Anthropologist Marjorie Shostak met Nisa in 1971 at the tail-end of a 20-month field stay in Botswana’s Kalahari Desert. Shostak knew a little about the !Kung prior to her journey, but felt that a large portion of their culture remained unknown. How did they feel about themselves, their childhoods, their parents? Did spouses love one…
Tag: history
Review: The Engagements
In 1947 a young advertising copywriter named Frances Gerety changed the world with a single tagline: “A Diamond is Forever.” It kicked into gear a national obsession with diamonds, weddings, and idealized marriages from which we’ve yet to recover. “A rich, layered, exhilarating novel spanning nearly a hundred years, The Engagements captures four wholly unique…
Review: Here, There Be Dragons
The opening act of Here, There Be Dragons is the swift and silent murder of a professor. That murder brings together three strangers — John, Jack, and Charles — and sets in motion an adventure that spans further than any of them could have dreamed. These three are now the caretakers of the Imaginarium Geographica,…
Review: The Impeachment of Abraham Lincoln
Two years after surviving an assassination attempt by John Wilkes Booth, President Abraham Lincoln is on the brink of impeachment; his enemies accuse him of overstepping his authority during and after the Civil War, and the case is not looking good. Enter Abigail Canner, the newest clerk at Dennard & McShane, the law firm responsible…
Review: Books: A Living History
I’ve read lots of books in my lifetime (my guess is somewhere around eleventy-million), but I don’t know much about books themselves: who first created them, how their mode of creation and distribution has changed, and how people think about them. Fortunately there are men like Martyn Lyons who think to catalogue these things. His…