Hi everyone. Welcome back to Bibliophilia Book Reviews. I apologize for posting this so late into December, but here it is. In November, I read four books and here are my thoughts on all of them. I will also be posting my End of the Year Wrap Up soon.
1. SCIENCE AND PREHISTORY: A Pocket History of Human Evolution by Silvana Condemi and François Savatier
This is indeed a pocket history of human evolution. It is 154 pages long and it is roughly the size of a Paperwhite Kindle e-reader, so it is both short and small and can effectively fit in one of your jeans pockets. I honestly don’t remember where I got this book from, but I grabbed it because I have always loved to read about paleontology and the discovery of prehistoric human remains. When I was in school, we learned about Australopithecus afarensis, Australopithecus africanus, Homo habilis, Homo erectus, Homo neanderthalensis, and Homo sapiens. But this book also talks about Homo florensis, Homo rudolfensis, Homo ergaster, and Homo heidelbergensis, names that I’d never heard of before, specially heidelbergensis, a species of man thought to be a, if not the, precursor of Homo sapiens. It is a current book, talking about discoveries made in the field as close as 2019 and I liked that. But this book is not an account of all the species of ancient humans discovered thus far in paleontology; it is a summary of how we think humans evolved into Homo sapiens based on the discoveries made thus far in paleoanthropology.
At 154 pages long, this book doesn’t even remotely go in-depth about what it’s talking about. Starting with a small explanation of our presence in the hominid family tree, which also includes orangutans, gorillas, bonobos, and chimpanzees, the book goes on to describe that humans have gone through three stages of evolution: one, the transition from an arboreal quadruped posture to an imperfect biped; two, the first true biped, e.g., Australopithecus and all its different species, among them, Lucy, or Australopithecus afarensis. And third, the stage we are currently on, the obligate biped; that is, a human form that is fully committed and adapted to walking on the ground with two legs. This, the book says, is the defining characteristic of the Homo genus and it distinguishes us from all other hominids.
What follows is a summary of the rest of the book: Bipedalism and culture, the evolutionary accelerator, are what transformed us from hominids into humans. But what is more important, bipedalism reconfigured our entire bodies. Now, we were able to run, and running let us cover larger distances when hunting. Hunting led to the extinction of bigger predators than us, since we were able to perfect it with tools now that our hands were free to make them. From there we formed bands and expanded into the rest of the world. These bands transformed into tribes, which later on formed states and countries… I understand the importance of social anthropology to paleontology and archeology but, frankly, knowing how society emerged from early human villages and life has never been a subject that I am particularly interested in.
I don’t want to undermine social anthropologists and paleoanthropologists’ work, but trying to figure out how our society emerged is not what I was expecting when I picked this book up. I wanted it to talk more about the bones, and, yes, it does do this but not to the extent that I was hoping for. The book instead goes in a completely different direction trying to deduce how humans evolved into Homo sapiens, from the point of view of society and culture. And despite the fact that the authors do this with scientific findings from the study of ancient human fossils in mind, this book is more a summary of social and paleoanthropology than paleontology studies hitherto.
I Did Not Like This Book, and doubt that I will ever read it again.
2. HISTORY AND WWII: The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany by William L. Shirer
The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany is a book that chronicles the rise and fall of Nazi Germany from the birth of Adolf Hitler in 1889 to the end of World War II in 1945. First published in 1960, this book is a classic of WWII nonfiction and is still in print. Working as a correspondent for CBS in Berlin during the first year of WWII, Shirer writes about the events in politics and world history that led to the eruption of WWII in 1939 as he lived and experienced them during that fateful year of human history. The author himself, however, states that despite having lived and worked in the Third Reich for the first six years that the Nazis were in power; despite having watched firsthand as Hitler consolidated his power as dictator and led Germany to war, his personal experience of the events did not prompt him to write this book. In fact, he would not have attempted to write it at all, he says, had there not occurred at the end of war an “event unique in history”: the capture of most of the confidential archives of the German government, including the personal diaries of some of the closest men to Hitler; among these were the voluminous diary written in Gabelsberger shorthand of General Franz Halder, who provides concise information for the period between August 14th, 1939, and September 24th, 1942, the diary of Dr. Joseph Goebbels, the Minister of Propaganda and the diary of General Alfred Jodl, Chief of Operations of the High Command of the Armed Forces (OKW).
Nonfiction literature about WWII has been prominent in my Wrap Ups lately, as you probably know, and I have seen this book cited or mentioned in several of them, so I decided to pick it up when I found it at a used book sale close to my house. At 1245 pages in the hardback edition, this book is a behemoth and you need discipline and dedication to finish it. The audiobook is 57 hours, and, yes, some of Brandon Sanderson’s books are just as long, but fiction is not the same as nonfiction, especially a nonfiction book as dense as this one. I think The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon is the only nonfiction book that I have seen thus far that surpasses this one by far at a whooping 127 hours of audio. But anyways.
Did I like this book? Yes. From the beginning, it is possible to find the author’s voice in the text. He is immersed in the telling and you can feel his presence throughout the entirety of the book even though he is the first one to say that his personal experience of the events is not the backbone of what he narrates. That is the captured archives of the Germans, and the historical information that these sources provide him is everywhere in the text. Yet his voice is pervasive throughout the entire text as well, and this gives The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich some degree of subjectivity that other books I have read on the topic thus far do not have, and I liked this. This makes it less scholarly, true, but that in itself isn’t bad. In fact, it was a bit refreshing considering that every other book I have picked up about Hitler and the Third Reich hitherto have been from a third party telling the history of WWII from a detached and objective point of view.
