Anthropology

Published in 2005, 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus was written by Charles C. Mann. A companion work, 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created, was released in 2011. The first chapter introduces many of the problems and inadequacies surrounding popular accounts of native societies. The author describes the tendency to minimize the cultures that existed prior to the arrival of Europeans. Native cultures are seen as simpler and less sophisticated than contemporary... Read 1491 Summary

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... Read A Brief History Of Neoliberalism Summary

... Read Ain't No Makin It Summary

... Read An Edible History of Humanity Summary

... Read An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States Summary

Rebecca Solnit’s A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster is a 2009 non-fiction book that examines the behavior of people amid and after disasters as well as the institutional failure that can worsen disasters. Solnit explores five major disasters and detours to discuss several others while providing commentary on contemporary Western culture, anarchism, and the media’s portrayal of disaster victims.Solnit and the many sociologists she cites present an optimistic view... Read A Paradise Built in Hell Summary

Argonauts of the Western Pacific: An Account of Native Enterprise and Adventure in the Archipelagoes of Melanesian New Guinea (1922) is an ethnological monograph by Bronislaw Malinowski, a leading anthropologist of his time. It concerns his research in what was then called “Melanesian New Guinea,” which is today known as the Kiriwana island chain, northeast of New Guinea. The work focuses on the trade, magic, and cultural traditions of the Trobriand people on the archipelago... Read Argonauts of the Western Pacific Summary

As Brave as You is a middle grade novel written by American author Jason Reynolds and published in 2016. It won several awards, including the Kirkus Award, the NCAAP Image award for children’s literature, and the Schneider Family Book Award, which recognizes superior depictions of disability in children’s literature. It was also chosen as a Coretta Scott King Honor book, awarded to African-American writers and illustrators for excellence in conveying the African-American experience in children’s... Read As Brave As You Summary

Dominican Friar Bartolomé de Las Casas’s A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies is a primary source on the genocide of indigenous peoples during Spanish colonization of the Americas. This account of Las Casas, who spent much of his life in the New World, specifically spans the years 1509-1542, with some reference to the years between 1542 and 1552, when the book was published. The text mostly details events that occurred in present-day... Read A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies Summary

This study guide refers to the 2004 House of Anansi edition of Ronald Wright’s A Short History of Progress. The book is a printed version of five Massey Lectures that Wright delivered in Canada in 2004. Wright is a Canadian author of historical fiction and non-fiction with a background in archaeology, anthropology, and linguistics. This lecture series uses Wright’s unique set of skills as a storyteller and student of history to provide a sweeping and... Read A Short History of Progress Summary

At the Mountains of Madness is a science-fiction novella written by H. P. Lovecraft in 1931 and published in Astounding Stories in 1936. Like much of Lovecraft’s work, it also helped establish the genre of cosmic horror, or what Lovecraft called “weird fiction”: horror that relies on existential anxieties about humanity’s place in the universe to achieve its effects. The story involves a research team discovering an ancient city buried beneath the Antarctic. At the... Read At the Mountains of Madness Summary

A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail is a 1998 travel book by American-British author Bill Bryson. The book was a New York Times bestseller, and a 2014 Cable News Network (CNN) poll named it the funniest travel book ever written. In addition, it inspired the 2015 film A Walk in the Woods starring Robert Redford as Bryson, Nick Nolte as Stephen Katz (his primary hiking companion), and Emma Thompson as... Read A Walk in the Woods Summary

Originally written in the late 1920s and early 1930s, Barracoon: The Story of the Last “Black Cargo” (2018) is the transcribed posthumous autobiography of the life of Oluale “Cudjo Lewis” Kossola (1841-1935), written by Zora Neale Hurston (1891-1960). Known for her involvement in the Harlem Renaissance, Hurston was a writer, anthropologist, folklorist, and filmmaker. In all her work, she held a special appreciation for Black life and Black culture of the US South. Her works... Read Barracoon: The Story of the Last "Black Cargo" Summary

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Cannery Row by John Steinbeck was originally published in 1945. A Nobel Prize-winning writer, Steinbeck grew up in Salinas, California, which is near Monterey—the location of Cannery Row. Aside from a few years in Palo Alto, New York, and Los Angeles, Steinbeck spent most of his adult life living in Monterey County, and he drew on his personal experiences to write Cannery Row.Considered literary fiction or classic literature, Cannery Row is realistic and was written... Read Cannery Row Summary

