Normally, books about evolution by people who aren't evolutionary biologists, are lacking some rigor. All kinds of assumptions are made, and many assumptions, such as inheritance, are ignored. This one was actually pretty good- the explanations for diseases are sensible hypotheses and are well backed up by data.
An interesting book about disease. I had never really thought about disease perhaps as a beneficial and therefore selected for traits.

Dull, dull, dull. I checked out this book because I love the stories of ancient cultures, but this book had surprisingly few. I was disappointed at the end- the "2 extra myths" for the audioversion were what I had hoped the entire book would be- well told stories of ancient cultures.
Instead, the book was full of history and analysis, but only the broadest outlines of the stories told by each culture. This made it boring and uninformative of the things I had wanted to learn.

I've never really known much about the Bushman hunter-gatherers of Africa, although it's quite interesting to me, especially in the sense that hunger-gatherers are fundamentally different from agricultural cultures (as in Ishmael). This account was very interesting, since she first visited the Bushman as a teenager in the early '50's, before they had much contact with western cultures.
What I felt like was missing was a description of how hard that kind of life must be. Not that it's idealized here, but I have to think they're living on a very marginal edge.
The clicks in the language amaze me and made me glad I did the audioversion of this book.

Beginning in 1948 at age nineteen, and on up to the present, Elizabeth Marshall Thomas has observed the Bushmen of the Kalahari Desert of southern Africa. Her first expeditions started with her father, Laurence Marshall, and her mother, Lorna Marshall. Lorna Marshall, former ballerina and English teacher at Mount Holyoke College. The Marshalls wanted to study the Bushmen since the Kalahari Desert was then a place where humans still existed in a pristine environment. The Bushmen, or “First People” as they called themselves, did not even own dogs, so ancient was their culture. Although she was not a trained anthropologist, Lorna Marshall’s work on Bushman culture later brought her acclaim among academic anthropologists.

“First People” is an apt name. Thomas takes us back to the “Old Way,” the way we followed as we sprang from the forests and savannahs of Africa. The “Old Way” served humans well for fifteen hundred centuries. Their story puts flesh on the current enthusiasm for DNA genographic testing, which shows that most people now alive descended from a common female ancestor in Africa. Using the term “we” and “us,” she tells us how we learned to hunt big-game animals, how we first used fire, how we found water and stored it in ostrich eggs stoppered with grass plugs, how we worked together in community, how we contained violence and lived in relative peace. In twenty chapters, we learn all these things and more. We learn about the natural world, too. We learn about elands and how they run. We learn indigenous botanical principles long ignored by the West, wisdom now recognized as valid. We learn many things long forgotten and which define us as human.

As Thomas says, “Today, nobody lives in the Old Way,” and so she wrote The Old Way to preserve as much knowledge of the “Old Way” as possible.

Her book has the power to engross the reader in the same way that watching a well-directed film does. If we take from our “viewing” any of the traits that made the “Old Way” serve humankind for so long, that would be a good thing.

This book made me think about the way I eat, probably more than any other book. I think I should reread it every couple of years.
A better book about food in America than any other I've read. He's non-judgmental, just documenting, and it's great.

Pollan makes a seemingly dull topic come to life and changes the way I have come to view my food. Bravo!

This guy's books just crack me up. I could read his books forever.

As an athlete would do a lap of honour, Bryson embarks on a farewell round trip of Britain, the island that had been his home for the last 20 years. His decision to repatriate was prompted by a Gallup poll that said 3.7 million Americans believed that they had been abducted by Aliens. Obviously his country needed him.

I guess the main idea is that people used to have these giant ecstatic rituals that bond people together and made everybody happy. In our staid first-world culture, these rituals were once common but became looked down upon as primitive.
While historically interesting and food for thought, I found it to be so unscientific, especially the evolution parts, that it was a bit obnoxious. Story-telling is fine, but without data it remains a story.
I also found the judgments about our modern culture to be a bit old and trite. How can she say that we don't have common ecstatic rituals and not really discuss burning man?

I can't handle depressing, emotionally disturbing books like this. There was not one ounce of hope in this book. Why must Oprah pick the angiest, saddest books in the world?

A wonderfully powerful novel. A great read despite the Oprah's
Book Club emblem blemishing the front cover.

This book was painful. Toni Morrison's opening piece, it's masterfully done, despite her contradictions in the afterword. The story describes Pecola Breedlove, a young black girl who prays daily that God will make her beautiful. Her dark black skin is ridiculed and the poverty in which she and her parents live shapes her life.

There are some really painful, hard to read parts of this story, but it is so worth it.