Anthropologist Helen Fisher is the author of Why We Love, Anatomy of Love, and The First Sex. Here she chooses six favorite books that illuminate the traits that all humans share.
Nisa: The Life and Words of a !Kung Woman by Marjorie Shostak (Harvard University Press, $18). Chronicles the world of a mid-20th-century !Kung Bushmen woman living in a hunting-gathering band in southern Africa, much as our ancestors did millenniums ago. Yet Nisa’s childhood crushes, teen romances, and marriages, philanderings, and divorces are no different from those of many young women (and men) in industrial societies.
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