William Cronon wrote a scholarly assessment of the ecological changes in the land wrought by the arrival of New England’s European settlers from about 1620 to 1800 called Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England (1983). Cronon examines both the Native American and European land usage during the pre-colonial time period, including farming, hunting, fishing, and the commercial harvesting of the fruits of the land. In particular, Cronon explores the... Read Changes in the Land Summary

Cloud Atlas is a 2004 dystopian novel by British author David Mitchell. The sprawling narrative is composed of a series of nested stories, spanning centuries into the past and the future. In addition to winning numerous literary and science fiction awards, the novel was adapted into a 2012 film of the same name. This guide uses the 2014 Sceptre edition of Cloud Atlas.Content Warning: The novel and this guide depict slavery and discuss racism, death... Read Cloud Atlas Summary

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Following his best-selling, Pulitzer Prize-winning Guns, Germs, and Steel (1997), geologist and anthropologist Jared Diamond published a companion book, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, in 2006. Where Guns, Germs, and Steel described how various environments around the world helped or hindered human civilization, Collapse explains how environmental abuse ruined many past societies and how it threatens civilizations today. An updated edition, released in 2011 by Penguin Books, is the subject of this... Read Collapse Summary

Custer Died for Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto was written in 1969 by Vine Deloria Jr., a historian, theologian, activist, and member of the Standing Rock Sioux tribe. The work explores the oppression and exploitation of Native people in the United States, outlines the history of Indian resistance, and recommends a course of action for modern Indigenous people. Extremely influential in the 1960s and 1970s Native American Movement, Custer Died for Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto remains... Read Custer Died for Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto Summary

Published in 1989, Death Without Weeping: The Violence of Everyday Life in Brazil, is an in-depth and long-ranging look at the crisis of infant and early-child mortality in the rural communities of the Brazilian Northeast. The author of the book is Nancy Scheper-Hughes, a former aidworker who returned to Brazil as an anthropologist. While the object of this book is infant and child mortality, its main focus is not a medical or scientific approach to... Read Death Without Weeping Summary

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A New York Times Best Seller and winner of the 2014 Kirkus Prize for fiction, Lily King’s novel Euphoria is inspired by the life and fieldwork of eminent American anthropologist Margaret Mead. Specifically, King looked at the time in 1933 when Mead, the woman whom protagonist Nell Stone is based on, went to what was then known as the Territory of New Guinea with anthropologists Gregory Bateson and Reo Fortune. In the Acknowledgements at the... Read Euphoria Summary

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In his 2001 book Facing East from Indian Country: A Native History of Early America, historian Daniel K. Richter presents an account of early American history from a rarely seen perspective: that of the Indigenous peoples who were present in North America as the first European colonists arrived. Using primary sources and imaginative reconstruction, the book examines Cultural Accommodation, Racial Antagonism and Erasure, and The Influence of Resources and Materials on Historical Events, reorienting readers... Read Facing East from Indian Country Summary

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Galapagos is a 1985 novel by American author Kurt Vonnegut. The novel’s narrator is the long-dead Leon Trout, a ghost who watched the evolution of humanity of the course of a million years. The story explores the themes Nature Versus Nurture, Pacifism, and Regret.This guide uses an eBook version of the 1985 Dial Press edition.Content Warning: This novel depicts explicit acts of violence and refers to death by suicide.Plot SummaryLeon Trout, the story’s narrator, is... Read Galapagos Summary

Gods of the Upper Air: How a Circle of Renegade Anthropologists Reinvented Race, Sex, and Gender in the Twentieth Century, was written by Dr. Charles King, and published in 2019 by Penguin Random House. King is a professor of International Affairs and Government at Georgetown University in Washington, DC, and the author of 10 books, predominantly on the subject of society, government, and culture in Eastern Europe. Gods of the Upper Air is a New... Read Gods of the Upper Air Summary

Guests of the Sheik is a nonfiction book set in Iraq in the early years of the Cold War. In 1956, Elizabeth Warnock Fernea accompanies her husband, Bob Fernea, on a two-year, anthropological, dissertation research trip. As a new bride who is entirely unfamiliar with the Middle East or its history and culture, Elizabeth lives in the rural tribal settlement of El Nahra among the El Eshadda tribe. Though she is unable to speak Arabic... Read Guests of the Sheik Summary

