I’ve always loved fairytales, whimsical stories, and mysteries. Plus, I’m passionate about mind-expanding, heart-opening books that offer me new ways to understand myself and the Universe we live in. And I particularly like books that show me ways to have more of what brings me joy and pleasure. When I can get all of this in a novel I’m in heaven.
This is a very original book with deep wisdom delivered through a most unique relationship about a man and the Gorilla who becomes his Guru!
One of the most life-changing concepts I took from the book is that there are two kinds of people in the world: leavers and takers. I recognized that I am essentially a taker, but the book made me realize that to be a better person it was time for me to become a leaver.
One of the most beloved and bestselling novels of spiritual adventure ever published, Ishmael has earned a passionate following. This special twenty-fifth anniversary edition features a new foreword and afterword by the author.
“A thoughtful, fearlessly low-key novel about the role of our species on the planet . . . laid out for us with an originality and a clarity that few would deny.”—The New York Times Book Review
Teacher Seeks Pupil. Must have an earnest desire to save the world. Apply in person.
It was just a three-line ad in the personals section, but it launched the adventure of…
I have been enamored with archaeology and evolutions since childhood when my parents handed me my first book on these subjects: Ruth Moore's Man, Time and Fossils, and The Testimony of the Spade by Geoffrey Bibby. These themes have guided my study and teaching. I retired as a University Distinguished Professor of Anthropology in the SUNY system. I am the author or editor of eight books in areas related to this interest. My focus on archaeology and cultural evolution and my counter-intuitive conclusion that workload and illness often increased with the evolution of civilization were stimulated by the works of Lee and Boserup.
This book revolutionized our common understanding of human history by showing that the smallest and simplest (most “primitive”) human populations, mobile rather than sedentary, subsisting only on wild foods, contra the standard Hobbesian characterization of primitive life, actually had relatively light workloads and often were better nourished and more disease free than contemporary agriculturalists [and I might add many historic civilizations].
This book excited me and started me on my counterintuitive interpretation of the evolution of human economies.
Man the Hunter is a collection of papers presented at a symposium on research done among the hunting and gathering peoples of the world. Ethnographic studies increasingly contribute substantial amounts of new data on hunter-gatherers and are rapidly changing our concept of Man the Hunter. Social anthropologists generally have been reappraising the basic concepts of descent, fi liation, residence, and group structure. This book presents new data on hunters and clarifi es a series of conceptual issues among social anthropologists as a necessary background to broader discussions with archaeologists, biologists, and students of human evolution.
Dark Emu is the history of Aboriginal Australia, before the white people came. As a settler here myself, I was astounded as chapter after chapter demolished the myth of Terra nullius and showed how comprehensively the landscape had been managed before invasion. The descriptions of the early colonialists had recorded the truth, and then it had ben buried.
I know some people who have had strong negative reactions to this work as well so it is controversial.
So you know, the author Bruce Pascoe is a Bunurong man and an award-winning Australian writer and editor. Dark Emu won the 2016 NSW Book of the Year and was a joint winner of the 2016 Indigenous Writer’s Prize.
History has portrayed Australia's First Peoples, the Aboriginals, as hunter-gatherers who lived on an empty, uncultivated land. History is wrong.
In this seminal book, Bruce Pascoe uncovers evidence that long before the arrival of white men, Aboriginal people across the continent were building dams and wells; planting, irrigating, and harvesting seeds, and then preserving the surplus and storing it in houses, sheds, or secure vessels; and creating elaborate cemeteries and manipulating the landscape. All of these behaviours were inconsistent with the hunter-gatherer tag, which turns out to have been a convenient lie that worked to justify dispossession.
I’m a professor of evolutionary psychology at the University of Queensland. I’ve had the good fortune to spend my life studying humans and trying to figure out how they got that way. These are some of the best books I’ve read on this fascinating topic. They might seem to be all over the map, but understanding human nature requires approaching it from many different perspectives, and these books will get you started.
To understand human nature you need to take a deep dive into anthropology, particularly into the lives of hunter-gatherers. Because humans are the most flexible animal on this planet, it can be incredibly difficult for an outsider to tell which lessons from any one society are general and which relate to just their small part of the world. The beauty of this book is that the brilliant anthropologist who wrote it does the hard yards for you, narrating a fascinating and highly accessible trip through the lives of hunter-gatherers.
Are humans by nature hierarchical or egalitarian? Hierarchy in the Forest addresses this question by examining the evolutionary origins of social and political behavior. Christopher Boehm, an anthropologist whose fieldwork has focused on the political arrangements of human and nonhuman primate groups, postulates that egalitarianism is in effect a hierarchy in which the weak combine forces to dominate the strong.
