Archives de catégorie : Anthropology/Sociology

FOSSIL MEN de Kermit Pattison

A behind-the-scenes account of the shocking discovery of the skeleton of “Ardi,” a human ancestor far older than Lucy—a find that shook the world of paleoanthropology and radically altered our understanding of human evolution. FOSSIL MEN is popular science at its best, and a must read for fans of Jared Diamond, Richard Dawkins, and Edward O. Wilson.

FOSSIL MEN:
The Quest for the Oldest Skeleton and the Origins of Humankind
by Kermit Pattison
William Morrow/HarperCollins, June 2020

In 1994, a team led by fossil-hunting legend Tim White—”the Steve Jobs of paleoanthropology”—uncovered the bones of a human ancestor in Ethiopia’s Afar region. Radiometric dating of nearby rocks indicated the skeleton, classified as Ardipithecus ramidus, was 4.4 million years old, more than a million years older than “Lucy,” then the oldest known human ancestor. The findings challenged many assumptions about human evolution—how we started walking upright, how we evolved our nimble hands, and, most significantly, whether we were descended from an ancestor that resembled today’s chimpanzee—and repudiated a half-century of paleoanthropological orthodoxy. FOSSIL MEN is the first full-length exploration of Ardi, the fossil men who found her, and her impact on what we know about the origins of the human species. It is a scientific detective story played out in anatomy and the natural history of the human body. Kermit Pattison brings into focus a cast of eccentric, obsessive scientists, including one of the world’s greatest fossil hunters, Tim White—an exacting and unforgiving fossil hunter whose virtuoso skills in the field were matched only by his propensity for making enemies; Gen Suwa, a Japanese savant who sometimes didn’t bother going home at night to devote more hours to science; Owen Lovejoy, a onetime creationist-turned-paleoanthropologist; Berhane Asfaw, who survived imprisonment and torture to become Ethiopia’s most senior paleoanthropologist and who fought for African scientists to gain equal footing in the study of human origins; and the Leakeys, for decades the most famous family in paleoanthropology.

“An entertaining update on a process as ‘red in tooth and claw’ as nature itself… Pattison delivers a gripping and reasonably balanced account… Big personalities, simmering turmoil, and fascinating popular science.” —Kirkus, starred review

Kermit Pattison is a journalist whose work has appeared in the New York Times, GQ, Fast Company, and Inc., among many other publications. He spent more a decade doing research for FOSSIL MEN, a large portion of which was spent in the field in Ethiopia with the team that discovered Ardi. This is his first book. He lives in St. Paul, Minnesota.

MINE! de Michael Heller & James Salzman

A hidden set of rules governs who owns what—explaining everything from whether you can recline your airplane seat to why HBO lets you borrow a password illegally—and in this lively and entertaining guide, two acclaimed law professors reveal how things become « mine. »

MINE!
How the Hidden Rules of Ownership Control Our Lives
by Michael Heller & James Salzman
Doubleday, March 2021
(chez Levine, Greenberg, Rostan – voir catalogue)

« Mine » is one of the first words babies learn. By the time we grow up, the idea of ownership seems natural, whether buying a cup of coffee or a house. But who controls the space behind your airplane seat: you reclining or the squished laptop user behind? Why is plagiarism wrong, but it’s okay to knock-off a recipe or a dress design? And after a snowstorm, why does a chair in the street hold your parking space in Chicago, but in New York you lose the space and the chair? MINE! explains these puzzles and many more. Surprisingly, there are just six simple stories that everyone uses to claim everything. Owners choose the story that steers us to do what they want. But we can always pick a different story. This is true not just for airplane seats, but also for battles over digital privacy, climate change, and wealth inequality. As Michael Heller and James Salzman show—in the spirited style of Freakonomics, Nudge, and Predictably Irrational—ownership is always up for grabs. With stories that are eye-opening, mind-bending, and sometimes infuriating, MINE! reveals the rules of ownership that secretly control our lives.

Michael Heller and James Salzman are among the world’s leading authorities on ownership. Michael Heller is the Lawrence A. Wien Professor of Real Estate Law at Columbia Law School. He is the author of The Gridlock Economy: How Too Much Ownership Wrecks Markets, Stops Innovation, and Costs Lives. James Salzman is the Donald Bren Distinguished Professor of Environmental Law, with joint appointments at the UCLA School of Law and the UCSB Bren School of the Environment. He is the author of Drinking Water: A History.

BONES, BLOOD, BREATH de Susan Wise Bauer

In the tradition of Sapiens, bestselling author Susan Wise Bauer’s BONES, BLOOD, BREATH is a gripping and thought-provoking take on human history told through humanity’s evolving perceptions of illness

BONES, BLOOD, BREATH: How Sickness Shapes Our World
by Susan Wise Bauer
St. Martin’s Press, TBD
Manuscript available Fall 2021

In illness, Bauer provides a surprising new lens through which to consider all of human history—she argues that bodily sickness and our conception of it has shaped our culture, our philosophies, and our religions, and has directly and indirectly affected how we view others, how we view ourselves, and how we fashion our world. She argues that sickness is the great mirror that reflects back our most urgent and eternal questions: Why does calamity descend without warning? How can we explain it? And how do we fight back? Told in a propulsive narrative style that brings sweeping history to life through intimate individual stories—the feverish Mesopotamian sufferer; the plague victim who dies alone, the last in his village; the seventeenth-century teenager racked by smallpox; the Congolese grandmother watching her family die of Ebola—Bauer takes readers on a journey from humans’ earliest days when sickness was an unsolvable mystery, evidence that humans were powerless to the unseen forces of gods, to more modern times and the birth of germ theory, when secularism grew alongside our fear of contamination. A multidisciplinary human history like no other, BONES, BLOOD, BREATH is a big think book that tells a large-scale, vivid, chronological story, stretching around the world from ancient times until the present—it will change the way we understand who we are.