Historian and anthropologist Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel (1997) is a multidisciplinary study that uses anthropological, biological, evolutionary, and socio-economic analysis to chart the fates of different peoples throughout human history. Subtitled first as A Short History of Everybody for the Last 13,000 Years, and later as The Fates of Human Societies, the book seeks to understand why some groups of people have prospered while others have failed to advance to the same extent... Read Guns, Germs, and Steel Summary

Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow (2015) is a work of popular science by Israeli writer, professor, and futurist Yuval Noah Harari. Published in multiple languages, it is a continuation of the work of Harari’s previous book, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind. While Sapiens contextualized the advents of modernity within humans’ evolutionary legacy, Homo Deus speculates about what lies in wait for humanity in the distant future. Harari grounds his discussion in an... Read Homo Deus Summary

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Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism is a nonfiction work by historian and political scientist Benedict Anderson. First published in 1983, the book provides a highly influential account of the rise of nationalism and the emergence of the modern nation-state. Anderson sees the nation as a social construct, an “imagined community” in which members feel commonality with others, even though they may not know them. The strength of patriotic feeling and... Read Imagined Communities Summary

Published in 1988 and written by anthropologist Jack Weatherford, Indian Givers: How the Indians of the Americas Transformed the World traces the substantial and often over-looked contributions of American Indians to modern society. Despite his lack of formal training as a historian of American native cultures, Weatherford’s anthropological rigor shines through: Indian Givers has been widely praised for its insight, though occasionally criticized for relying too heavily on secondary literature. This study guide refers to... Read Indian Givers Summary

In Search of Respect: Selling Crack in El Barrio is a critically-acclaimed work of nonfiction by Philippe Bourgois, first published in 1995. It won the 1996 C. Wright Mills Award and the 1997 Margaret Mead Award. A second edition, with a prologue and an additional epilogue, was released in 2003. The book explores themes of respect, independence, autocracy, self-worth, racism, and social marginalization. Bourgois is Professor and Chair of the Department of Anthropology, History and... Read In Search of Respect Summary

Published in 1971, In the Shadow of Man is the third and most famous book by British primatologist Dr. Jane Goodall. The work details Goodall’s groundbreaking study of chimpanzees in Tanzania’s Gombe Stream National Park and her unlikely journey from being a secretary in the UK to heading a major chimpanzee study in East Africa and becoming one of the world’s foremost primatology experts. Functioning as both a memoir and a scientific exploration of chimp... Read In the Shadow of Man Summary

Monique and the Mango Rains: Two Years with a Midwife in Mali is a work of narrative nonfiction written by Kris Holloway and published in 2006. Told through Holloway’s perspective, the book recounts the incredible life and death of a young Malian woman named Monique Dembele and her unlikely friendship with Holloway, who came to Mali as a young American woman serving in the Peace Corps in 1989.The book follows Monique, a midwife who strives... Read Monique and the Mango Rains Summary

Mules and Men is a work of nonfiction published in 1935 by the American author Zora Neale Hurston. Hurston, a student of anthropology, used ethnographic research methods to collect and record Black folklore in the American South. Consisting of two parts, the work first details some folktales elicited directly from residents of rural folklore, and secondly describes several hoodoo practitioners in New Orleans. This book explores themes of establishing origins and the difference between honesty... Read Mules and Men Summary

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One of the foundational texts of postcolonial studies, Edward W. Said’s Orientalism was published in 1978. Up until this point, the term “Orientalism” was used to describe Western scholarship, thinking, and art about “the Orient,” generally Asia and the Middle East. In his book, Said interrogates both the term and ideology of Orientalism. He asserts that the West paints these cultures as exotic and “Other,” using essentialism and stereotypes to situate the West as superior... Read Orientalism Summary

Patterns of Culture, originally published in 1934, is an anthropological text by Ruth Benedict. Translated into 14 languages and with three updated English editions, the book is considered a classic in American anthropology. This study guide uses the most recent, 2005 edition published by Mariner Books, which includes a foreword by Louise Lamphere, a preface by Margaret Mead, and an introduction by Franz Boas, the founding father of cultural anthropology.Benedict popularized the idea of cultural... Read Patterns of Culture Summary

