John’s Books
This will in no way, shape or form be an exhaustive list. I read a lot and read about many different subjects. Here, mainly, I will be listing books relevant to survival, survival psychology, survival archaeology,” to paleoanthropology, archaeology, and occasionally other topics. Unless I encounter something egregiously awful with potential to do actual harm, I plan to keep this positive. If something is just "ridiculous nonsense," then I may just tag it as such and move on.
I will update this list when the mood strikes me and in chronological order (most-recently-read works first).
August 11, 2023
Holliday, T. W. 2023. Cro-Magnon: The Story of the Last Ice Age People of Europe. New York: Columbia University Press.
(Much of this review below is a review I posted on Amazon.)
Cro-Magnon summarizes what scientists think we know about the humans (Homo sapiens) who lived in Europe near the end of the Pleistocene Ice Age, ca. 12,000-45,000 years ago. The book covers these “Cro-Magnons” ancestral origins in Africa, debates about their interactions with indigenous Eurasian Neanderthals, the nature of “modern” human behavior, Ice Age subsistence, and Cro-Magnon artworks. Trenton Holliday is one of the foremost experts on the biological anthropology of Cro-Magnons, and his book does an excellent job of summarizing the current state of our knowledge. Inter-dispersed throughout the book (usually at the start of chapters) are little vignettes. A few are fictional, set among Cro-Magnons, others recall Holliday’s experiences investigating Cro-Magnon fossils and working at archaeological excavation sites. These liven up the text and will give readers a peek “behind the scenes” at paleoanthropological research
There are several audiences for this book.
1. If you are a professional anthropologist/archaeologist and do NOT work on later Pleistocene archaeology in Europe (e.g., this reviewer), then this is good place to start and to get up-to-speed.
2. If you are teaching a class on Pleistocene/Paleolithic archaeology, this could be a good coursebook (not necessarily the main textbook, but one for the part of the class that deals with Cro-Magnons).
3. If you are not a professional anthropologist but interested in human origins and evolution, the book will be a fun read, but it may require you to do a little background reading first, such as a very basic introduction to archaeology and/or human evolution.
4. If you are a molecular anthropologist working on fossil DNA and/or proteomics from Later Pleistocene Eurasian sites, then you need to read this book before you publish your findings. All too often, when hard-won DNA and proteomic evidence gets published, it does so using the archaeology and paleontology as “window-dressing.” Mistakes occur and the larger enterprise of human origins research suffers.
This text in red below does not appear in the Amazon review I posted. On reflection, my remarks about these NASTIES (named stone tool industries) will probably not much influence others than those of us who study Pleistocene stone tools.
Older books on this topic, Cro-Magnon archaeology, especially ones archaeologists have written for their colleagues, get bogged down in arcane debates (ones Holliday mercifully avoids) about what to call specific sorts of stone tools and groupings of stone tools that share similar sets of artifacts, and occur close to one another in time and space. Archaeologists call these artifact groupings “industries,” and give them names, like Aurignacian, Gravettian, Solutrean, Magdalenian, and so on. The underlying assumption is that industries are kind of “stand-ins” for groups of people with similar ideas about how to make stone tools and other matters. Still, this is an assumption, one about which one can find abundant counter-examples in living and recent human behavior, and moreover an assumption that that is impossible to prove right or wrong (unless one has a time machine). Cro-Magnon uses these named industries in the text, but without defining them. This is not a big problem, for one can look them up online with a couple of keystrokes, but a paragraph cautioning readers that “industries do not necessarily equal specific groups of people” might have been warranted.
Some quibbles: A section discussing height estimates based on human fossils might have profited from a table or a chart summarizing the data. The illustrations are clear and improve the overall quality of the work, but plate of drawings showing some of the larger mammals mentioned in the text might have been valuable for readers unfamiliar with Palearctic fauna.
I would have liked to have seen the chapter on the environment of Europe during Cro-Magnon’s time there a little earlier on in the book, but it works just fine where it is.
Cro-Magnon is a work that will be one’s first go-to book about Ice Age humans for quite some time to come. It is an essential purchase for archaeologists and others researching Pleistocene human evolution and for others interested in evolution more generally.
July 22, 2023
Clifford, E., and P. Bahn. 2022. Everyday Life in the Ice Age: A New Study of Our Ancestors. Oxford, UK: Archaeopress.
