(Norton, $28)
Extreme nostalgia is much in vogue, said Robert Herritt in TheDailyBeast.com. For a certain health-conscious segment of the population, it’s become a bedrock faith that we’d all be healthier and happier if we only ate, exercised, and behaved more like our pre–Bronze Age ancestors. While there’s an attractive elegance to this view, “it is also the kind of back-of-the-napkin evolutionary theorizing that begs to be cut down by a thoughtful specialist.” Enter Marlene Zuk, an evolutionary biologist who “brings the right mixture of expertise and humor
to the task.”
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Zuk “pokes gentle and delightful fun” at the excesses of “paleo” ideology, said Cordelia Fine in The Wall Street Journal. Some adherents, she points out, would have the rest of us eschew every post-caveman innovation from cereal to eyeglasses. And many presume that our big-game-hunting forebears of 10,000 to 60,000 years ago achieved perfect adaptation to their environment. But Zuk reminds us that evolution has never been that simple. Human beings have changed physically since the Pleistocene era, evolving a greater diversity of eye colors, for instance, as well as the ability to digest lactose. What’s more, there was no single paleo lifestyle: Humans, then and now, maintained extremely varied customs. Some, scientists recently discovered, even cooked and ate grains, violating one of the basic prohibitions of today’s paleofantasists.
And still the allure of the caveman persists, said Laura Miller in Salon.com. Zuk “hits the nail pretty solidly on the head” in explaining why. “We have,” she writes, “a regrettable tendency to see what we want to see and rationalize what we already want to do.” If we’re caught having an affair, we say it’s because we were never meant to be monogamous. If we want to avoid buying a new pair of running shoes, we say that Homo sapiens evolved to run barefoot. In reality, we don’t live in the same world as cavemen, and we don’t even have their bodies. “It turns out, we’re stuck being us.”
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Also of interest...in picture books for grown-upsfeature How About Never—Is Never Good for You?; The Undertaking of Lily Chen; Meanwhile, in San Francisco; The Portlandia Activity Book
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Author of the week: Karen Russell
feature Karen Russell could use a rest.
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The Double Life of Paul de Man by Evelyn Barish
feature Evelyn Barish “has an amazing tale to tell” about the Belgian-born intellectual who enthralled a generation of students and academic colleagues.
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Book of the week: Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt by Michael Lewis
feature Michael Lewis's description of how high-frequency traders use lightning-fast computers to their advantage is “guaranteed to make blood boil.”
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Also of interest...in creative rebellion
feature A Man Called Destruction; Rebel Music; American Fun; The Scarlet Sisters
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Author of the week: Susanna Kaysen
feature For a famous memoirist, Susanna Kaysen is highly ambivalent about sharing details about her life.
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You Must Remember This: Life and Style in Hollywood’s Golden Age by Robert Wagner
feature Robert Wagner “seems to have known anybody who was anybody in Hollywood.”
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Book of the week: Astoria: John Jacob Astor and Thomas Jefferson’s Lost Pacific Empire by Peter Stark
feature The tale of Astoria’s rise and fall turns out to be “as exciting as anything in American history.”