Stranger than Fiction

Svante Pääbo is the director of the Department of Genetics at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany. He is one of the founders of the field of paleogenetics and, with his team, was responsible for sequencing the Neanderthal genome in 2010 (the Neanderthal Genome Project). He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2022 "for his discoveries concerning the genomes of extinct hominins and human evolution" (according to the Nobel Prize press release). His book, Neanderthal Man: In Search of Lost Genomes , 2014, relates the story of the years leading up to this achievement, which is written as a personal memoir focusing on the details of the scientific method that was developed. One of the difficulties the team was confronted with from the start of their work was the limited ancient material for DNA analysis. However, the greatest problem to solve was finding methods for avoiding contamination while extracting ancient DNA f...

The subtitle of The Island at the Center of the World , by Russell Shorto, 2004, is The Epic Story of Dutch Manhattan and the Forgotten Colony That Shaped America , which is a good description of the book. The history of the beginning of the American colonies usually focuses on the settlements by the English: the Puritans of New England, the Pilgrims at Plymouth Plantation, the Massachusetts Bay Colony, and Jamestown, Virginia. This is the history I learned in school. The earlier settlement by the Dutch in Manhattan was briefly taught with the characters Peter Minuit, who supposedly bought the island of Manhattan from the local Indian tribe for $24 worth of wampum, and Peter Stuyvesant, the peg-legged governor of “New Amsterdam” who lost the settlement to the English. It is said that history is written by the victors, and it seems to be the case with the history of Manhattan. Shorto debunks this history by presenting a fascinating story of what early Manhattan and the surrounding Dut...

In London, 1953, the crime that became “the most notorious crime scene in twentieth-century Britain” was the discovery of several corpses of women hidden in the wall and garden at 10 Rillington Place. The murderer, Reginald Christie, had killed his wife and at least seven other women, who he strangled and then raped. Two years before, Timothy Evans, Christie’s upstairs neighbor, had been executed for killing his wife, Beryl, and their 1-year-old daughter, Geraldine, at the same address. But during the investigation of Christie’s crimes, many doubts were raised as to whether Evans had been innocent and Christie the true murderer of Beryl and Geraldine. In The Peepshow: The Murders at 10 Rillington Place , 2024, Kate Summerscale has done extensive research to not only learn the truth about happened, but also to learn more information about the victims – who they were and how their deaths continued to haunt their families. This book is my choice for the category True Crime for the 2025...

The Remarkable Life of the Skin: An intimate journey across our surface , by Monty Lyman, 2019, is a science book for the general public about the body’s largest organ. Lyman is a medical doctor in Oxford, UK, specializing in dermatology who has worked in different areas of the world for his training as well as for researching case studies for this book. This book is my choice for the category  Health  of the 2025 Nonfiction Reader Challenge. The book is organized into 10 chapters which focus on the various aspects of our skin. For example: ‘Skin Safari,’ describing the various layers and microbes of the skin; ‘Towards the Light,’ about the sun’s effect on the skin; ‘Ageing Skin,’ self-explanatory; ‘Psychological Skin,’ looking at ways people are affected by skin conditions and illnesses; ‘Social Skin,’ detailing how the kind of skin we have (diseases, color, tattoos, etc.) influences how we are perceived by others; etc. In addition, there is a Glossary, an extensive Referen...

  Alan Rickman was one of my favorite actors. He was such a convincing character, no matter which kind he played, and – oh! – that voice! When he died in January 2016, I felt such a loss; all the plays and films he would never be in. But in 2022, when Madly, Deeply: The Alan Rickman Diaries (edited by Alan Taylor) was published, I was looking forward to knowing more about his life and thoughts. However, with 480 pages, which include a section of photographs, illustrations from his diaries, index, appendix and preface, there isn’t much detail about his life. This book is my choice for the category Memoir/Biography of the 2025 Nonfiction Reader Challenge. The diary entries are from 1993, when he started writing regularly, to 2015, which was shortly before his death. There is an Appendix of the occasional diary entries he made earlier. This is described as, “Alan Rickman kept occasional diaries from around 1993 to 1982 and the again, more fulsomely and regularly from 1993 to the ...

A new year and a new challenge! Again, I’m joining the Nonfiction Reader Challenge hosted by Shellyrae at her blog, book’dout . The stated goal of the challenge is to encourage participants to read nonfiction during the year. Each year, there are 12 topic categories, and those who accept the challenge choose a goal to complete by 31 December. This year’s goals are: Nonfiction Nipper : Read & review 3 books, from any 3 listed categories Nonfiction Nibbler : Read & review 6 books, from any 6 listed categories Nonfiction Nosher : Read & review 12 books, one for each category Nonfiction Grazer : Read & review any nonfiction book. Set your own goal, or none at all, just share the nonfiction you read through the year. I aim to become a Nonfiction Nosher, because I already have books on my TBR pile for 10 of the categories (and multiple books for some of the categories). So I’m ready to start noshing. The categories this year are: History Memoir/Biography True ...

