The riveting story of the intrepid women anthropologists who redefined race, sex, gender and normality in the early twentieth century.
Charles King is Professor of International Affairs at Georgetown University where he teaches a popular course called 'Ethnicity, Race, and Nation'. His many books include Midnight at the Pera Palace- The Birth of Modern Istanbul, a 2014 New York Times Book Review Notable Book, and Odessa- Genius and Death in a City of Dreams, winner of a National Jewish Book Award in 2011. His writing has appeared in the TLS, New York Times, Washington Post, Foreign Affairs, The New Republic and other publications.
Magnificent ... In this brilliantly written and deftly organised
book, Charles King tells the story of how the study of humankind
[was revolutionised] in the first half of the 20th century
*Guardian*
Hugely informative and adhesively readable
*Sunday Times*
Stunning ... every syllable seems perfectly positioned for pitch,
stress, euphony and evocative power; the brilliant vignettes of the
anthropologists’ leisure moments … the vividness with which their
private lives, sexual intrigues and secret thoughts are captured …
elegant and entertaining
*Literary Review*
An intellectual adventure story of the best sort - elegantly
written, thought-provoking and full of biographical riches
*SARAH BAKEWELL, author of At the Existentialist Café*
Charles King, author of this illuminating biographical history
[has] a great gift for nicely balanced epigrammatic prose … as King
writes with a typically fine flourish, Boas can be seen to have
been “on the front line of the greatest moral battle of our time”
and he, along with the talented women who learnt from him, won out
in the end
*New Statesman*
Written with verve and authority, this exciting – even entrancing –
story follows the first cultural anthropologists to far-flung field
sites that suggested antidotes to the racism and xenophobia of
society
*DAVA SOBEL, author of Longitude*
Stunning. Wickedly perceptive, a scholarly masterpiece
*DAVID OSHINSKY, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Polio*
Elegant and kaleidoscopic … this looks to be the perfect moment for
King’s resolutely humane book
*NEW YORK TIMES*
Deeply intelligent and immensely readable
*Atlantic*
The notion of cultural relativism was as unique in its way as was
Einstein’s theory of relativity in the discipline of physics, a
shattering of the European mind. This remarkable book explains why.
Franz Boas’s intuitions and insights, distilled in theory and
practice by generations of scholars, a lineage that includes Ruth
Benedict, Margaret Mead, and Zora Neale Hurston, all brilliantly
portrayed in the book, continue to inform contemporary
anthropology, allowing the discipline to stand today as the
antidote to nativism and the poisonous rhetoric of political
demagogues. The entire purpose of anthropology, wrote Ruth
Benedict, is to make the world safe for human differences. Never
has the voice of anthropology been more important, and the arrival
of this astonishing book can only be described as a gift to us
all
*Wade Davis, author of Into the Silence*
Masterful. A vital book for our times
*IBRAM X. KENDI, National Book Award-winning author of How To Be An
Antiracist*
Engaging, deeply thought-provoking and brilliantly written. Charles
King takes you on an unforgettable journey as daring
anthropologists unravel the profound mysteries of culture and
mankind
*DAVID HOFFMAN, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Dead Hand*
Vitally relevant
*Financial Times*
A motley crew of rebellious young female scientists, inspired by a
scar-faced mad-genius professor, boldly set out on intrepid
journeys to study strange far-flung worlds, and discover that their
own home-world is stranger than they thought. Along the way, they
have tempestuous love-affairs, scary adventures, swashbuckling
battles against armies of racists, sexists and eugenicists. In the
end, they change our moral universe. Sounds like a sci-fi fantasy
movie? It happened, here on Earth, nearly a century ago. A
fascinating and important story, beautifully told
*KATE FOX, author of Watching the English*
As told very engagingly by Charles King, their research turned
upside down the then unshakeable assumption that certain people
were innatley superior to others, because of their skin colour,
culture and gender
******Mail on Sunday*
Nothing short of magnificent … in many ways a deeply touching book.
Charles King’s prose is immensely readable and perceptive and lends
itself perfectly to telling one of the most fascinating tales of
twentieth-century science
*All About History*
No one until now has told this story of anthropology’s rise to
[its] ‘master key’ status … Charles King’s book … does this with
both subtlety and panache … A compelling account of
mutliculturalism’s intellectual precursors
*History Today*
King's book tells this many-layered, mostly forgotten story
cogently and compellingly ... a gift to the field of anthropology
and to us all
*TLS*
Franz Boas, whose achievements are set out in Charles King's The
Reinvention of Humanity, recast the foundations of American
anthropology. Against the prevailing political and intellectual
orthodoxy, Boas and his students insisted that the basic unity of
humankind was beyond dispute, and that within this unity there was
no natural hierarchy of races, languages or cultures... That their
ideas were found radical and strange is an indictment of their
culture; that King's book seems timely is an indictment of our
own
*London Review of Books*
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