72 books like Demonic Males

Geology can be a tough sell for the popular science audience. It can seem boringly commonplace yet remote in relevance to our day-to-day lives. But it is probably the most important science for understanding how and where we live.

In this beautifully written compilation, McPhee drives across North America, generally in the company of a local geologist, exploring the deep past and our modern relationship with it through roadcuts, quarries, eroded exposures, volcanoes, and mountains pushing up through the sediments.

McPhee is a New Yorker writer, with all that implies–his work is meticulously written, detailed, and literary. This book is simply a visceral pleasure to read–I recommend you find a hammock and a few days.

This book came out just as I was starting grad school and caused quite a bit of academic consternation. Diamond, a Harvard anthropologist, steps way outside the normal academic lanes to link geography, biology, technology, and history to answer one of the big academic questions: why was Europe able to conquer Africa and South Africa in the 16th-19th centuries? Even asking the question is to face challenges to morality, politics, and identity issues that are still radioactively hot topics in the modern political and academic world.

His mechanistic explanation of the advantages of climate and geography enraged many academics who specialized in narrow aspects of the question because it seemingly rendered them, at worst, irrelevant or, at best–simple foot soldiers providing data for Wrangam’s deeper, yet broader, causal explanations.

Historians detested his deterministic and scientifically amoral approach to a historical question. Yet his essential thesis has held up, and no… show more.

My father gave me a copy of this book when I was in 6th grade and it introduced the world of natural science to me. This was the first in a series of volumes that collected his monthly essays written for Natural History magazine.

Gould has an eye for unusual scientific phenomena that illuminate a deeper truth about the relationship between humanity and the natural world. He was not afraid to tackle moral issues, such as eugenics and the science of IQ, recognizing the importance of the popular scientist as more than just a translator.

But the most important thing for the 11-year-old me was that he was such a clear writer–I could follow all of his arguments without knowing anything about genetics, statistics, or anatomy. I still have the copy my father gave me–it is dog-eared, and the spine is long broken, but when I thumb through it, I… show more.

This is simply one of the best books on natural history ever written, and I read it in two sittings. The title is subtlety deceptive: instead of the straightforward story of the dodo's extinction, this explores the interrelationship of evolution, biogeography, and humanity across time and space.

The book covers the American West, Amazonia, and New Guinea, documenting and explaining the relationship between ecological fragmentation and the natural world. From pygmy elephants to marsupial carnivores to rats, evolution has responded to geography in marvelous yet scientifically understandable ways since the appearance of life.

If you want to understand how the natural world is responding to natural geological changes and our own incursions and fragmentations of the planet without being hit over the head with ‘important moral lessons,’ this is the book for you.  

This book tells how three unlikely women–Jane Goodall, Diane Fossey, and Biruté Galdikas–broke scientific ground with their study of the wild chimpanzee, the mountain gorilla, and the orangutan. In every case, a deep emotional involvement with the animals opened the door to insights that male-dominated “objective” methods of research had minimized or overlooked. “Each woman’s first few months in the field were marked by despair, as the study subjects either could not be located or fled at first sight. The women could not make it work–not by extra stealth, not by better equipment, not by new techniques.  One can manipulate an experiment to hasten it, but one cannot force or hurry a revelation.”

This is my only other fiction pick. I read this many years ago, when it was new, but it stayed with me. We see a lot of relationships between people and dogs or people and horses, but this is a novel about a girl and a group of bonobos. That’s an interesting twist on the human/animal relationship, because other primates are so similar to us in their intelligence and approach to the world. They are mostly helpless against human forces, but then again so are young girls. The bonds formed in this book are worth the price of admission, and the suspense is high throughout.

The discovery of the diminutive hominin Homo floresiensis, a.k.a. the “Hobbit,” was a sensation in paleoanthropology–one that was anticipated by the fieldwork of cultural anthropologist Gregory Forth. Stories of creatures of similar attributes were taken as descriptions of real encounters with an “empirical” entity rather than merely figures of folklore.

This book has been a case study in the realization of a paradigm shift in how human evolution is envisioned–one branch of a bushy family tree, accompanied by multiple parallel branches, i.e., relict hominoids. 

The book and the original 1968 movie are worthwhile experiences that examine our society, our treatment of animals, and our treatment of each other by creating a planet in which the roles of humans and apes are swapped. The screenplay was written by Oscar-winner Michael Wilson and Emmy-winner Rod Serling and adds a legendary ending that was the talk of the neighborhood kids when I was growing up. It created a powerful symbol of mankind’s possible eventual destruction that stayed with me over the years.

The 2001 remake of the movie stayed fairly true to the original movie but was a bit slow because of its many side stories. The second remake in 2011 had amazing special effects but made the disturbing point that humans have become a destructive society that must be abolished by the apes. While the original message was to treat animals and each other better, the… show more.

John Green combines the spirited curiosity of an investigative reporter with the incisive logic of the argument of a rhetorician and the articulation of a wordsmith.

I found that he skillfully painted the historical and anecdotal context for this intriguing mystery as an adept journalist, drawing me into the very scene, to become part of the actual experience. He also went to lengths to make the evidentiary case for the scientists to acknowledge and seriously consider the proposition. With that determination, he promoted and sponsored the launch of a venue to provide a platform for the dissemination of scholarly publications exploring the question of relict hominoids, with me as the editor-in-chief.

John Bindernagel’s book persuasively demonstrated that rather than being an enigmatic monster, sasquatch anatomies and behaviors, as reported by hundreds of independent eyewitnesses, were remarkably parallel to those of known great apes. Rather than an inexplicable anomaly, sasquatch constitutes another species of hominoid ape.

As I pursue Bindernagel’s thesis, I have discovered further that some anatomies and behaviors attributed to sasquatch actually anticipated those of great apes only recently recognized or appreciated.