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MANTHROPOLOGY

THE SCIENCE OF WHY THE MODERN MALE IS NOT THE MAN HE USED TO BE

An amusing but troubling study of manhood, offering scant hope for improvement.

A paleoanthropologist offers a wry, dispiriting perspective on modern man.

McAllister (Anthropology. Univ. of Western Australia; Dracula Tooth, 2008, etc.) explains how his research opened up to him the nightmare of contemporary male inferiority: “I discovered, to my horror,” he writes, that “there’s nothing we can’t do that ancient men, and sometimes women, haven’t already done better, faster, stronger, and usually smarter.” He begins by opining that the man of 2010 is “the worst man in history,” in that historical narratives consistently suggest greater accomplishments by men of the ancient world, the Greco-Roman era and pre-agricultural societies. This is true in many categories, which he uses to organize the book: “Brawn,” “Battle,” “Beauty,” “Babes,” etc. In each chapter, McAllister bends his argument to the topic with an array of historical comparisons, which are certainly entertaining but occasionally arbitrary. In boxing and warfare, many earlier groups committed acts of bravery and ferocity that show up today’s ultimate fighters and even the training of America’s Special Forces. As for “Bravado,” Native American tribes such as the Sioux practiced brutal rituals that suggest great resistance to pain, and routinely tortured captives from rival tribes who bore such ordeals with contemptuous stoicism. The complex rituals of competitive beauty practiced by the African Wodaabe tribe puts to shame metrosexuals like David Beckham. Regarding erotic conquest, even Wilt Chamberlain withers next to the recorded behavior of ancient Indian kings. For McAllister, such disparate anecdotes lead to grim conclusions: “our sloth betrays not just our own genetic potential, but that of our sons too... we are sentencing them to a lifetime of brittle bones, weak tendons, and softened bodies and brains.” The author’s application of anthropological research is rigorous and the writing is sharp and often funny, but the overall approach proves repetitive.

An amusing but troubling study of manhood, offering scant hope for improvement.

Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2010

ISBN: 978-0-312-55543-6

Page Count: 336

Publisher: St. Martin's

Review Posted Online: July 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2010

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HOW TO FIGHT ANTI-SEMITISM

A forceful, necessarily provocative call to action for the preservation and protection of American Jewish freedom.

Known for her often contentious perspectives, New York Times opinion writer Weiss battles societal Jewish intolerance through lucid prose and a linear playbook of remedies.

While she was vividly aware of anti-Semitism throughout her life, the reality of the problem hit home when an active shooter stormed a Pittsburgh synagogue where her family regularly met for morning services and where she became a bat mitzvah years earlier. The massacre that ensued there further spurred her outrage and passionate activism. She writes that European Jews face a three-pronged threat in contemporary society, where physical, moral, and political fears of mounting violence are putting their general safety in jeopardy. She believes that Americans live in an era when “the lunatic fringe has gone mainstream” and Jews have been forced to become “a people apart.” With palpable frustration, she adroitly assesses the origins of anti-Semitism and how its prevalence is increasing through more discreet portals such as internet self-radicalization. Furthermore, the erosion of civility and tolerance and the demonization of minorities continue via the “casual racism” of political figures like Donald Trump. Following densely political discourses on Zionism and radical Islam, the author offers a list of bullet-point solutions focused on using behavioral and personal action items—individual accountability, active involvement, building community, loving neighbors, etc.—to help stem the tide of anti-Semitism. Weiss sounds a clarion call to Jewish readers who share her growing angst as well as non-Jewish Americans who wish to arm themselves with the knowledge and intellectual tools to combat marginalization and defuse and disavow trends of dehumanizing behavior. “Call it out,” she writes. “Especially when it’s hard.” At the core of the text is the author’s concern for the health and safety of American citizens, and she encourages anyone “who loves freedom and seeks to protect it” to join with her in vigorous activism.

A forceful, necessarily provocative call to action for the preservation and protection of American Jewish freedom.

Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2019

ISBN: 978-0-593-13605-8

Page Count: 224

Publisher: Crown

Review Posted Online: Aug. 22, 2019

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AN INDIGENOUS PEOPLES' HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES

A Churchill-ian view of native history—Ward, that is, not Winston—its facts filtered through a dense screen of ideology.

Custer died for your sins. And so, this book would seem to suggest, did every other native victim of colonialism.

Inducing guilt in non-native readers would seem to be the guiding idea behind Dunbar-Ortiz’s (Emerita, Ethnic Studies/California State Univ., Hayward; Blood on the Border: A Memoir of the Contra War, 2005, etc.) survey, which is hardly a new strategy. Indeed, the author says little that hasn’t been said before, but she packs a trove of ideological assumptions into nearly every page. For one thing, while “Indian” isn’t bad, since “[i]ndigenous individuals and peoples in North America on the whole do not consider ‘Indian’ a slur,” “American” is due to the fact that it’s “blatantly imperialistic.” Just so, indigenous peoples were overwhelmed by a “colonialist settler-state” (the very language broadly applied to Israelis vis-à-vis the Palestinians today) and then “displaced to fragmented reservations and economically decimated”—after, that is, having been forced to live in “concentration camps.” Were he around today, Vine Deloria Jr., the always-indignant champion of bias-puncturing in defense of native history, would disavow such tidily packaged, ready-made, reflexive language. As it is, the readers who are likely to come to this book—undergraduates, mostly, in survey courses—probably won’t question Dunbar-Ortiz’s inaccurate assertion that the military phrase “in country” derives from the military phrase “Indian country” or her insistence that all Spanish people in the New World were “gold-obsessed.” Furthermore, most readers won’t likely know that some Ancestral Pueblo (for whom Dunbar-Ortiz uses the long-abandoned term “Anasazi”) sites show evidence of cannibalism and torture, which in turn points to the inconvenient fact that North America wasn’t entirely an Eden before the arrival of Europe.

A Churchill-ian view of native history—Ward, that is, not Winston—its facts filtered through a dense screen of ideology.

Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2014

ISBN: 978-0-8070-0040-3

Page Count: 296

Publisher: Beacon Press

Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2014

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2014

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