In Plagues and Peoples, William H. McNeill argues that patterns of disease have integrally influenced human history from prehistory to the modern day. Until 1976, the year of this book’s publication, the historical study of disease was treated as a footnote of minor importance compared to war, agriculture, and politics. By contrast, McNeill takes a broader view and breaks human history into two categories. The forces of ecology and humanity are equally weighed in McNeill’s... Read Plagues and Peoples Summary

The Popol Vuh is a cultural narrative of the Quiché people that blends folklore, mythology, and historical accounts. The contents of the Popol Vuh have been relayed through oral tradition for many years, and its written form has suffered many losses following Spanish colonization of Latin America. Spanish colonizers destroyed nearly all Quiché texts and codices, including the Popol Vuh. Thus, the earliest known version of the Popol Vuh that exists is a Spanish translation... Read Popol Vuh Summary

Originally published in 1966, Purity and Danger, by Mary Douglas, is a treatise on the concepts of purity and uncleanness in various societies and cultures. It is widely considered a classic in the field of cultural anthropology. Douglas (1921-2007), a British anthropologist with an interest in comparative religion, pursues the idea that dirt is abhorrent to us because it is “matter out of place.” She examines dietary rules, religious rituals, and social and sexual taboos... Read Purity and Danger Summary

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Salem Possessed: The Social Origins of Witchcraft is an academic work focusing on the Salem witch trials. First published by Harvard University Press in 1974, the book offers an alternative explanation for the phenomenon of witch hysteria and its special relevance to the town of Salem, Massachusetts. The book was well-received by critics for its unique approach to this familiar material. It falls into the nonfiction categories of popular culture, social sciences, and U.S. history... Read Salem Possessed Summary

First published in Hebrew in 2011, with the English translation following in 2014, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind examining the shaping of human history. Israeli author Yuval Noah Harari shines a light, sometimes harshly, on how humans have exploited the ideas of capitalism, religion, and politics to control the globe and put the species Homo sapiens on the threshold of banishing natural selection. Sapiens landed on the New York Times best-seller list and won... Read Sapiens Summary

Sidewalk tells the true story of sociologist Mitchell Duneier’s years-long effort to understand the informal sidewalk economy of 1990s Greenwich Village, in New York City. The story begins when Duneier meets Hakim Hasan, who is a vendor of books on Sixth Avenue, one of the commercial hubs of the Village and the main focus of this book. Through Hakim, Duneier becomes acquainted with several of the lower-income book and magazine vendors, scavengers, and panhandlers that... Read Sidewalk Summary

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In the nonfiction book The Blank Slate, Steven Pinker, a Harvard-educated experimental psychologist, draws from cutting-edge cognitive science to debunk popular ideas about the mind and human nature. Primarily, Pinker argues against the concept of the Blank Slate—that is, that the mind is a “blank slate”—showing instead that our brains come hardwired with universal attributes. He also discredits two related concepts, that of the Noble Savage (the idea that primitive humans were superior to and... Read The Blank Slate Summary

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The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas are Setting Up a Generation for Failure is a psychology book written by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt and published in 2018. The nonfiction work, which expounds upon an essay the authors wrote for The Atlantic in 2015, became a bestseller and National Book Critics Circle Award nominee. The book argues that parents and schools, in an overabundance of caution, have taught children... Read The Coddling of the American Mind Summary

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The Denial of Death was written by the American cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker and published in 1973. The work explores the fear of death and the ways in which rituals and beliefs have helped humans to cope with it throughout history. It was inspired by the fact that Becker had been diagnosed with terminal colon cancer. Over the course of his life, he taught at several prestigious universities, including Syracuse University, UC Berkeley, and, by... Read The Denial of Death Summary

The Division of Labor in Society by Émile Durkheim is a doctoral dissertation first published in 1893. It is most notable for using the scientific method to explain social phenomena, and it is widely considered one of the foundational works in modern sociology. Durkheim, along with other theorists such as Max Weber and Karl Marx, is considered a founder of the field. In The Division of Labor in Society, Durkheim explores how modern societies remain... Read The Division of Labor in Society Summary