The political flexibility of our species is formidable: we can be quite egalitarian, we can be quite despotic. Hierarchy in the Forest traces the roots of these contradictory traits in chimpanzee, bonobo, gorilla, and early human societies. Boehm looks at…
In 1972, I started an early childhood center in the Monadnock Region in New Hampshire. The focus was on child-centered education, with an emphasis on working with children outdoors. I've spent the last 50 years continuing to connect children with nature in schools, nature centers, national parks, museums, and in families. I taught graduate courses in developmental psychology, cognitive development, place-based education and have done hundreds of professional development workshops for early childhood and elementary school teachers. As a father, I focused on connecting my own children with nature. My son is a ski coach and runs an ecotourism kayaking business. My daughter is a theater director and writes grants for an environmental non-profit.
The course I took from Paul Shepard in college was one of the most thought-provoking courses I ever experienced. Find an image of the original cover of the book and you'll see what I mean—it's a strange synthesis of a post-modern bow hunter emerging from his paleo ancestor. Shepard contends that the key to understanding human happiness is recognizing that we are genetically hunters and gatherers living in a post-modern age. Reclaiming our hunting and gathering impulses will help us lead fuller lives. He does a fascinating job, in this book, of describing what hunting and gathering culture childhoods looked like and then suggesting how we should parent our children with these old genetic impulses in mind.
In what may be his boldest and most controversial book, Paul Shepard presents an account of human behavior and ecology in light of our past. In it, he contends that agriculture is responsible for our ecological decline and looks to the hunting and gathering lifestyle as a model more closely in tune with our essential nature. Shepard advocates affirming the profound and beautiful nature of the hunter and gatherer, redefining agriculture and combining technology with hunting and gathering to recover a livable environment and peaceful society.
I became interested in bar culture in my 20s when I worked at a neighborhood "local" in Toronto and was struck by how close people could become when sharing drinks and stories across a bar. Since then, I’ve spent most of my life researching the history of cocktails and bars—both as an academic topic and as a columnist for magazines and newspapers, including the Toronto Star. I’ve written a podcast on Prohibition for Wondery Media, as well as four books, Mondo Cocktail, America Walks Into a Bar,Canadian Spirits (with Stephen Beaumont), and the forthcoming Cocktails: A Still Life (Running Press), with James Waller and still-life artist Todd M. Casey.
You know how, when you read a book that’s so clever, funny, and perfectly written you want to actually get to know the author? That’s what happened to me when I read this book. Even though I didn’t know him, I knew he’d be the kind of person that you hoped to run into at the bar—a generous man with a great sense of humor, a bright outlook, and plenty of great stories.
We did eventually come to be friends in real life, too. It turned out that we’re practically neighbors and both enjoy the occasional glass of gin. True story.
First published in 2001 to national acclaim, Notes on a Beermat is Nicholas Pashley’s ode to the amber nectar of the gods, a witty meditation on beer and everything that goes with it―from socializing to the solitary pleasures of a beer and a book, to the qualities necessary in a good pub. Most books about beer focus on the beverage itself, how to make it and how to buy it. Notes on a Beermat, the only Canadian book of its kind, explains how to drink beer and why it is absolutely necessary. With characteristic wit and charm, Pashley observes, for…
I’ve written seven books, all along the theme of adventure in one way or another, but my best-known work is that of my novels of the Ojibwe Indians. As a child, I grew up on a farm where my dad discovered scores of arrowheads and artifacts while plowing the fields. This was a deep revelation for me as to the extent of Indian culture and how little we know of its people. In my books, Windigo Moon and The Wolf and The Willow, I try to bring the world of the 1500s and its Native peoples to life.
This fictional account of the life of an English fur trader is a sentimental favorite for me out of my respect for historian Charles Cleland.
Cleland tells the story of Alexander Henry who was captured by the Odawa Indians during the attack on Fort Michillimackinac in 1763. Henry lived among the Indians through the seasons, giving an eye-witness account of their lives as hunter-gatherers. Cleland is better as a historian than a novelist, but this is still a fun read and would also be a good book on any Young Adult list.
