C. Harris

Interesting perspective on ancient and modern humans

Revisado: 06-20-24

This book is thought provoking and spawned numerous conversations both in support of and in denial of its ideas. At times bleak, the retrospective on Homo sapiens is easy to grasp yet it never feels patronizing.

Overall, this book is well worth the hype

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Misleading Title 3.5 stars rounded up

Revisado: 03-22-23

This was very accessible and often humorous. Occasionally I learned something. The narration is great and the wry humor of the author is well portrayed.

My complaint is that this is t a short history of everything. Rather, it is a short history of science disciplines and the scientists that popularized them. The book has quite a lot of scientist drama; backstabbing, smart people doing stupid things, and quirky excesses.

The affairs of scientists isn’t particularly germane to their disciplines and I would rather have had more science and and less soap opera.

All that said, the author does a great job breaking down very complex scientific theories and making them understandable by the lay listener. I understand DNA, it’s structure, and role better.

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"The work of Death" - a compelling theme

Revisado: 09-15-21

The central theme of this book is "The work of death". It analyzes how death and dying worked in Civil War-era society, how it transformed Judeo-Christian, mostly fundamentalist, men when they killed, and how industry and the service sector had to transform to handle the disposition of the remains of so many men who died far from home. I understood, in a statistical sense, the number of wounded and dead at Fredericksburg, Antietam, Gettysburg, but I never thought about how a soldier's remains were identified and how their family was notified. We take "dog tags", National Cemeteries, and War Department notification for granted, but these things were created during and after the Civil War.

The narrator is sometimes a bit dramatic and if the subject matter were more dryly historical, it may have been more off-putting. However, her drama, in the face of the often ghastly imagery of Civil War dead, kind of worked.

My main complaint is that the book is often repetitive. Some themes, like that of The Good Death, are revisited repeatedly; more than is necessary to illustrate the author's point.

All-in-all, this is a compelling book. I heard about it while listening to an equally compelling podcast called Death, et seq which deals with the disposition of the dead and the law. It mentioned the book in the context of funereal and burial practices, including embalming, that originated during the Civil war era.

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Superb Big Picture of the Era

Revisado: 09-15-21

The appeal of this narrative is that it paints a cohesive picture of the United States in the preceding decades before the war that helps to explain its causes. Before this, the war, in my limited knowledge, started with Dredd Scott and Harper's Ferry. Now I understand the tension created by the Missouri Compromise that led to the Pottawatomie Massacre that led to the Lawrence Massacre. The Mexican-American war the role of Manifest Destiny in the expansion or curtailment of slavery is made clear. I did not understand the significance of the Whig party and its relationship to the Republican Party.

If you're interested in the history of the time but have American primary and secondary school knowledge, this is a great book. There is enough storytelling to bring characters like Grant, Jackson, Johnston, McClellan, and Sherman alive. Enough battle facts to satisfy you if you aren't studying military tactics. And enough quotes and excerpts from letters and diary entries to personalize those affected by the war, North and South.

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