Lydia Pyne

Way behind on my reviews, gotta catch up before school starts! Prepare for short and choppy...

Okay, this one was a mixed bag. The content completely carried the book, so it's a good thing this was nonfiction instead of fiction. I've been fascinated by early homonids since my biological anthropology class back in freshman year of college (my ideal major would have been English-History-Anthropology-Psychology with minors in Creative Writing and Women's studies, but alas, there is only so much time in the day). I'd actually learned about all but the last of the described skeletons before, though of course not in the detail that Pyne goes into here. If anything, I may have wanted more detail: How could scientists know from just a few bones of a single example of a different species that homonid was male or female? How can they tell that they're different species with only partial skeletons? How do scientists decide what makes a new species (except in the obvious case of homo floresiensis)? How did they preserve the spongy, not-actually-fossilized homo floresiensis bones? I would have liked to know more about the frequently-mentioned Java Man, but that would have ruined the title's alliteration and the book's symmetry.

What's fascinating about this book, though, is that these questions aren't neglected by negligence but by choice. It's remarkable that this book isn't just about human evolution but, in fact, about how modern homo sapiens react to these skeletons: it's not just the scientific story, but the story of the media, the cultural impact. This actually would have made the book more appealing to me up front, since I'm very interested in how humans relate to each other and to the world around them. I would have made this much more obvious up front by slipping another word into the subtitle: "The Cultural Evolution of the World's Most Famous Human Fossils." But that might be the scholarly side of my publishing experience coming through--I can't exactly say that I know better than a trade editor about what titles catch attention. Probably that subtitle sounds too academic and stuffy for the educated, non-specialist reader.

I can definitely tell the writer has potential, but there should have been a lot more editing in this. Granted, I was reading an ARC, so I have no idea how far ahead of the pub date this particular review copy was printed--it's quite possible it did get a lot more editorial help after this point. Some points:

> In the space of three pages, three paragraphs begin, "Today, the Old Man..."
> Three paragraphs are exactly repeated--I seriously hope this is something that was caught before the book went to print!
> I could never figure out why some words were defined but not others. We're told that a scapula is "part of the shoulder" but we don't get a definition of paleoanthropology. I would guess that readers, even if they know what the separate parts mean, might want to know before diving into the text how, exactly, we can extrapolate about human species from fossilized bones. Dinosaurs are guesses enough, and it seems like we have far more of them than we have homonids. (Hey, that would have been a useful factoid to include! But I'm not docking points for that).
> Puns, oh my heck. Here and there they're fun, but for some reason they were almost exclusively concentrated in a single chapter and involved repeated use of the phrase, "no bones about it." Ha flipping ha. You can't use that more than about twice without it becoming a groaner.

Okay, this is picky, but Pyne hinted at a potentially fascinating point in the chapter on homo floresiensis before dropping it like a hot potato: the contemporary local legends of the ebu gogo, small human-like creatures that live in the forest (205). This is a ready-made opening for an interesting sentence or two here about the possibility of overlap between two species of homonid and the length of cultural memory, but Pyne doesn't follow it up. To be clear, the only reason I'm complaining about this is because I did a paper on it in college and because I'm fascinated by the ways some fairy tales are shaped by reality.

Okay, on to quotes--not as many as usual, for which you're probably thankful.

Quote Roundup

74) I just love that the British Museum is saving satire, poetry, and cartoons about Piltdown Man along with the bones. This is exactly the kind of archival work I fantasize about.

97) I must admit, I found it interesting how little Pyne mentioned religious opponents of human evolution. Here's one page where it is addressed. This was also the page where I really understood that this wasn't just a story about the skeletons, but public investment in their discovery and interpretation.

220) Here's where there was an opportunity to discuss how scientists determine sexual dimorphism versus individual variation.

222) I felt a little warm inside knowing that as far back as the 1920s/30s, a male archaeologist tried to nickname a fossil "Nelly" to combat what he saw as explicit sexism by referring to particular hominin discoveries as "man."

Wow, almost none of my quotes were actually quotes. Don't think that's ever happened before...