ISBN-13 : 978-1803272580
This book presents evidence of how humans lived in Europe between 12,000-45,000 years ago. It is a very different book from more common accounts of this period (the “Upper Paleolithic”) in that it avoids getting entangled in archaeologists’ debates about stone tools. lithic industries and cultures. Instead, it gets right to the heart of the matter, how people lived, reproduced, and survived. Well-written, the text is clear and free of errors. Bahn enjoys a (well-deserved) reputation as an expert on Upper Paleolithic artworks. Clifford is an evolutionary psychologist. The two bring much to the table, and the result is a very different sort of book about Ice Age humans. I think the book will be of interest to college professors as an aid to research. I can envision it being used as a coursebook for upper-level classes in European prehistory.
This being said, the book’s title over-promises. Humans moved into Europe around 45,000 year ago. They evolved and live in Africa and southern Asia since 300,000 years ago. These Ancestral Africans and First Asians were no less “Ice Age people” than Upper Paleolithic Europeans, they just (sensibly) avoided trying to live and survive in an icy subcontinent during some of the coldest condition in recent Earth history. Why does this matter? Prehistoric archaeology began in Europe during the 19th Century. To this day, far more Pleistocene-age archaeological research takes place in Europe than elsewhere. As a result, archaeologists and others often project things we think we know about Later Pleistocene European humans to the rest of the world. This may be a mistake. For example, evidence from Southeastern Asia and Australasia now shows humans undertook long-distance oceanic voyages before 65,000 years ago. European humans, in contrast, do not appear to have settled large Mediterranean islands (Sicily, Corsica, Sardinia, Crete, Cyprus) until less than 12,000 years ago. European Ice Age humans apparently domesticated wolves some time between 11,000-30,000 years ago. African and Asian evidence for domesticated dogs/wolves dates to less than 6000 years ago. Bottom line: Europe has a rich archaeological record for Ice Age human adaptations, but that record need to be put into context. Namely, it needs to be contrasted with evidence for earlier European hominin adaptations (i.e., Neanderthals, Denisovans, Homo heidelbergensis, etc.) and with evidence for what ancestral Africans and Asians were doing around the same time.
This was one of the most interesting archaeology books I have read in the last several years. It does require some prior knowledge about archaeology. So, if you are thinking about buying and reading it, you might benefit from reading one or another of Bahn’s general introductory works about archaeology. They are also very good.
July 17, 2023
Goodell, Jeff (2023) The Heat Will Kill You First: Life and Death on a Scorched Planet. New York: Little, Brown and Company.
ISBN-13 : 978-0316497572
Category: Survival psychology
This book discusses heat and its effects, on our bodies, on our society, and on the biosphere. It's interesting and readable, alarming without being alarmist. Clearly, researching how humans coped with heat in the past needs to inform us about strategies for coping with heat in the future. I want to read his other book about sea level rise (The Water Will Come), but I need to read something funny first.
Bellwood, Peter(20220 The Five-Million-Year Odyssey: The Human Journey from Ape to Agriculture. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press
ISBN-13 : 978-0691197579
This book is an excellent overview of world prehistory. It's pitched at an educated non-specialist audience, so perhaps college students in an archaeology/prehistory class, or readers who took such classes and retain an interest in the subject. Scholars in archaeology-adjacent fields such as molecular anthropologists and biological anthropologists will probably find this book a fast route to get "up to speed" in areas where their interests intersect with archaeology. Readers unfamiliar with the nuts and bolts of archaeology will not be lost, for Bellwood writes well and clearly. For the later phases of prehistory, the book focuses on connections between the archaeological and linguistic evidence. There are not a lot of illustrations (which probably kept the cost manageable -besides one can look such things up with a mouse click or two), but the tables and maps are outstanding. Checking the parts of the book in which I have expertise, I found no errors and the facts up-to-date as of 2022. (From a review I posted on Amazon.)
Almecija, Sergio (2023) Humans: Perspectives on Our Evolution from World Experts. New York: Columbia University Press.
ISBN-13 : 978-0231201216
Category: Paleoanthropology
This book’s editor asked 100 scholars to answer questions about themselves and about human evolution. (Full disclosure, I am one of the persons surveyed.) The questions ranged from “how did you get started,” to “what’s a game-changer” to more speculative ones about what it all means and about humanity’s future. The book is a remarkable snapshot of human origins research in the late 20th-early 21st Centuries. Historians of anthropology will be mining this work for decades to come.
Takeaways
#1 You will probably not want to read Humans continuously. It is a long work, and the quality of the answers varies. After receiving my copy, and over the next few weeks, I opened the book up at random, read one or two entries, made a pencil note that I have done so, and moved on to do something else.
#2 Humans could find great use as a springboard for classroom discussions. Assign a reading by one or more of the experts and also their entries in the book. Better yet, ask one or another of the respondents to visit on Zoom and have your students ask more questions.
