An illuminating history of prehistory.
Way back when.
Journalist and podcaster Wyman, author of The Verge: Reformation, Renaissance, and Forty Years That Shook the World (2021), rejects the traditional narrative of ancient Homo sapiens moving smoothly from foraging to farming to cities to nations to the Industrial Revolution to the modern world. He adds that, despite the absence of writing, evidence for prehistory continues to appear. No longer dependent on stones, ruins, and graves, archeologists employ “isotopic analysis, paleoenvironmental studies…chemical analyses of metal and ceramic material, satellite imaging, and the various other emerging methods that fall under the heading of archaeoscience tend to receive less public attention than ancient DNA.” Wyman begins at the end of the Paleolithic era, 20,000 years ago, when glaciers reached their maximum. The image of wandering hunters following herds of woolly mammoths across the tundra was reality. Except for a millennium of cooling 12,900 years ago, the Earth warmed steadily, and from 11,700 to 8,000 years ago, our ancestors broadened their approaches to subsistence, leading to agriculture and cities. It was a bumpy process. Readers will share the author’s fascination with Göbekli Tepe, a massive quasi-city in Turkey constructed over 11,000 years ago whose remains reveal no sign of domesticated plants, animals, or food production. He moves on to the “Long Neolithic,” 8,000 to 5,000 years ago, which altered the globe for good, emphasizing agricultural societies in China, Italy, and Pakistan, whose remains have been well-preserved. It’s a disturbing picture, as increasing food production led to a rising population that did not have equal access to resources. The greatest threat to Neolithic societies came from the societies themselves. They grew, flourished, and then fell apart, often violently. It’s no secret that civilization emerged, first in the Middle East, then around the world. As regularly as their Neolithic predecessors, they rose and then collapsed.
An illuminating history of prehistory.Pub Date: May 5, 2026
ISBN: 9780063256484
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: April 6, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2026
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
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
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