humans masters of the planet, but walking upright came first.
In this fine account, Dartmouth paleoanthropologist DeSilva writes that humans are “the only fully bipedal ape,” and there is no shortage of explanations of how we evolved that way. Darwin speculated that standing freed our hands to make tools, which jump-started the growth of our brains. It’s sound logic, but common sense is no substitute for evidence, and fossils reveal that hominids walked long before they made tools. DeSilva makes a solid scientific case with an expert history of human and ape evolution, emphasizing the importance of food. Humans have a nongrasping big toe in line with the other toes, which are short and bend upward as we walk. This is the opposite of all other primates, whose toes are long and bend downward for grasping. Since Darwin’s time, fossils reveal ancient but upright hominids close to 6 million years old, the accepted period when hominid and ape evolution diverged. Since all living apes walk on their knuckles, researchers yearned to discover the first primate who rose up to become the founding proto-human. It turns out he or she may not have existed. Ardipithecus, perhaps the oldest hominid, walked upright despite possessing feet with some apelike features, and this was also a feature of ape fossils from the period before the common ancestor. As a result, some (but not all) anthropologists believe that knuckle-walking is not a primitive trait; modern apes evolved it. One scientist pointed out, “Asking why humans stood up from all fours is the wrong question….Perhaps we should instead be asking why our ancestors never dropped down on all fours in the first place.” DeSilva devotes the final 100 pages to the generally dismal consequences of bipedalism: dangerous childbirth, backaches, hernias, knee injuries, bunions, etc. On the bright side: Walking is good for us.
Accessible, valuable popular anthropology.Pub Date: April 6, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-06-293849-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Jan. 18, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2021
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 Yorker staff 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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