Susan Wise Bauer is a writer, historian, and educator. Known for combining meticulous research with gripping detail to offer her readers sweeping and engaging big-picture narratives, Susan is also an in-demand speaker and expert. She is the author of eighteen books, including the educational classic The Well-Trained Mind (with Jessie Wise), now in its fourth edition with over 250,000 copies sold. Her four-volume educational series The Story of the World has sold over 1.5 million copies since 2001. Bauer has a bachelor’s degree in English language and linguistics with a minor in Greek; a Master of Divinity in Ancient Near Eastern Languages and Literature; an M.A. in English language and literature; and a Ph.D. in American Studies, with a concentration in the history of American religion. Susan writes, reads, lectures and consults, and runs a family farm and bed-and-breakfast. With its broad, multi-disciplinary approach, and propulsive story-driven writing, BLOOD, BONES, BREATH is poised to be her breakout title.

WIE WIR MENSCHEN WURDEN de Madelaine Böhme, Rüdiger Braun et Florian Breier

Spectacular finds throw a new light on the history of human evolution

WIE WIR MENSCHEN WURDEN
(How We Became Human)
by Madelaine Böhme, Rüdiger Braun, & Florian Breier
Heyne/Random House Germany, November 2019

A criminalistic search for clues of the origins of humanity

The cradle of humanity is in Africa – for a long time this was the incontrovertible truth. In recent years, however, ever more bones have been found that chronologically and geographically do not fit into the picture: archaeologists have found numerous fossils in Europe of early ancestors of present-day apes from which later the human line of evolution emerged. The latest of those findings: the Danuvius guggenmosi, an ape with arms suited to hanging in trees but human-like legs.
In the renowned Nature magazine, Madelaine Böhme and her team just published their research article on this new fossil ape and how it changes the previously applied models of the evolution of bipedalism. These approximately 11.6-million-year-old fossils suggest a form of locomotion that might push back the timeline for when walking on two feet evolved and extend the theory for a common ancestor of great apes and humans. In her book, Böhme and her team describe their paradigm-changing findings and bring to life the fascinating world of our earliest ancestors. A truly absorbing scientific crime story!

Madelaine Böhme, geo-scientist and palaeontologist, is professor of terrestrial palaeoclimatology at the University of Tübingen and founding director of the Senckenberg Center for Human Evolution and Palaeoenvironment. She is one of the most esteemed palaeoclimatologists and palaeoenvironmental scientists examining human evolution with regard to changes in climate and environment.
Rüdiger Braun is a science journalist and contributes to Stern and Geo.
Florian Breier is a science journalist and works as a filmmaker and author for ZDF television, arte, SWR broadcasting and others.

WIE WERDEN WER WIR SIND de Joachim Bauer

How we become who we are

WIE WERDEN WER WIR SIND
by Joachim Bauer
Blessing, publication Mai 2019

Why there is no me without you – the new major book by bestselling author Joachim Bauer.
Recent neuroscientific research indicates that human beings are born without a self. But how do we develop this « self », this « me » that can later define itself as distinct from others? How do we manage to think and feel in terms of me, you or we? What makes a human being into an individual? These are the central questions Joachim Bauer examines in his new major work, in which he demonstrates that our « true self » does not slumber within us like some natural resource waiting to be found and polished. It is rather the product of our encounters and relationships with others – experiences, joys and fears we share. Joachim Bauer makes us realise that this « me », in contrast to what had long been thought, is not engraved in stone but instead is a process of perpetual self-construction and life-long transition and can grow and change.
In an age of rampant egocentricity and social currents forcing us to assert ourselves by erecting a border between our own self and others, Bauer has drawn a new image of how we become who we are and explains why we can only find this path if we tread it together.

Also by Joachim Bauer, Selbsteuerung, the re-discovery of free will. blessing, May 2015
Self-control is an ability that in the world we live in is a prerequisite for professional success, happy relationships, and psychological and physical health. Those of us with selfcontrol– in other words, people who are in a position to postpone the short-term satisfaction of personal needs in favour of long-term advantages – don’t fall victim to unhealthy eating habits and lack of exercise; they don’t spend too much time in front of the television or computer screens and are not at risk of addiction. This book makes it clear how self-control works, why it is so important for a successful life and what we can do to relearn what we have forgotten. Joachim Bauer emphasises that abstinence, putting off wants and consciously tackling problems are by no means unnatural forms of self-castigation. In fact, the contrary is true: the ability to learn self-control is inherent in human beings. If it is to develop, we have to practice it from an early age – an observation that radically runs counter to the idea of children not having to make an effort, of perpetually being « enthusiastic ».

Joachim Bauer is a university teacher and professor at the University of Freiburg. He is a doctor of internal medicine, psychosomatic medicine, psychiatry and psychotherapy. For his research work, he was awarded the renowned Organon Prize of the German Society for Biological Psychiatry.Spiegel bestselling author: More than 700,000 copies of his books sold.