New Publications
Darwin’s Universe: Evolution from A to Z, by Richard Milner (488 pages, July 2009), is not so much an encyclopedia of physical anthropology in the mode of the Garland Encyclopedia of Human Evolution and Prehistory (1999) or the Cambridge Encyclopedia of Human Evolution (1994). However, in this 150th anniversary year of The Origin of Species, anthropologist Milner has compiled an entertaining mix of topical essays that illustrate how the concept of evolution has left its mark on science and the humanities, along with biographical entries that describe both famous and not-so-famous men and women (and chimpanzees) who have contributed to or argued against evolutionary theory. Milner’s writing style is just as engaging when he discusses genetic variability or origin myths as when he has fun with caveman movies or Richard Owen’s famous 1853 dinner inside an iguanodon statue. $39.95. University of California. 978-0-520-24376-7.
Another commentary on evolution is offered in Stephen Jay Gould and the Politics of Evolution, by David F. Prindle (249 pages, May 2009), which argues that Gould’s writings had a political as well as a scientific context. For example, his concept of punctuated equilibrium in evolution can be construed, when applied to history, as a Marxist interpretation of progress jump-started by upheavals. Also, after many long battles with creationists, Gould decided on a political truce in 1999 when he wrote in Rocks of Ages that science and religion were two “non-overlapping magisteria” or domains, one dealing in facts and the other in values. $26.98. Prometheus. 978-1-59102-718-8.
Harry Truman’s Excellent Adventure, by Matthew Algeo (262 pages, May 2009), documents the extraordinary road trip that ex-President Truman and his wife Bess took for 19 days in the summer of 1953—unaccompanied by Secret Service agents or aides—in his brand-new Chrysler New Yorker from their home in Independence, Missouri, to the East Coast and back again. They stayed in motels or with friends, ate in diners along the way, dropped in for lunch with Senators John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, took in some Broadway shows, and waved at ordinary Americans who recognized him. Algeo retraced Truman’s route in stages from 2006 to 2008. Here he comments on the Trumans’ trip and adds insights from his own to tell the “story of life in America in 1953, a time of unbridled optimism and unmitigated Cold War fear.” $24.95. Chicago Review. 978-1-55652-777-7.
Another more exotic travel book is Invisible China: A Journey Through Ethnic Borderlands, by Colin Legerton and Jacob Rawson (244 pages, May 2009), who traveled 14,000 miles by bus and train through the hinterlands of China to visit minority peoples—Mongolians, Vietnamese, Naxi, Tibetans, Koreans, Dongxiang, Uyghurs, and Tajiks—and attempt to understand how they manage to retain their art and culture in a country that hides rather than celebrates its ethnic diversity. $24.95. Chicago Review. 978-1-55652-814-9.
The Marvelous Hairy Girls, by Merry Wiesner-Hanks (248 pages, June 2009), looks at the lives of the sisters Maddalena, Francesca, and Antonietta Gonzales, whose faces were completely covered in thick hair due to a condition, inherited from their father Petrus, that is known today as congenital hypertrichosis. Petrus was probably taken as a Guanche slave in the Canary Islands and was brought in 1547 to the French court, where he was educated but treated as a curiosity. He married a French woman who bore him the three hairy daughters as well as one non-hairy and two hairy sons, all of them winding up in the court of the Duke of Parma around 1590. Wiesner-Hanks uses the Gonzales family as a focal point for examining 16th-century stories of human oddities and wild folk; religious and ethnic imposture; attitudes towards women, marriage, and childbirth; Catholic and Protestant concepts of deformity and human/animal distinctions; contemporary medical and scientific speculation; and the role of curiosity collectors, especially the Italian Ulisse Aldrovandi, whose Monstrorum historia contains the most complete description of the Gonzales sisters. $30.00. Yale University. 978-0-300-12733-1.
Stalin’s Terror of 1937–1938: Political Genocide in the USSR, by Vadim Z. Rogovin (513 pages, July 2009), is a sequel to the late Trotskyist scholar Rogovin’s 1937: Stalin’s Year of Terror (1998) and analyzes events from June 1937 to the end of 1938. Rogovin explains the violence of the Great Purge as more than a massive crushing of resistance to collectivization; Stalin also intended to eradicate all traces of at least two generations of old Bolsheviks who had participated in the October Revolution in 1917 and who, along with Leon Trotsky, represented a threat to his regime. Complex as only Soviet politics can be and unabashedly Marxist, but filled with intriguing details and a fair number of photos showing the major participants. It certainly meshes with Victor Serge’s insights in his From Lenin to Stalin (1937). $60.00. Mehring Books. 978-1-893638-08-2.
Steel Helmet and Mortarboard: An Academic in Uncle Sam’s Army, by Francis H. Heller (190 pages, April 2009), is a memoir of the author’s combat experiences in the Pacific theater during World War II. Heller was serving in the Austrian army when Hitler annexed the country in 1938, but he managed to escape to the United States, where he got a law degree at the University of Virginia shortly before he was drafted. He saw action in New Guinea and the Philippines, was stationed in occupied Japan, and served stateside during the Korean War before Harry Truman asked him to help write his memoirs. He has been on the University of Kansas law faculty since 1948. $24.95. University of Missouri. 978-0-8262-1838-4.
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