Fascinating lessons from early humanity.
Layne reevaluates the benefits of humanity’s societal underpinnings in this nonfiction work.
While the pre-agricultural era often invokes images of a primitive humanity in sharp contrast to the progress of civilization, the author suggests that we have much to learn from our primordial ancestors. The experiences of these early societies, per Layne’s intriguing interpretation, illustrate the viability of a hunter-gatherer lifestyle that was able to sustain humanity through 97% of our existence. While subsequent civilizations adopted various economic models, they each inevitably faltered. The lynchpin of early humanity’s success, according to the author, was the adoption of a “waterhole economy” that was “survival-driven by design.” This structure, in which humans made daily pilgrimages to a waterhole, prioritized sharing, environmental stewardship, and group survival. The book’s first few chapters emphasize the evolutionary need for waterhole economies and place humanity within a larger context of Earth’s other living creatures. The book’s middle section transitions to discuss the development of civilizations, which fundamentally changed the trajectory of humanity and our relationship to the environment; while waterhole economies emphasized “living inside Earth’s habitats and ecosystems,” subsequent civilizations have been defined by their attempts to live “outside” of such ecosystems through endless quests to conquer nature and maximize human domination. Building on this thesis, the book’s back half makes the argument that our current model (accelerating environmental decay and climate change, reliance on nonrenewable energy, and the embrace of technology that runs counter to our evolutionary drive to survive) threatens the future of our species by defying the lessons handed down from our ancestors. Skeptics may be wary of the book’s glamorization of the era (anthropological evidence points to the existence of endemic warfare among early humans), but Layne nevertheless makes a compelling argument about the wisdom of our distant relations. A well-researched volume backed by more than 500 interdisciplinary endnotes, the book is written in an accessible style, and the text is supplemented by dozens of full-color photographs, tables, and diagrams.
Fascinating lessons from early humanity.Pub Date: Nov. 30, 2025
ISBN: 9781733755542
Page Count: 730
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: March 4, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2026
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.
The veteran actor, comedian, and banjo player teams up with the acclaimed illustrator to create a unique book of cartoons that communicates their personalities.
Martin, also a prolific author, has always been intrigued by the cartoons strewn throughout the pages of the New Yorker. So when he was presented with the opportunity to work with Bliss, who has been a staff cartoonist at the magazine since 1997, he seized the moment. “The idea of a one-panel image with or without a caption mystified me,” he writes. “I felt like, yeah, sometimes I’m funny, but there are these other weird freaks who are actually funny.” Once the duo agreed to work together, they established their creative process, which consisted of working forward and backward: “Forwards was me conceiving of several cartoon images and captions, and Harry would select his favorites; backwards was Harry sending me sketched or fully drawn cartoons for dialogue or banners.” Sometimes, he writes, “the perfect joke occurs two seconds before deadline.” There are several cartoons depicting this method, including a humorous multipanel piece highlighting their first meeting called “They Meet,” in which Martin thinks to himself, “He’ll never be able to translate my delicate and finely honed droll notions.” In the next panel, Bliss thinks, “I’m sure he won’t understand that the comic art form is way more subtle than his blunt-force humor.” The team collaborated for a year and created 150 cartoons featuring an array of topics, “from dogs and cats to outer space and art museums.” A witty creation of a bovine family sitting down to a gourmet meal and one of Dumbo getting his comeuppance highlight the duo’s comedic talent. What also makes this project successful is the team’s keen understanding of human behavior as viewed through their unconventional comedic minds.
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-26289-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
PERSPECTIVES
Sedaris at his darkest—and his best.
In which the veteran humorist enters middle age with fine snark but some trepidation as well.
Mortality is weighing on Sedaris (Theft by Finding: Diaries 1977-2002, 2017, etc.), much of it his own, professional narcissist that he is. Watching an elderly man have a bowel accident on a plane, he dreaded the day when he would be the target of teenagers’ jokes “as they raise their phones to take my picture from behind.” A skin tumor troubled him, but so did the doctor who told him he couldn’t keep it once it was removed. “But it’s my tumor,” he insisted. “I made it.” (Eventually, he found a semitrained doctor to remove and give him the lipoma, which he proceeded to feed to a turtle.) The deaths of others are much on the author’s mind as well: He contemplates the suicide of his sister Tiffany, his alcoholic mother’s death, and his cantankerous father’s erratic behavior. His contemplation of his mother’s drinking—and his family’s denial of it—makes for some of the most poignant writing in the book: The sound of her putting ice in a rocks glass increasingly sounded “like a trigger being cocked.” Despite the gloom, however, frivolity still abides in the Sedaris clan. His summer home on the Carolina coast, which he dubbed the Sea Section, overspills with irreverent bantering between him and his siblings as his long-suffering partner, Hugh, looks on. Sedaris hasn’t lost his capacity for bemused observations of the people he encounters. For example, cashiers who say “have a blessed day” make him feel “like you’ve been sprayed against your will with God cologne.” But bad news has sharpened the author’s humor, and this book is defined by a persistent, engaging bafflement over how seriously or unseriously to take life when it’s increasingly filled with Trump and funerals.
Sedaris at his darkest—and his best.Pub Date: May 29, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-316-39238-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Feb. 19, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2018
PROFILES
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