Lydia PyneRecensioni

I have actually read about all these skeletons on other books. Much better books. This is useful if you know nothing about these skeletons but otherwise repetitive.

Way behind on my reviews, gotta catch up before school starts! Prepare for short and choppy...

Okay, this one was a mixed bag. The content completely carried the book, so it's a good thing this was nonfiction instead of fiction. I've been fascinated by early homonids since my biological anthropology class back in freshman year of college (my ideal major would have been English-History-Anthropology-Psychology with minors in Creative Writing and Women's studies, but alas, there is only so much time in the day). I'd actually learned about all but the last of the described skeletons before, though of course not in the detail that Pyne goes into here. If anything, I may have wanted more detail: How could scientists know from just a few bones of a single example of a different species that homonid was male or female? How can they tell that they're different species with only partial skeletons? How do scientists decide what makes a new species (except in the obvious case of homo floresiensis)? How did they preserve the spongy, not-actually-fossilized homo floresiensis bones? I would have liked to know more about the frequently-mentioned Java Man, but that would have ruined the title's alliteration and the book's symmetry.

What's fascinating about this book, though, is that these questions aren't neglected by negligence but by choice. It's remarkable that this book isn't just about human evolution but, in fact, about how modern homo sapiens react to these skeletons: it's not just the scientific story, but the story of the media, the cultural impact. This actually would have made the book more appealing to me up front, since I'm very interested in how humans relate to each other and to the world around them. I would have made this much more obvious up front by slipping another word into the subtitle: "The Cultural Evolution of the World's Most Famous Human Fossils." But that might be the scholarly side of my publishing experience coming through--I can't exactly say that I know better than a trade editor about what titles catch attention. Probably that subtitle sounds too academic and stuffy for the educated, non-specialist reader.

I can definitely tell the writer has potential, but there should have been a lot more editing in this. Granted, I was reading an ARC, so I have no idea how far ahead of the pub date this particular review copy was printed--it's quite possible it did get a lot more editorial help after this point. Some points:

> In the space of three pages, three paragraphs begin, "Today, the Old Man..."
> Three paragraphs are exactly repeated--I seriously hope this is something that was caught before the book went to print!
> I could never figure out why some words were defined but not others. We're told that a scapula is "part of the shoulder" but we don't get a definition of paleoanthropology. I would guess that readers, even if they know what the separate parts mean, might want to know before diving into the text how, exactly, we can extrapolate about human species from fossilized bones. Dinosaurs are guesses enough, and it seems like we have far more of them than we have homonids. (Hey, that would have been a useful factoid to include! But I'm not docking points for that).
> Puns, oh my heck. Here and there they're fun, but for some reason they were almost exclusively concentrated in a single chapter and involved repeated use of the phrase, "no bones about it." Ha flipping ha. You can't use that more than about twice without it becoming a groaner.

Okay, this is picky, but Pyne hinted at a potentially fascinating point in the chapter on homo floresiensis before dropping it like a hot potato: the contemporary local legends of the ebu gogo, small human-like creatures that live in the forest (205). This is a ready-made opening for an interesting sentence or two here about the possibility of overlap between two species of homonid and the length of cultural memory, but Pyne doesn't follow it up. To be clear, the only reason I'm complaining about this is because I did a paper on it in college and because I'm fascinated by the ways some fairy tales are shaped by reality.

Okay, on to quotes--not as many as usual, for which you're probably thankful.

Quote Roundup

74) I just love that the British Museum is saving satire, poetry, and cartoons about Piltdown Man along with the bones. This is exactly the kind of archival work I fantasize about.

97) I must admit, I found it interesting how little Pyne mentioned religious opponents of human evolution. Here's one page where it is addressed. This was also the page where I really understood that this wasn't just a story about the skeletons, but public investment in their discovery and interpretation.

220) Here's where there was an opportunity to discuss how scientists determine sexual dimorphism versus individual variation.

222) I felt a little warm inside knowing that as far back as the 1920s/30s, a male archaeologist tried to nickname a fossil "Nelly" to combat what he saw as explicit sexism by referring to particular hominin discoveries as "man."

Wow, almost none of my quotes were actually quotes. Don't think that's ever happened before...