In The Forest People, anthropologist Colin M. Turnbull describes his experiences while living as a friend and observer with the BaMbuti (Pygmies) of the Ituri Forest. He shares the everyday lives of the Pygmies located in the Epulu River region and their interactions with each other and with him. The setting is the Belgian Congo, which Turnbull describes as located in the center of Africa. Turnbull had visited the Epulu BaMbuti in 1951. This narrative... Read The Forest People Summary

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Scottish anthropologist James George Frazer published The Golden Bough: A Study in Comparative Religion in 1890 in two volumes. It is considered Frazer’s magnum opus and, in its 1936 third edition, was expanded into 13 volumes. Subsequent editions abridged the text to the currently used single-volume text. The title is taken from Virgil’s epic poem The Aeneid, in which Aeneas uses a golden bough (or branch) to gain admission into the underworld. Though elements of... Read The Golden Bough Summary

The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History is a nonfiction essay collection published in 1984 by American historian Robert Darnton. Using folktales, oral histories, letters, and police reports, Darnton explores the attitudes and behaviors of 18th-century French men and women, from indigent peasants to the most celebrated minds of the Enlightenment. The book takes its title from a perplexing incident in the late 1730s, in which a group of Parisian printers’... Read The Great Cat Massacre Summary

The Great Transformation, by Karl Polanyi, was first published in 1944 and is a nonfiction work of economic history. The most recent 2001 edition features a Foreword by renowned economist Joseph Stiglitz as well as an Introduction by sociology professor Fred Block, both of which tout the continued relevance of Polanyi’s work. Throughout the work itself, Polanyi discusses the social and economic changes—what he terms “the great transformation”—that occurred as a result of the Industrial... Read The Great Transformation Summary

Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces is a nonfiction work about world mythology published in 1949. Campbell, a mythology scholar and professor of literature, presents his theory of the “monomyth,” or the narrative tropes common to all storytelling traditions. The first half of the book covers the monomyth of the hero’s journey. The second half deals with similarities among a wide range of creation myths.In his Prologue, Campbell considers why people from all... Read The Hero with a Thousand Faces Summary

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The Land of Open Graves: Living and Dying on the Migrant Trail is a 2015 work of nonfiction and the winner of four awards, including the J.J. Staley Book Prize in 2018. Drawing on his expertise in anthropology, ethnography and archeology, author Jason De León, Executive Director of the Undocumented Migration Project and current Professor of Anthropology and Chicanx Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles, critiques the federal border enforcement policy known as... Read The Land of Open Graves Summary

The Lost City of the Monkey God: A True Story is a New York Times best-selling nonfiction book written by journalist and novelist Douglas Preston and published by Grand Central Publishing in 2017. Preston’s book follows the history of various expeditions in search of the legendary Lost City of the Monkey God in the La Mosquitia region of Honduras. Most of the book covers an aerial lidar survey and a ground expedition organized and led... Read The Lost City of the Monkey God Summary

David Grann’s The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon (2009) tells the story of Percy Harrison Fawcett’s ill-fated expedition into the Brazilian jungle. After nearly two decades spent exploring the region and gathering evidence, Fawcett concluded that a sophisticated ancient civilization, a city he called Z, lay hidden deep in the Amazonian wilderness. In 1925, while searching for Z, Fawcett disappeared along with his son Jack and Jack’s friend... Read The Lost City of Z Summary

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The Mismeasure of Man, by Stephen Jay Gould, is a survey and critique of 19th- and 20th-century theories that posited human intelligence was a fixed and measurable number. Gould argues that mainstream scientists were not immune to the widespread racist and prejudicial beliefs of their time, and that these unconscious biases underlie the history of biological determinism, or the argument that shared human behavior is innate and primarily controlled by biology. Under this argument, social... Read The Mismeasure Of Man Summary

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... Read The Myth of the Eternal Return Summary

... Read The Nuer Summary

... Read The Order of Things Summary

... Read The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State Summary

... Read The Pastoral Clinic Summary

... Read The Poisonwood Bible Summary

The Power of Myth by Joseph Campbell with Bill Moyers, published in 1988, is a nonfiction companion to a six-episode PBS documentary series by the same name. The main text of the book is a transcript of an extensive conversation between comparative mythology expert Joseph Campbell and journalist Bill Moyers. Using mythological stories, psychoanalytic theories, and personal anecdotes, Campbell and Moyers examine how world mythologies illuminate the mysteries of human life through shared symbols as... Read The Power of Myth Summary