Another thing I liked was how the author is keen to provide a detailed and thorough account of what happened before, during and the end of WWII. He is concise, minute, and scrutinous about every significant event in the history of the Third Reich and doesn’t let anything slip past his fingers. This, many have pointed out, is one of the flaws of the book because it makes it that much longer. And many have said that the book is longer than it should be, but this didn’t bother me. True, there is a part of the book that slows down to a trickle somewhere in the middle, but then it picks up again.
I gave this book and I Liked It and Will Probably Read It Again rating.
3. SCIENCE AND ARCHEOLOGY: Buried: An Alternative History of the First Millennium in Britain by Alice Roberts
I know I’m not the only one, but I have always been interested in reading about death and burial rites. In 2019, for example, I read From Here to Eternity: Traveling the World to find the Good Death where mortician Caitlin Doughty sets out in a journey to discover how other cultures care for their dead. In 2020, I read Stiff: The Curious Lives of Cadavers by Mary Roach and this is the only book about the dead that has made me sick to my stomach (and it probably didn’t help that I was also pregnant then. So do not, and I mean do not, read this book while pregnant; definitely a poor choice on my part); in 2021, I read All That Remains: A Renowned Forensic Scientist on Death, Mortality and Solving Crimes as well as Written in Bone: Hidden Stories in What We Leave Behind by Sue Black, a leading anatomist and forensic anthropologist that helps solve crimes in the UK, similar to what is portrayed in TV shows like CSI and Bones. I also read When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi, a memoir about mortality and meditations on facing death. And I read Being Mortal by Atul Gawande in 2022.
Buried: An Alternative History of the First Millenium in Britain by Alice Roberts is different from all of the above in that it tries to explain what people living in Britain a thousand years ago thought about mortality, death, and loss; what they believed came after. The closest book to it that I have read is probably From Here to Eternity, but this one talks about funeral rites that occur today in different cultures of the world. Alice Robert’s book focuses on rituals performed by people who lived in Britain a thousand years ago, in a period of history on the island about which very little is known nowadays.
If you are interested in things like this, I recommend you pick this book up. Graves have a story to tell. I know that some people are not okay with disturbing the dead and their rest, but I think they are an important source of information to learn more about ourselves, how we once lived, and who we were. I will be picking this author’s other books soon.
4. CLASSIC AND ROMANCE: Far From the Madding Crowd by Thomas Hardy
“Far from the Madding Crowd is a tale of passion, courtship, and the complexities of romantic love and sexual relationships set against the stunning backdrop of rural England. The hero of the story is the loyal and dependable shepherd Gabriel Oak and he is the first suitor of the headstrong, independent and alluring Bathsheba Everdene, who has recently inherited her uncle’s farmer state. And she is determined to manage it successfully, which means navigating all of the challenges, all of the obstacles that come with being a woman in a men’s world. Bathsheba has three suitors: Gabriel Oak, William Boldwood, a wealthy yet reclusive farmer, and the soldier seducer Sargeant Troy.”
Headstrong, independent and alluring…these are the words that someone I know used to describe Bathsheba Everdene, the protagonist of Far from the Madding Crowd. He loves this novel, and when he first described the heroine of this romantic tale set in Victorian England to me, I thought they were strong words to live up to and I didn’t know if she would come through. Did she? She definitely is all those things, yes, but she is also not very smart in making decisions concerning love. Granted, she is young and inexperienced like many other girls her age. And my friend never said she was smart. She is definitely not the only girl to have ever made those terrible decisions, and I think that was kinda Hardy’s point. She is vain, easily impressed and rash despite her independent and headstrong personality but she needs to make those terrible decisions and live through the consequences of those decisions in order to be worthy of the hero. I mean, he’s the archangel Gabriel for crying out loud. This novel has so many biblical allusions it’s crazy, starting with the name of the protagonists themselves.
Did I like this novel? Yes and no. Hardy is a master at describing nature, and this is perhaps the best written pastoral novel I have ever read even though this is the only pastoral novel that I have ever read in English; the others have been in Spanish and the descriptions emanating from those were different simply because they were written in another language, if that makes any sense. Yet, I still think that Hardy is the master here and his description of nature is superb. What I didn’t like all that much was Bathsheba herself. I thought that sending a random Valentine to a complete stranger and asking him to marry you as a joke just because he didn’t even look at you at the market was childish and something that a high schooler would do. Again, she does this because she is vain. She doesn’t want to marry anyone, but she wants every man to look and admire her. I’ve known several women like that. And I have also known several women who get married to a boyfriend who is clearly not right for them but whom they are madly in love (lust) with and think that they cannot live without him. Sadly, this is very realistic and Hardy portrays this well. Like many women, Bathsheba lives to regret her decisions and realizes the consequences that those decisions have had on everyone around her. This is, of course, when she grows up and realizes that she loves Gabriel. And I’m happy that they get married in the end. But I also found Boldwood’s and Troy’s endings rather sad. Would I read this again? I don’t know. Maybe, but for now I would say no.
That’s everything I read this month. Thank you for stopping by.