Overall, I recommend the book for its fascinating content, but not for structural or stylistic execution. But this recommendation is made with the caveat that I have no idea how close to final this ARC draft was when it was printed. And I'm a grumpy fan of continuous narrative who unfairly doesn't cut nonfiction writers a little slack.… (plus d'informations)

I read nonfiction to expand my view of the world. I read about things I'm interested in, and I read about things I know nothing about so that I can find new things to become interested in. When I read nonfiction, I implicitly trust in the author. I have to. I trust that the author has done a lot of research and has some level of expertise in their work. I trust that editors have looked over the work and combed through for errors. However I also understand that some things are always going to have some hanging chads that make it through the publication process.

While this book was interesting and informative, I found too many hanging chads for my like. The irony being that this book's credibility started to falter in my eyes.

In my grad student life, I spent many many hours in clean rooms, so I am familiar with a lot of technology such as CVD, and I worked extensively with silicon both doing some CMOS processing but later a lot of e-beam lithography on quartz substrates. So let me say that it was jarring for me to read the author refer to silicon dioxide (glass) as "silicone", which is actually a polymer that, while related to silicon and SiO2, is nowhere near actually the same thing. But that's an issue that many non-scientific people struggle with so I was willing to let it go.

Then I got to the section about the Mayan Codices. I was fascinated! I wanted to see pictures. I looked at the glossy section inside the book and saw a photo labeled that it was of the Grolier Codex, so I decided to do more searching online. I looked at the Wikipedia page for the Maya codices and saw that same exact picture -- labeled as the Madrid Codex. Doing a lot more searching led me to a stock photo website showing the Madrid Codex incorrectly labeled as the Grolier Codex.

How could the author take that stock photo and include it in a book without doing more research? Without asking why a photo about a codex that's worn down with water damage shows a codex with no water damage? Why didn't the author just look at Wikipedia, the low-hanging fruit of fact-checking?

OK, so I'm disappointed. There were typos and logical inconsistencies. (The author mentioned a cave that was discovered in 1985, after a cave that was discovered in 1991 (!?) - when they meant to say that the cave was only made public after a cave that was discovered in 1991.) Quotes that never closed out. Too many hanging chads that pile on and make this book go through a heavier filter as I continue to read.

As a collection of essays, this book is interesting. Thought-provoking even. But as a nonfiction book leading to educate, I would have hoped for a lot more research and editing than what I was presented with.… (plus d'informations)

4.5 I forget how I stumbled upon this clever miniseries of books from Bloomsbury Press called ObjectLessons, but I'm glad I did. It is like the Tedtalk of nouns in book form. Titles include: Glass, Tree, Hotel, Bread, Silence and many intriguing more. This particular edition is about bookshelves and examines their cultural significance, their history, some of their unique features and unknown trivia. Subcategories within this include a medieval chained library (Hereford, England), the Donkey Mobile Library in Ethiopia, the Franklin naval expedition to the Arctic in 1845 whose ships were outfitted with a total of 2,900 books for the use of the voyage, futuristic depictions of bookshelves (anachronistic) and the symbiotic relationship of NY Public Library's architecture its and iron shelving. One key lesson throughout is that form follows function. "Since form and function of a text determines how and where it is curated, every text is store on its shelf and encountered and read in ways that are consistent with its respective technology, history, and cultural symbolism. Text and shelf shape each other." (5) and "Social expectations and cultural needs shape how booksleves move from place to place or how books move from shelf to shelf...bookshelves exist as a series of relationships." and "Bookshelves act as the mediating object between a person and a book...." (52) and "The bookshelf leads a life of a curious cultural sign; it is a physical, tangible thing -- a combination of technology and craft -- as well as a symbol of one's worldview." (68) The the knowledge is a little esoteric, the well-written reflection, research and philosophical premise makes this a delight. Two parting quotes that anchor the beginning: "A room without books is a body without a soul" (Cicero) and the ending: "Books speak of other books and every story tells a story that has already been told." (Umberto Eco)… (plus d'informations)