The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life is a sociological study of the ways individuals encounter each other. Published in 1956 by Erving Goffman, it focuses on the relationship between an individual carrying out a particular role in society (what Goffman calls a “performance”) and those who are present but not participant (whom he calls “observers”) in the activity. While the text begins with a general introduction to Goffman’s methodology, with Chapter 1 solely an... Read The Presentation Of Self In Everyday Life Summary

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C. Wright Mills’ The Sociological Imagination covers the recent history of sociology as a field of study relating to society and the lives of individuals therein. While Mills’ work was not well received at the time of publication due to his reputation, today it is one of the most widely read sociology books and a staple in sociology university courses. The questions this text raises and the attention it gives to reconceiving the contemporary human... Read The Sociological Imagination Summary

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Anne Fadiman’s nonfiction book The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down: A Hmong Child, Her American Doctors, and the Collision of Two Cultures chronicles the life of Lia Lee, a Hmong girl who lives with her family in Merced, California, in the 1980s and 1990s. The book examines the cultural misunderstandings and conflicting belief systems that result in Lia’s poor medical treatment after she is diagnosed with a severe form of epilepsy, Lennox-Gastaut Syndrome... Read The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down Summary

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This study guide refers to the 2009 House of Anansi Press edition of Wade Davis’s The Wayfinders: Why Ancient Wisdom Matters in the Modern World. The Wayfinders collects a series of five Massey Lectures that Davis delivered in Canada in 2009. Davis is a Colombian-Canadian anthropologist and ethnobotanist, and the Explorer-in-Residence at the National Geographic Society. This position, as well as his long anthropological career, has allowed Davis to spend time with many of the... Read The Wayfinders Summary

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Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging is a 2016 non-fiction book by Sebastian Junger. This guide is based on the 2016 first-edition hardback published in New York by Twelve/Hachette Book Group. Junger is a journalist, essayist, filmmaker, and best-selling author whose writing about dangerous work and the people who perform it has been credited with stimulating the “adventure non-fiction” genre. His first book, Perfect Storm: A True Story About Men Against the Sea, about six fishermen... Read Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging Summary

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Us and Them: Understanding Your Tribal Mind is a 2005 nonfiction book by David Berreby about how humans divide and categorize themselves. The psychological text explains human nature and the neuroscience of human groupings like races, ethnicities, classes, and nationalities. Berreby also discusses the positive and negative effects of human-kind groupings and offers advice on how to better act on human-kind beliefs.Plot SummaryBerreby begins by explaining the concept of human kinds—a number of people that... Read Us and Them Summary

Lila Abu-Lughod’s Veiled Sentiments: Honor and Poetry in a Bedouin Society, first published in 1986, is the anthropologist’s first ethnography on the Awlad ‘Ali Bedouin peoples of North Africa. Over years of research and ‘ishra (living with) the Awlad ‘Ali, Abu-Lughod, initially interested in women’s experiences in the community, is drawn to poetry, specifically that which women recite in intimate, private settings. As she lives in and learns from the villagers, she explores the purpose... Read Veiled Sentiments Summary

Ella Cara Deloria’s 1988 novel, Waterlily, is an examination of the Dakota Native American way of life. The novel follows a Dakota camp circle called White Ghost—a group composed of several families that live and travel together. While the novel provides perspectives from many different characters, the author places the greatest focus on Blue Bird and her daughter Waterlily. At the novel’s outset, Blue Bird gives birth to Waterlily by a river while her camp... Read Waterlily Summary

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Wisdom Sits in Places (University of New Mexico Press, 1996) is a non-fiction book of essays by American ethnographer and anthropologist Keith Basso. In the book, Basso explores the role of place-names, or toponyms, in the language and culture of the Western Apache. In doing so, he sets forth an argument that the way of life of the Western Apache can only be understood by examining their sense of place, and he makes the case... Read Wisdom Sits in Places Summary

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In his 2008 book Your Inner Fish: A Journey into the 3.5-Billion-Year History of the Human Body, paleontologist and biologist Neil Shubin explores the evolutionary history of various anatomical structures. As Shubin explores the histories of everything from our limbs to our eyes and ears, he shows how closely related humans are to all of Earth’s living creatures.The first two chapters of Your Inner Fish describe one of Shubin’s most important scientific contributions: the discovery... Read Your Inner Fish Summary