Euphoria

A novel that is partly based on the real-life anthropologist Margaret Mead and her work in New Guinea in the 1930s, this book had me gripped from the start as it evoked the complex dynamics between the three main characters and their very different approaches to studying Indigenous people.

I was in awe of the power of story-telling in this short book. It shows us how anthropologists might hope to be impartial observers of the people they study, but in reality, these encounters change everyone.

I’m not a big reader of historical fiction, but this book was a big exception to that.

Nell Stone, inspired by renowned anthropologist Margaret Mead, is thoroughly engaging. And so is the portrayal of the science of anthropology and how it was done, for better or worse, in the 1930s.

Like all the books on this list, you don’t need to know about the science in the book's pages before being swept into the story. The characters taught me what I needed to know, all without me realizing it, as they made their way up rivers, into indigenous cultures, and… show more.

This book surprised me on all counts. I’m not crazy about historical fiction because real lives are seldom as beautifully crafted as fictional ones and often make for dull novels. I knew nothing about Margaret Mead and cared less about archeology. Plus jungles... ew. I’d make a dismal explorer! But this book gripped me with fantastic settings and characters, and a sexy love triangle juiced it up. The story also challenged my so-far unexamined ideas about the Western study of societies and civilizations and left me thinking some good deep thoughts long after I finished. A brilliant book that tries… show more.

Add to the list of extraordinary women mentioned above, the anthropologist Margaret Mead. I’m embarrassed to say that I knew little of Mead and her ground-breaking work before reading this book. The novel centers on (another) love triangle between three scientists studying the Kiona tribe in New Guinea in the 1930s. The personal struggles of these three anthropologists living in sometimes harrowing circumstances cover profound emotional territory. I also found the rituals of the tribe fascinating. And the inherent conflicts that abound when observing while living inside a community make for page-turning intrigue. Despite renaming her main character Nell Stone,… show more.

The “girl” in this novel is a young anthropologist (inspired by the real-life Margaret Mead), and the island is New Guinea, 1933. King, a writer’s writer, has crafted a complex page-turner that’s as tight as a drum. It’s a stunner, down to the final perfect sentence, which knocked the breath out of me. I don’t think I’ve read a book in the past five years that compares craft-wise.

Euphoria is a novel based on the love triangle that developed between Margaret Mead; her second husband, Reo Fortune; and the man who would become her third husband, Gregory Bateson. King did not attempt to recount the actual events that transpired in New Guinea in the early 1930s, but her research (she lists dozens of books in her acknowledgments, led by Jane Howard’s comprehensive 1984 biography, Margaret Mead: A Life) enabled her to recreate the personalities involved and the feverish atmosphere of remote fieldwork. Some of the details in the novel are invented, but the overwhelming, disjointed intensity of… show more.