Overall, I recommend the book for its fascinating content, but not for structural or stylistic execution. But this recommendation is made with the caveat that I have no idea how close to final this ARC draft was when it was printed. And I'm a grumpy fan of continuous narrative who unfairly doesn't cut nonfiction writers a little slack.

I read nonfiction to expand my view of the world. I read about things I'm interested in, and I read about things I know nothing about so that I can find new things to become interested in. When I read nonfiction, I implicitly trust in the author. I have to. I trust that the author has done a lot of research and has some level of expertise in their work. I trust that editors have looked over the work and combed through for errors. However I also understand that some things are always going to have some hanging chads that make it through the publication process.

While this book was interesting and informative, I found too many hanging chads for my like. The irony being that this book's credibility started to falter in my eyes.

In my grad student life, I spent many many hours in clean rooms, so I am familiar with a lot of technology such as CVD, and I worked extensively with silicon both doing some CMOS processing but later a lot of e-beam lithography on quartz substrates. So let me say that it was jarring for me to read the author refer to silicon dioxide (glass) as "silicone", which is actually a polymer that, while related to silicon and SiO2, is nowhere near actually the same thing. But that's an issue that many non-scientific people struggle with so I was willing to let it go.

Then I got to the section about the Mayan Codices. I was fascinated! I wanted to see pictures. I looked at the glossy section inside the book and saw a photo labeled that it was of the Grolier Codex, so I decided to do more searching online. I looked at the Wikipedia page for the Maya codices and saw that same exact picture -- labeled as the Madrid Codex. Doing a lot more searching led me to a stock photo website showing the Madrid Codex incorrectly labeled as the Grolier Codex.

How could the author take that stock photo and include it in a book without doing more research? Without asking why a photo about a codex that's worn down with water damage shows a codex with no water damage? Why didn't the author just look at Wikipedia, the low-hanging fruit of fact-checking?

OK, so I'm disappointed. There were typos and logical inconsistencies. (The author mentioned a cave that was discovered in 1985, after a cave that was discovered in 1991 (!?) - when they meant to say that the cave was only made public after a cave that was discovered in 1991.) Quotes that never closed out. Too many hanging chads that pile on and make this book go through a heavier filter as I continue to read.

As a collection of essays, this book is interesting. Thought-provoking even. But as a nonfiction book leading to educate, I would have hoped for a lot more research and editing than what I was presented with.

4.5 I forget how I stumbled upon this clever miniseries of books from Bloomsbury Press called ObjectLessons, but I'm glad I did. It is like the Tedtalk of nouns in book form. Titles include: Glass, Tree, Hotel, Bread, Silence and many intriguing more. This particular edition is about bookshelves and examines their cultural significance, their history, some of their unique features and unknown trivia. Subcategories within this include a medieval chained library (Hereford, England), the Donkey Mobile Library in Ethiopia, the Franklin naval expedition to the Arctic in 1845 whose ships were outfitted with a total of 2,900 books for the use of the voyage, futuristic depictions of bookshelves (anachronistic) and the symbiotic relationship of NY Public Library's architecture its and iron shelving. One key lesson throughout is that form follows function. "Since form and function of a text determines how and where it is curated, every text is store on its shelf and encountered and read in ways that are consistent with its respective technology, history, and cultural symbolism. Text and shelf shape each other." (5) and "Social expectations and cultural needs shape how booksleves move from place to place or how books move from shelf to shelf...bookshelves exist as a series of relationships." and "Bookshelves act as the mediating object between a person and a book...." (52) and "The bookshelf leads a life of a curious cultural sign; it is a physical, tangible thing -- a combination of technology and craft -- as well as a symbol of one's worldview." (68) The the knowledge is a little esoteric, the well-written reflection, research and philosophical premise makes this a delight. Two parting quotes that anchor the beginning: "A room without books is a body without a soul" (Cicero) and the ending: "Books speak of other books and every story tells a story that has already been told." (Umberto Eco)