Beyond the Far Horizon is based upon the true life story of Alexander Henry, abrave and adventurous young man who, as a fur trader, dared to risk his life andfortune on the vast lakes and in dark forests of the Great Lakes frontier. Henryslife, far from the comforts of the American colonies he left behind, was so dangerousthat he was no stranger to the threat of death. As he pursued his fur trade venture duringthe years between 1760 and 1765, he nearly drowned, starved, and froze to death, andon several occasions, barely escaped being killed by hostile Indians. He was…
I’ve always craved outdoor adventure. My earliest preschool memories include frog hunting in the fields behind my house, and careening down hills around the neighborhood on my metal-wheeled skateboard. In middle school, I progressed to BMX, spearfishing and surfing. After college, I added snow and water skiing, windsurfing, and eventually mountain biking to the mix, and was fortunate to have a career that allowed time and resources to travel the world extensively seeking adventure. Now well into my sixties, I research and write about science, extreme sports, nature and philosophy in between daily hikes and mountain bike rides around the homebase and monthly journeys to destinations unknown.
I’ve always wanted to understand our shared humanity through the lens of our hunter-gatherer past. We spent 1,990,000 of our last 2 million years on the planet in this capacity, after all!
Fortunately, I came across anthropologist James Suzman’s book about his two decades living amongst the San tribe of the Kalahari, one of the few remaining hunter-gatherer peoples on earth (at the time). Unfortunately, 21st-century political and cultural realities have all but eliminated this traditional way of life, as remaining members of this group now live in government-supported resettlement camps after losing their ancestral lands to agricultural and industrial interests.
Nonetheless, this poignant book provided me with new insights about what it means to be human living in a world we were neither designed nor prepared for.
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'Insightful ... Avoiding both modern conceits and romantic fantasies, Suzman chronicles how economics and politics have finally conquered some of the last outposts of hunter-gatherers, and how much humankind can still learn from the disappearing way of life of the most marginalized communities on earth.' - Yuval Noah Harari, author of Sapiens and Homo Deus
'Fascinating' - Sunday Times
'Elegant and absorbing' - Financial Times
'Profoundly moving' - Irish Times
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From acclaimed anthropologist James Suzman, a portrait of the 'original affluent society' - the Bushmen of southern Africa - and what their way of life can teach us…
I've been writing about and teaching military history for many years (I'm a professor at the University of North Carolina), mostly focused on the pre-industrial world, and mostly about the maelstrom of the North Atlantic colonial experience (including warfare in Ireland, England, and in North America). I quickly decided that I needed to do more to understand the Native American perspective, and that also meant understanding the very nature of their societies: Not just how they fought, but how they imagined the function of war. This book is the product of constantly returning to that problem, while also putting it into a world comparative context of other non-state experiences of war.
I teach this book to my graduate students every year.
It is a wide-ranging, deeply researched attempt to understand the nature of war in the human experience. And unlike so many other surveys of military history, Gat goes all the way back to human evolution and the fundamental motives underlying human conflict. He also then shows how conflict itself shaped human cultural evolution and the rise of states.
Why do people go to war? Is it rooted in human nature or is it a late cultural invention? How does war relate to the other fundamental developments in the history of human civilization? And what of war today - is it a declining phenomenon or simply changing its shape?
In this truly global study of war and civilization, Azar Gat sets out to find definitive answers to these questions in an attempt to unravel the 'riddle of war' throughout human history, from the early hunter-gatherers right through to the unconventional terrorism of the twenty-first century.
I have always been fascinated with plants. Their shapes, their colors, their beauty, even the plants that are known to be harmful to humans (poison ivy, puncture vine) had appeal to me. Plants are, by far, the most prolific, the biggest, the oldest, the most complex of organisms. And yet, as a pre-med student, classes on botany were never recommended. Sad. These books delve into the complexity, the wonder of plants, and how they interact with humans. From the sheer poetic pronouncements of Michael Pollan to the straightforward prose of Richard Manning, here is a chance to see the breadth and depth; our rewards and struggles with the plant kingdom.
Against the Grain is a one-of-a-kind book. Unlike many hagiographies of agriculture gives a more realistic interpretation of how agriculture came to be; the costs associated with its adoption, and the hold it has over all humankind. It gives insight into that cost through an economic and environmental lens. After you read this book, you will look at what is at the end of your fork very, very differently.
In this provocative, wide-ranging book, Against the Grain, Richard Manning offers a dramatically revisionist view of recent human evolution, beginning with the vast increase in brain size that set us apart from our primate relatives and brought an accompanying increase in our need for nourishment. For 290,000 years, we managed to meet that need as hunter-gatherers, a state in which Manning believes we were at our most human: at our smartest, strongest, most sensually alive. But our reliance on food made a secure supply deeply attractive, and eventually we embarked upon the agricultural experiment that has been the history of…
