Word: fictions
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Many of us have also been lawyers, architects, scientists, academics, directors of Fortune 500 companies, professional fund raisers, doctors, nurses, State Department employees, psychotherapists, teachers, bookstore owners, artists, musicians, editors, teachers, a minister, a literary agent, poets (one Pulitzer Prize winner), essayists, fiction writers, biographers and authors of scientific and medical articles. One classmate is an investment adviser; another advises in alternative dispute resolution; a third is an adviser on urban development. This list by no means includes all our jobs over the years...
...similarities don't stop there. In many ways both writers' books have more in common with a science-fiction view of the human future than with any rational interpretation of our species' past. Mad scientists were perhaps obligatory, but who would have thought that both Neanderthals and australopiths communicated using not language (fair enough) but esp? And in both novels, two sets of primitives, good and bad, battle it out; younger researchers meet their former professors under bizarre circumstances; sexual tension breaks out between scientists and primitive hominids; and fieldworkers become the innocent pawns of dark political and military maneuverings...
...best. Despite their authoritative tone, these books are mines of misinformation--and not just in detail. They are to paleoanthropology what Indiana Jones is to archaeology--pure fantasy constructs. And while this may sound like carping on my part, given that these are, after all, works of fiction, it's fair to point out that no scientist likes to see his field of study caricatured--all the more so when the caricaturists have taken Hollywood for millions of dollars in movie rights for what are pretty run-of-the-mill potboilers...
...after-all hominids to launch an ingenious and thoughtful exploration of what it means to be human, see if your local library or used-book store still has a copy of Vercors' You Shall Know Them, which was published back in the 1950s. If your tastes run to pulp fiction instead, either of these novels might make an adequate companion on a plane ride. If you choose Popescu, better make sure it's a long trip...
...Fake Book"; Linsey C. Marr '96 for "A Flourescent Torchiere and Energy Savings at Harvard"; Jeremy L. Martin '96 for "The Mathieu Group M12 and Conway's M13-Game"; and Andrew L. Wright '96 for "'The Seeds of History, the License to Invent': Torquato Tasso Between History and Fiction...