How do we decide what’s real? Sometimes it’s about full disclosure of the conditions of production, as when museums make blue whale models and reconstruct parts—even significant parts—of the animal for display. Other times that’s not quite enough, as when a present-day artist uses Warhol’s acetates to create a new set of prints from the negatives by employing the same methods (inks, stretcher bars, canvas, etc.) that Warhol used to create his “originals.” The artist called the project a ‘forced collaboration’ and pointed out that Warhol himself said “ I want other people to make my paintings.” Meanwhile, the Andy Warhol Foundation and the representatives of Basquiat, Roy Lichtenstein, Keith Haring and Jackson Pollock have all dissolved their authentication boards to minimize hassle and legal risk, “rather than deal with the legal repercussions of mistakenly authenticating some work of art that later proves to be fraudulent,” and “scholarly conferences that focus on the authenticity of an artist’ s work have been cancelled, as even the merest whisper of doubt about a painting could have ramifications for its value.” In this vein, the book explores various types of historical authenticity, not just in paintings but in “fossils,” synthetic diamonds, synthetic flavors, nature films, blue whale models, and replicas of ancient art where the art itself is too physically sensitive to be exposed to tourists.

Although the book argues that some forgeries gain value with time as artifacts of their own time of production—the Spanish Forger is the prime example—that didn’t particularly convince me; the value seemed to come from being sufficiently old to tell us something about the artistic preferences of the people around at the time of creation, which is fine but not super tightly connected to the fact of being a forgery (except insofar as that fake provenance led people to notice and preserve that particular work). More convincingly to me, the book tracks shifting ideas around synthetic diamonds, which are both physically like natural diamonds and highly unlike them in conditions of production, which initially made synthetic diamonds less appealing but may now make them more so to people worried about conflict diamonds. (Although the book characterizes synthetic diamonds as physically “identical” to mined diamonds, it also says that De Beers developed technologies that could often distinguish them by looking for “an optical absorption line, found in the majority of natural diamonds but not in laboratory ones.” I would have liked more about that—first, is it a distinction without a difference? Second, that “majority” is really interesting in context: should we think of those natural diamonds without absorption lines as less “real”?)

I wasn’t as clear about the point of the chapter on synthetic flavors. You may have seen the tidbit that artificial banana flavor tastes so distinct from today’s bananas because it was based on the extinct Gros Michel banana, but there’s been a lot of effort to create synthetic flavors that would qualify as “better” than the original—super-strawberry and the like. But the book doesn’t explain much about what “better” would mean here, and the supposed reversal of valuation doesn’t seem complete without an attempt to create flavors that don’t actually have a natural referent. We haven’t seen much in the way of attempts to create “unicorn flavor,” for example, even if Jelly Belly experiments with gross flavors. Another useful factoid: telling people they were eating free-range, organic meats made the meat taste better, though they mostly can’t differentiate in blind taste tests; likewise, “oysters taste better with the sound of the seashore playing in the background.”

Because I’m interested in visual realism, I liked the chapter about how what counts as a “realistic” nature documentary has changed over time, in terms of the amount of human intervention into creating and narrating the story. Apparently, “certain kinds of artifice are necessary to create an ethical wildlife documentary,” such as splicing in footage of tame or captive animals to illustrate an otherwise unseeable part of an animal’s story. It makes sense that it’s not a great idea to get too close to wild bears, or to habituate them to humans. The blue whale chapter was similar: whale skin and bones are uniquely hard to preserve, so if you want a whale or whale skeleton that looks like the real thing (and doesn’t smell nauseating), you can’t have it made entirely or even substantially of real whales. The question then becomes what is an “authentic” model, and museum location (as opposed to sideshow appearance) as well as at least some disclosure of what happened seems to be the key here. “As whale curators and showmen have found, there’ s only so much authenticity about whales that audiences are willing to tolerate–no leaking, dripping or smelling–even if those things are just as ‘real’ as the other parts of an exhibit.”

Similarly, caves with ancient human paintings deteriorate if exposed to many humans, as discovered with Lascaux, so replicas are the only way that the art can be both visible and preserved for the future. As with the synthetic diamonds and nature documentaries, there’s a specifically ethical appeal to the artifice: using the replica keeps the original in existence.

The world of fakes is as big as the world. If a fake is of unauthorized manufacture, then every homemade item is a fake of the original model. Counterfeits are hundred billion dollar businesses. So what then is a genuine fake? In Lydia Pyne’s telling, they are fakes that have been legitimately accepted as marketable legally.

It’s a tortured definition, and Pyne doesn’t always make it work. There are forgers whose work is so good people collect them, and they’re worth big money. A fake unpublished Shakespeare play can be priceless. It’s whatever the marketplace accepts, and Pyne shows the marketplace can be very forgiving.

