The Five Books series of interviews and book recommendations on The Browser continues with an interview with paleoanthropologist Tim White from Berkeley. His choice of the best books on “prehistoric man” (women will surely object to that term) will surprise you.
And be sure to bookmark the Browser’s “Evolution” section, which contains links to articles, videos, interviews (like mine), and new books.
I would like to read the Ann Gibbons one (nominative determinism?!) but there are so many many books to read. Interested in what he says “I don’t like the genre of tell-all politics of paleoanthropology books, and there are a great number of those”, and to be honest while they are interesting to me historically, eg Swisher, Curtis & Lewin on Java Man & the politics around him/her/it, what really interests is the actual fossils & what they tell us.
Cutting to the chase (with my comments) :
– Darwin – Voyage of the Beagle (no surprise ; if you haven’t read it yet, make the time)
– Darwin – On the Origin of Species (no surprise ; if you haven’t read it yet, I’m astonished that you’re here!)
– Journals of Lewis and Clark (haven’t read it yet, but from what I’ve heard of their story, it’ll be a cracking story. Lots of good science there too, I’d be sure. If I had any expectation of visiting America again, I’d probably put it on my reading list)
– The First Human, By Ann Gibbons (read it a couple of years ago. Good. Probably needs updating by now. And a wonderful example of nominative determinism. Isn’t Gibbons a writer for ‘Science’?)
– Missing Links: In Search of Human Origins by John Reader (Sounds like an update to the Gibbons book. Haven’t read it, but sounds like it’ll go on my wish list.)
The surprise is slightly underwhelming.
From the interview:
“Ann is the correspondent for Science magazine who covers this field, so she is extremely knowledgeable and very much up to date.”
“It is a very nice complement to the previous Gibbons book which shows more how the modern science is done. John presents the history of this field.”
Oh, and he also expects Gibbons to update her book with Ardi, and indeed Reader has already done so.
( subscribing )
Could anyone reccomend a good book on the general aspects of life (how the social groups worked, what did they eat, etc.) of the pleistocenic human? Thanks!
Insightful, if predictable (nothing wrong with predictable in a scientist).
The Ann Gibbons book was news.
The clicking quote: White’s remark about Jefferson sending off Lewis&Clark. What a difference such a truly enlightened character would make nowadays as President of the United States!
Jerry, not to derail the topic or anything, but next to the Tim White interview I found Woody Allen’s Five Books. Allen plugs SJ Perelman, and by your leave, so would I. Quoting Allen:
“The funniest human being in my lifetime, in any medium — whether it’s stand-up, television, theatre, prose, or movies — is SJ Perelman. There is nobody funnier than SJ Perelman.”
English is, alas, only my fifth language by order of acquisition, not counting Latin and Greek (counting those, it would be my seventh), so perhaps I’m no judge. But there is no writer, in any language that I know, whose style is so consistently and irresistibly funny, reading after reading. In a Fahrenheit 451 world I’d be hard put not to save SJ Perelman and forsake Shakespeare. He’s truly lifesaving funny.
Fifth or seventh you are clearly bloody good at the language thing!
Crap. S/he’s more fluent in English than I am. (English being pretty much my only language, tho I’ve taken Spanish, Russian, & Arabic.)
I didn’t know that the site got an interview with Woody Allen: what a coup! You can read his interview and choice of five books here.
Occam can you list your languages from first to last? Are they all up to conversational standard? Just curious…
Oops. Embarrassing question, and seriously derailing the Tim White thread.
My point in explaining that English is not my first or second language was that humour is among the literary genres least suited for translation, and most reliant upon allusions, double-entendres, wordplay, and generally the whole cultural frame of reference at the disposal of a native speaker. So someone from a different linguistic background is likely at a disadvantage to discern what’s deeply funny and what’s not in English literature.