#3: Anybody contemplating a career in paleoanthropology should read this book. More to the point, younger scholars should try their hand at answering these questions and then review their responses at intervals (every 10 years or so). These are the sorts of “big questions” my colleagues and I ask of prospective graduate students and colleagues.
(From a review I posted on Amazon.)
May 29, 2023
Keller, Julia (2023) Quitting: A Life Strategy: The Myth of Perseverance―and How the New Science of Giving Up Can Set You Free. New York: Hachette (Balance).
ISBN-13 : 978-1538722343
Category: survival psychology.
Survival psychology and philosophy derived from emphasizes grit, perseverance, and “never quitting.” But, sometimes quitting is the only rational choice. Not, quitting trying to survive or to save someone else, of course, but quitting the specific strategy one is using towards these goals. So, if following one trail isn’t getting you closer to other people, try a different one. I don’t read “self-help” books very often, so this warning might be superfluous, but -DO NOT just read this book and then make major life choices. But if you are thinking about making major changes, this may be a book, among others, that you should read.
People in general and Americans in particular disdain quitting. We use “quitter” as an epithet, equating it with failure and character flaw. This thought-provoking work traces the origin of the opprobrium around “quitter” to 19th century works by a Samuel Smalls (e.g., 1859 Self-Help: With Illustrations of Character and Conduct). Ostensibly a self-help for the ambitious then-rising mercantile middle classes, Smalls wrote and others heavily promoted this work at a time when factory owners struggled to keep their workers from quitting. Smalls might not have intended it as such, but the “quitter = loser” equation is pro-industrial propaganda. (Remember, this was around the same time and in exactly the same country (Britain) where Karl Marx was composing his Capital.) This propaganda persists to this day. Pro-business factions use the term, “quiet quitting,” for what workers see as “doing just what you pay us to do.”
The book makes many good points about quitting -habits, relationships, employment, and so on. It deploys some helpful advice about how to overcome peer- and societal pressures against quitting. But, it’s supporting arguments are mainly anecdotes and testimonials. (If you are a “show me the numbers” sociologist, or psychologist this is not a work for you.) For the most part, these testimonials come from the world of white- and pink-collar work, rather than from blue-collar workers or the unemployed for whom, sometimes, quitting simply isn’t possible without enormous financial of familial hardships. If you work in a Rust Belt city and all your family and support networks are local, then throwing in the towel and “lighting out for the territories” might not be the best choice. Nearly all the testimony comes from people whose quitting something led to a better life. Sometimes quitting can be the wrong decision -especially if one has no “Plan B,” or Plan C.
The book is well written, well-edited, and a quick read. It gets somewhat repetitive in places, and one thinks the “white flag moments” an ill-considered title, given its connotations -unconditional surrender. Quitting, in the sense this work uses it isn’t unconditional surrender, but rather a “strategic retreat.”
Jul 21, 2022
Quiñonez, J. P. 2022. Thrive: Long-Term Wilderness Survival Guide. Winnepeg, Manitoba, Canada: Boreal Press. ISBN-13 : 978-1777283803
Category: Survival/Survival archaeology.
(Note: This review is verbatim one I posted on Amazon, forgot about, then remembered in May 2023.)
An information-packed introduction to bushcraft and wilderness survival. I am a professional archaeologist. For a research project, I have been reading a lot about wilderness survival and bushcraft. This book is one of the best introductory-level such works. The author says that it is not for beginners, and fair enough, some of the contents are a bit advanced, but a fair amount of it (knots, for example) are things beginners need to know and that people with advanced skills probably already know well. Where this work parts company with a lot of the other survival works is that the author focuses on sustainable survival strategies rather than just what one needs to do in a (typical) 72 hour emergency. If this is why you are considering purchasing the book, then consider augmenting it with a geographically-appropriate book about wild plant foods. These vary widely, and while Mr. Quiñonez covers a few common such foods, there are many, many more out there pretty much everywhere.
The text is a bit "notional" in places -that is, it tells what to do without showing enough detail about how to do it. On the other hand, it is sufficiently-well illustrated that one gets the gist, and the book provides references to more detailed works. This, in and of itself, sets Thrive apart from a lot of other "survival" books.
So, who should buy/read this? If you are new to bushcraft/survival, then definitely, but take it slow. This book is absolutely packed with information. If you are a parent and you want to expose your kids (teenagers and older, or kids in scouting) to this subject, then yes. (Pair it with Cody Lundin's 98.6 book on thermoregulation.) If you are a college student or researcher with little no bushcraft experience and preparing to go on a field expedition, then this is a good book to bring along, together with one of the various "Where there is no doctor" books. (Now that my research project is done, I have been giving many of the books I purchased for it away to my students. Not this one. This is a "keeper."