Bedside Table: Read and relax. This book offers a fascinating escape
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Cover courtesy of William Morrow
“My perfect pandemic book is ‘Fossil Men: The Quest for the Oldest Skeleton and the Origins of Humankind,’ by Kermit Pattison. It is popular science/natural history at its finest. Cantankerous and feuding paleoanthropologists work in east Africa with the most fragile and hard-to-find evidence imaginable: ancient fossils that contain clues to human evolution. Pattinson is a master at drawing the character portraits of these fascinating and brilliant explorer-scientists while also explaining the delicate science to this non-scientist reader. It’s a page turner of geology, genomics, professional jealousies, academic publishing, ethnic conflict and skeletal reconstruction.
The roots of humanity remain obscure
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9 New Books We Recommend This Week
Jan. 7, 2021
For no particular reason, today might be a good day to read Edmund Fawcett’s “Conservatism” an intellectual history that explores how one political philosophy can give rise to wildly divergent politics. The book doesn’t limit its discussion to America, or to the present day, but for anybody riveted and shaken by images of rioters storming the U.S. Capitol to disrupt the orderly progress of democracy this week, it does offer a valuable wide-lens perspective on currents that have been at play for decades if not centuries. (Fawcett is a journalist, and by nature more an analyst than an agitator; in an earlier book he likewise explored the origins and contradictions of liberalism.)
Among the riot of species that have lived on Earth over the last four billion years, only we can ponder our own origins and it often angers the blood. We’re long past any serious debate that humanity evolved from apes in Africa a few million years ago, but the scientists looking for ever older bones of our ancestors always seem to be squabbling. A few pages into
Fossil Men: The Quest for the Oldest Skeleton and the
Origins of Humankind, the journalist Kermit Pattison concurs in his riveting account of the discovery of Ardipithecus, a sometimes climbing, sometimes walking proto-human that lived 4.4 million years ago in Ethiopia. “In an ideal world, the task should be left to more dispassionate investigators but, since no other species has volunteered, the job is left to us imperfect humans,” he writes.
Library News: Week of Dec. 27, 2020
The Nobles County Library, 407 12th St., Worthington, is open from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. Monday through Thursday and 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. on Fridays. The Adrian Branch Library, 214 Maine Ave., Adrian, is open from noon to 6 p.m. Monday through Thursday and noon to 5 p.m. Friday. 12:00 pm, Dec. 27, 2020 ×
The Nobles County Library, 407 12th St., Worthington, is open from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. Monday through Thursday and 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. on Fridays. The Adrian Branch Library, 214 Maine Ave., Adrian, is open from noon to 6 p.m. Monday through Thursday and noon to 5 p.m. Friday.
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