Anyhow, I was smitten with SJ Perelman from the first paragraph I ever read, and was comforted in my appreciation by authors and artists as diverse as T.S. Eliot, Raymond Chandler, John Updike, Al Hirschfeld, and of course Woody Allen. All of them were huge fans of Perelman, and I’m a huge fan of their work, too, so there is at least some consistency in my appreciation.
As to my languages, nothing exotic:
My second language was Italian, learnt by playful immersion at the age of ten with the street urchins in Rome. My third and fourth were French and German, the teaching languages at my school (“semi-bilingual”, with most of the subjects in German). Then Latin and Greek, a sound investment, as I was subsequently able to teach them for some time, earning much-needed cash for my studies. Fifth, extra-curricular English just before the baccalauréat, a course I took mostly out of juvenile spite, to prove that a language as ubiquitous as ‘Basic English’ could be acquired in a matter of months, rather than years, with sufficient proficiency to pass university entrance exams.
Working in a multilingual environment, as is luckily commonplace in my part of the world, forces one to to keep up one’s fluency just by doing one’s job. Inverse proof: Spanish, my sixth living language, is the only one I don’t have to use routinely, and therefore the one were my conversational level is shaky. No problem reading Borges or Vargas Llosa, but totally inadequate when pleading with a plumber in Barcelona. (Now I’m trying Catalan…)
So all my languages are Indo-European; of the living, four of them Romanic, two Germanic, all related, all using Roman scripts. Piece’o’cake. When I meet people from Asia, with three or more entirely different linguistic families and script systems to their name: now that’s something to write home about.
Impressive all the same. You didn’t say what your first language is.
I will try Perelman. At the moment I’m reading & listening to Thurber. Before that Wodehouse. Before that Patricia Highsmith & Elmore Leonard ~ these two authors I visit regularly for the degenerate characters & their foiled plots ~ similar to the stupidity of Bertie W, but with buckets of blood & plenty of ice cold malice. The latter quality warms my heart.
You didn’t say what your first language is.
No. I didn’t. I have traumatic memories of my childhood in the country of my birth, and the language is part of those memories.
“Ice cold malice” warming your heart: Perelman would have relished the phrase.
That’s fine ~ people with gaps in their CV are interesting. Regarding that phrase ~ I mashed it up from…
A town like Alice [Book, Nevil Shute]
Town called Malice [Song, The Jam]
Ice-Cold in Alex [film not book]
That’s what a bottle of Pinot Grigio is for!
There was also a Perelman piece (for the New Yorker, I think) about screenwriters in Hollywood. Inevitably titled “Malice in Wonderland.” (Unrelated to the movie.)
The word “man” originally meant any human.
A male human is a werman, and a female human is a wifman (later evolved to woman).
That’s the main reason there are so many man-centric idioms, not explicit sexism. Dropping the “wer” prefix probably was sexism, in the attitude that male human was the default assumption, so the prefix was only necessary for indicating a female.
While that’s not how we use the terms today, and it certainly seems appropriate to object to “chairman” as a generic, I’m not sure we should wholly abandon the historic meaning of the word. Do we really need to change “manhole” to something else?
With a word like “prehistoric” at the front, perhaps it’s forgivable to use the original meaning of the word, so that “prehistoric man” is synonymous with “prehistoric human”.
Or maybe not. I’m not a big fan of hand wringing about language we all know is used in a sex-neutral manner, but I also can’t abide generic “he”.
I can certainly live with replacing generic “man/mankind” with “human/humanity”, so long as no one starts talking about “humanholes” in the street.
“Utility ports” or some such would do just as well.
Sexism in language matters hugely. If you don’t believe me, have a daughter, and see if your perceptions change.
Everyone should read “The Handbook of Nonsexist Writing,” by Casey Miler and Kate Swift. The examples are priceless. Beginning example: “Development of the Uterus in Rats, Guinea Pigs, and Men.”
(And I forgot to hit “notify me…”)
A decent set of English gender-neutral pronouns is required. I don’t like the singular they nor Spivak. S/he doesn’t quite do it for me either. What do you think?
