A serious but nonetheless entertaining look at the human race’s long-term prospects.
A wide-ranging look at the human past and the possibility of our species’ extinction.
Gee, an author and a senior editor at Nature magazine, begins his book with a survey of human evolution, emphasizing the fact that humanity is the sole survivor of a number of hominid species. Our cousins include the Neanderthals, the Denisovans, and several other species, some of whom our ancestors interbred with before driving them to extinction. Moreover, we have gone through several population bottlenecks, resulting in a lack of genetic diversity—Gee says that a single tribe of chimpanzees has more genetic diversity than the entire human race. This affects, for example, our susceptibility to inherited and epidemic diseases. Another factor in our vulnerability is our dependence on agriculture, which has allowed our population to grow dramatically but also makes us highly dependent on an extremely narrow range of food sources. The Irish potato famine is just one example of what can go wrong. The “Green Revolution” that began in the 1960s increased the productivity of food crops, but at the same time it spurred an even greater surge in the number of people consuming those crops. Recently, however, there has been a drop in fertility—partly a result of more women becoming educated and deciding to opt out of motherhood. Is this a harbinger of a drastic worldwide drop in population? Is extinction—ultimately the fate of all species—closer than we suspect? The author suggests that one way, possibly the only way, to avoid short-term extinction is for humanity to expand beyond the single planet it has so far called home. Gee takes a surprisingly lighthearted approach, with frequent quips and allusions to pop culture. Given the seriousness of the subject, this makes for a more enjoyable read than one might expect.
A serious but nonetheless entertaining look at the human race’s long-term prospects.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781250325587
Page Count: 288
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Dec. 28, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorkerstaff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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