  This year, for the 4th time, I took on the Nonfiction Reader Challenge, hosted by Shelleyrae at Book’d Out ( https://bookdout.wordpress.com/ ). I’ve finished the Challenge as a “Nonfiction Nibbler,” for which I had to “read and review any 6 books, from any 6 listed categories”. I also read a book in a 7 th category, and nonfiction books that didn’t fit into a category, or were in a category I had already reviewed (a lot of history and science). In addition to the 13 nonfiction books, I read a number of fiction books, but I don’t include fiction on this blog. My Challenge wrap-up is: History: Lady Sapiens Science: The Smart Neanderthal Health: Vagina Obscura Culture: Image on the Edge True Crime: The Trial of Lizzie Borden Food: Ancestral Appetites Published in 2024: The Brothers Grimm It’s difficult to say which book I liked best – they were all good choices for me. Perhaps The Smart Neanderthal stands out because it was my favorite book about Neanderthals out of the ...

  Grimm’s (or Grimms’) Fairy Tales are well-known all over the world, but I wonder if most people know that the name refers to the brothers Jakob and Wilhelm Grimm. When I was a child I had assumed that the Grimms wrote the tales, but later learned that they collected the tales over a number of years in German-speaking regions of Europe. During my linguistics studies at university, I also learned that it was Jakob Grimm who developed ‘Grimm’s Law,’ which describes regular correspondences between certain sounds of proto-Indo-European to early Germanic and languages that developed from German (like English). It seems that his linguistics theories were inspired by the translations that were done for the tales he and his brother collected. But I did not know much about their personal lives or why they started collecting the folk tales and legends they became known for. So when I learned about The Brothers Grimm: A Biography, by Ann Schmiesing, I was very interested to find out more. ...

  Homo neanderthalensis , or Neanderthals, were a species of hominin that existed from approximately 400,000 to 40,000 BCE, coexisting with Homo sapiens for up to 10,000 years. From the time of the discovery of their existence in 1856, they were assumed to be brutish, ignorant and animal-like. The stereotypical caveman. But new discoveries and evidence during the last decade have given us a different picture of what Neanderthals were like and what they were capable of.* These assumptions were that they were not so different from us. They were intelligent, excellent hunters and stone carvers, they created art and buried their dead, and they lived in small family groups, caring for each other. Now Ludovic Slimak, in The Naked Neanderthal , 2022 (English translation 2023), questions this more recent image. His perspective is that Neanderthals were not like us, but rather a completely different type of humanity, and that we cannot know what they were really like. He states that the...

Being interested in both prehistory and in food history, I was attracted by the title of this book –   Ancestral Appetites: Food in Prehistory by Kristen J. Gremillion, 2011. This is also my choice for the category Food , in the 2024 Nonfiction Reader Challenge . Gremillion is a Professor of Anthropology at The Ohio State University who specializes in paleoethnobotany. In the Introduction , Gremillion states, “Like most mammals, and especially as primates, we have a versatile behavioral repertoire; when it comes to inventing ways to catch, harvest, prepare, and consume food, we have no rivals.” And explains that in this book, “I explore how this complex system of dietary adaptation developed to generate the diversity of human foodways present today.” She doesn’t focus on specific cuisines or “recipes,” but rather the development of hunting, gathering, farming, husbandry as well as techniques of cooking, preparation, fermenting, etc. Although Gremillion doesn’t focus on specifi...

  At the beginning of the first chapter of  How to Think Like a Neandertal , the authors Thomas Wynn and Frederick L. Coolidge (2012) explain their spelling choice of ‘Neandertal’ (instead of ‘Neanderthal’), so I use that spelling in this review. [Both spellings are correct and are pronounced the same.] But aside from the spelling choice, I do not like the title of the book. First, it sounds like the book will be about how to emulate the thinking process of Neandertals (similar to the books, How to Think Like Leonardo DaVinci, Like Sherlock Holmes , Like a Roman Emperor, Like a Computer Scientist, etc . ). And this book is nothing like that. Second, the title doesn’t fit the valid, academic focus of the book. Instead, this book concentrates on building a picture of the mental life of Neandertals, drawing on evidence from archaeology and psychology. The authors are professors at the University of Colorado. Wynn teaches Anthropology and Coolidge is a professor of Psychology....

Lizzie Borden was a woman accused of murdering her father and stepmother on August 4, 1892 in Fall River, Massachusetts. The circumstances were unprecedented for the time, and the trial, becoming known as the “Trial of the Century,” spawned a media frenzy that was a national sensation. I think the name ‘Lizzie Borden’ is still familiar to Americans today, and perhaps to those  in other parts of the world as well  who are interested in unsolved crimes. The Trial of Lizzie Borden , 2019, by Cara Robertson, is my choice for the topic True Crime for the 2024 Nonfiction Reader Challenge . The two victims, Andrew Borden and his second wife Abby, were hacked to death with an axe or hatchet, causing multiple blows to their skull and neck. In total, there were 29 wounds. Andrew’s face was unrecognizable, being described by a police officer as “a mass of raw meat.” It was determined that Abby was killed first, and Andrew about an hour later. That made it unlikely that the murderer ...