Why don’t you like “they”? It’s a perfectly cromulent word: “The alternative to the masculine generic with the longest and most distinguished history in English is the third-person plural pronoun. Recognized writers have used they, them, themselves, and their to refer to singular nouns such as one, a person, an individual, and each since the 1300s.” — American Heritage Book of English Usage: A Practical and Authoritative Guide to Contemporary English, 1996.
Why try to invent a new term that would struggle to be accepted? All we need do is unlearn — or just ignore! — a 19th-century grammarian’s rule that ignored centuries of common usage.
And I take it thou hast no problem with singular “you”?
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Thanks for using the adjective cromulent. It has embiggened my vocabulary. Quite frabjous, too.
As they say at Pareto’s Pizzeria:
them that has, gets.
I think I had a 20%-off voucher for them…
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I like your witty answer & I admit that this isn’t a total annoyance for me ~ it’s my quirk. I agree that I should be more accepting of “them”. Accept change.
I’m grinding my teeth over the gradual elision of effect/affect though. Grrr!
Well, it’s not so much a change as a reversion.
Language change is, of course, inevitable, but I do lament changes that erode differences in meaning. Like effect/affect. Or deny/refute (I’ve seen someone use “confute” recently, where pre-Nixon they’d likely have correctly and unambiguously used “refute”). Or infer/imply. &c. &c.
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Since I am the likely culprit here, having used both confute and refute in my recent criticism of Steven Pinker’s Horror Show, an explanation is due.
The cheap way out would be, again, the humble admission that English is neither my first nor my second language; and off into the woods. But if I erred, it was not out of sheer ignorance; rather, from a surfeit of Latin. In classical rhetoric, confutation and refutation denote two distinct, subsequent stages of a speech.Confutation means ‘to prove wrong’, applied primarily to the person stating the argument or assertion; refutation means ‘to prove conclusively to be false or illogical’, applied primarily to arguments or assertions.
I do not presently have the OED or a similarly authoritative dictionary at my fingertips for confirmation, but my Princeton/Wordnet-based electronic thesaurus, as well as the few online resources I consulted, do not confute me or refute my assertions.
So if proven wrong, I stand corrected. Until then, since you evoked the Nixon era, may I quote Ben Bradlee’s dictum: “We stand by our story.”
Oh, I didn’t have you in mind as a culprit at all, Occam. Although you might well have been my “confute”.
It’s just that so many people today use “refute” to mean simply “deny”, or perhaps to deny more strenuously. And I think this goes back to Nixon and Watergate, when he continually [not “continuously”; another abused couple] said something like, “I refute that allegation” when he simply offered no proof, conclusive or otherwise, that the allegations were false (how could he, when the allegations were, in fact, true?!).
A usage note in my dictionary (NOAD on Mac OS X) says, “Refute is not synonymous with rebut or deny. That is, it doesn’t mean merely “counter an argument” but “disprove beyond doubt; prove a statement false.” Yet the word is commonly misused for rebut — e.g.: “Ontario Hydro strongly refuted [read rebutted or denied ] the charges, saying none of its actions violate the Power Corporations Act.” (Ottawa Citizen; Apr. 25, 1997.) … Confute is essentially synonymous with refute in the sense “prove to be false or wrong.” It’s probably the stronger term, but it’s much rarer.” I think the rhetorical distinction between “refute” and “confute” hasn’t spread to idiomatic English at all.
So, I doubt you were wrong; given your explication, I don’t think you would have said “refute” where you meant only “deny”.
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Thanks for elaborating.
Re Nixon’s denial of the undeniable, I also recall Ron Ziegler’s immortal
“This is the operative statement. The others are inoperative.”
(relayed via the BBC World Service on shortwave at 2 AM. It made such a deep impression on my youthful mind that I jotted it down for future reference.)
The Browser is TOOOO good. If I read the Browser I would never get anything else done.
The Link is broken due to http being repeated. Great article though, Thanks!