It’s also arguable that not all fakes are fakes. A 1:1 scale model of a Blue Whale is not a fake. Artificial flavors are not fakes. Industrial diamonds are not fakes. But each has its own chapter in Genuine Fakes.

In the chapter on flavors, Pyne admits we’ve been making artificial flavors for 5000 years. We don’t consider them fake, just a different variety. They are necessary, convenient, economical and crucial. The whole argument they are genuine fakes seems misplaced, if not irrelevant. But Pyne provides a great tour of the flavor world.

The chapter on diamonds is all about the scientific search to replicate what nature does in squeezing diamonds out of carbon. There is a great deal on DeBeers, the global diamond monopoly and how it has been beaten down between man-made diamonds and international anti-competition laws. But artificial (a word she does not use here) diamonds are not considered fakes. They are their own legitimate product in their own legitimate market (they are also making inroads in the traditional jewelry market because of ethics issues in mining and war.) So are industrial diamonds “genuine fakes”? What difference does it make?

There is a chapter on animal films, in which she criticizes producers for making animals human, acting out human stories of love, challenge and death. This is called anthropomorphizing (a word she does not use), and we do it with everything – our cars, our plants, our homes, clouds – everything, to make them lovable and relatable. (Think about The California Raisins. That takes it all in instantly.) This is in no way fake; it’s how we relate to everything.

She calls archaeological replicas ethically tricky. Is a replica of the Lascaux Caves a genuine fake? Why is it important to label it that way? Everyone knows you can’t get into the original any more. So this replica is the only option. What good comes from labeling it fake? Is a hologram of Michael Jackson a fraud? Does it have no value? Are art posters fraudulent? Is a Charlie Chaplin film on DVD fraudulent? Or is it a genuine fake?

The whole premise of Genuine Fakes is difficult to digest. Pyne is a good storyteller. The book makes Shakespearean frauds, paleolithic caves and walruses sunning on the rocks fascinating and absorbing. Her stories have just the right level of detail. But tying them all together in the rubric of genuine fakes seems a stretch.

David Wineberg

When I was eight, I was going to be a paleontologist...I had a book on dinosaurs. When I was nine, I was going to be an anthropologist (I got a new book...), so despite 46 years since, I'm primed to like this book, which I got an early look at via First to Read.

I have more than a passing familiarity with six of the seven - Old Man of La Chapelle (Neanderthal), Piltdown, Taung Child (Australopithicus africanus), Peking, Lucy - of course, and Flo the "Hobbit" (Homo floresiensis). I've devoted reading the past five to eight years to other things, so did not recognize Australopithicus sediba. Thanks to Ms. Pyne, I now do!

Very nicely written, almost in a conversational tone, Ms. Pyne does a great job describing the history of each and why the significance of her chosen "celebrity" fossils. A recommended read.

{A cool thing about reading advanced galleys...sometimes neat artifacts show up: on one page in the margin was an editor's note about needing confirmation of a source, as the article cited didn't have the quote. Bill O'Reilly avoids editors like that.}

This relatively short (243 pages of text in my review copy) readable book is a quick but interesting exploration of the history and cultural impact of some of the most pivotal discoveries of paleoanthropology, approached by examining 7 "famous" fossils, including the Piltdown Man (a hoax fossil), Lucy (named after John Lennon's "Lucy in the Sky" and classified as Australopithecus afarensis), and Flo (a Homo floresiensis, otherwise known as one of the island "Hobbit" people). While readers will learn about the fossils themselves, there's more focus on the scientists who found and promoted the fossils and resulting evolution of cultural ideas about humanity's ancient past. Each of the seven fossils has its own chapter, which in keeping with the theme are ordered by discovery date rather than fossil age--starting with a Neanderthal fossil found in the early 20th century and finishing with a discovery made in 2008. Thought-provoking and entertaining

In some ways this was an interesting book...pulling together the story of how society (and scientists, etc) came to define and describe the history of what we now call the Pleistocene, and how that description is still changing.

The difficulty with this book was its language--it is written in a very flowing style, but with such an advanced vocabulary that it made it very difficult to read. After finishing the book I still wasn't quite sure what it had been trying to tell me, other than that humanity has been trying to create its own story, from prehistory through the present, from the pieces of the past that it discovers.½