Suggested Materials

Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctrine advances a truly unnerving argument: historically, while people were reeling from natural disasters, wars and economic upheavals, savvy politicians and industry leaders nefariously implemented policies that would never have passed during less muddled times. As Klein demonstrates, this reprehensible game of bait-and-switch isn't just some relic from the bad old days. It's alive and well in contemporary society, and coming soon to a disaster area near you.

"At the most chaotic juncture in Iraq'' civil war, a new law is unveiled that will allow Shell and BP to claim the country's vast oil reserves… Immediately following September 11, the Bush Administration quietly outsources the running of the 'War on Terror' to Halliburton and Blackwater… After a tsunami wipes out the coasts of Southeast Asia, the pristine beaches are auctioned off to tourist resorts… New Orleans residents, scattered from Hurricane Katrina, discover that their public housing, hospitals and schools will never be re-opened." Klein not only kicks butt, she names names, notably economist Milton Friedman and his radical Chicago School of the 1950s and 60s which she notes "produced many of the leading neo-conservative and neo-liberal thinkers whose influence is still profound in Washington today." Stand up and take a bow, Donald Rumsfeld. -Amazon.com

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This original and ingenious book presents a new theory of the origins of human culture. Integrating perspectives of evolutionary biology and social anthropology within a Marxist framework, Chris Knight rejects the common assumption that human culture was a modified extension of primate behavior and argues instead that it was the product of an immense social, sexual, and political revolution initiated by women. -Amazon.com

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Primal Tears tells the story of Sage, a female born to a human who had volunteered to be a surrogate mother for an endangered species program but is instead accidentally impregnated with bonobo chimpanzee sperm. Sage is raised in a remote part of Oregon, exhibiting characteristics of both her species. Her troubles begin when her existence becomes public knowledge and the government takes her from her family and places her in a research facility. Her escape marks the beginning of a series of powerful events with implications beyond Sage’s story. -Amazon.com

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Articles by Kelpie Wilson

• Chimpanzees and Culture Change
• The Lysistrata Strategy

• Saint Chola (184k PDF)
  Published in the Prize Anthology The Better of McSweeney's, and currently in development as a feature film)

• King Kong (140k PDF)
  Available in The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2003 (The Best American Series)

Articles by Jessica Seigel

• Fade to Black: The color of power (New York Times Op-Ed) 
• Fat Chance: Dove deception (New York Times Op-Ed) 
• Inhaling their Food: The real reason Frenchwomen don't diet (New York Times Op-Ed) 
• Gloria Steinem: the feminist icon on women, media, and money (Pink Magazine, 7.6 mb PDF)
• Secrets of the Bonobo Sisterhood: A cutting-edge professor reveals how
  our ape cousins celebrate the power of female friendship (Ms. Magazine, ASJA Award) 

What does sexy mean today? Levy, smartly expanding on reporting for an article in New York magazine, argues that the term is defined by a pervasive raunch culture wherein women make sex objects of other women and of ourselves. The voracious search for what's sexy, she writes, has reincarnated a day when Playboy Bunnies (and airbrushed and surgically altered nudity) epitomized female beauty. It has elevated porn above sexual pleasure. Most insidiously, it has usurped the keywords of the women's movement (liberation, empowerment) to serve as buzzwords for a female sexuality that denies passion (in all its forms) and embraces consumerism. To understand how this happened, Levy examines the women's movement, identifying the residue of divisive, unresolved issues about women's relationship to men and sex. The resulting raunch feminism, she writes, is a garbled attempt at continuing the work of the women's movement and asks, how is resurrecting every stereotype of female sexuality that feminism endeavored to banish good for women? Why is laboring to look like Pamela Anderson empowering? Levy's insightful reporting and analysis chill the hype of what's hot. It will create many aha! moments for readers who have been wondering how porn got to be pop and why feminism is such a dirty word. -Publishers Weekly, © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc.

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Naisbitt, prescient "futurist" and best-selling author of Megatrends (1982) and Megatrends 2000 (1990), reveals the process behind his ability to anticipate global trends. Naisbitt broke away from his small-town Mormon roots to become a top executive at IBM and Eastman Kodak and was an assistant to both presidents Kennedy and Johnson before becoming a global philosopher, studying trends by monitoring hundreds of daily local newspapers. In part 1, his 11 mind-sets reveal ways to approach the processing of information without the constraints imposed on us by preconceived ideas and popular culture. Mindset Four, "Understanding how powerful it is not to have to be right," is a prime example of how stubborn thinking, particularly in the fields of politics and medicine, puts huge constraints on the abilities of leaders to solve problems. In part 2, Naisbitt smashes many of the preconceptions we have about globalization and our perception of change. -Booklist, David Siegfried © American Library Association

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Journalist Bornstein (The Price of a Dream: The Story of the Grameen Bank) profiles nine indomitable champions of social change who developed innovative ways to address needs they saw around them in places as distinct as Bombay, India; Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; and inner-city Washington, D.C. As these nine grew influential when their ingenious ideas proved ever more widely successful, they came to the attention of Ashoka, an organization that sponsors a fellows program to foster social innovation by finding so-called social entrepreneurs to support. As Bornstein interviewed these and many other Ashoka fellows, he saw patterns in the ways they fought to solve their specifically local problems. To demonstrate the commonality among experiences as diverse as a Hungarian mother striving to provide a fuller life for her handicapped son and a South African nurse starting a home-care system for AIDS patients, he presents useful unifying summaries of "four practices of innovative organizations" and "six qualities of successful social entrepreneurs." Bornstein implies that his subjects are in the tradition of Florence Nightingale and Gandhi; the inspiring portraits that emerge from his in-depth reporting on the environments in which individual programs evolved (whether in politically teeming India or amid the expansive grasslands of Brazil) certainly show these unstoppable entrepreneurs as extraordinarily savvy community development experts. In adding up the vast number of current nongovernmental organizations and their corps of agents of positive change, Bornstein aims to persuade that, "without a doubt, the past twenty years has produced more social entrepreneurs than terrorists".
-Publishers Weekly © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

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If They Give You Lined Paper, Write Sideways
by Daniel Quinn, Steerforth Press (January 2007)

This slender volume—a place marker in Quinn's philosophical oeuvre about mankind's relationship to nature (including the trilogy Ishmael, The Story of B and My Ishmael)—is as slight as the winsome aphorism in its title. Two-thirds of the book is a lightly edited transcript of a rambling, three-day dialogue between Quinn and a fan who spent Thanksgiving 2005 weekend with him in his Houston home "to nail down the ideas she had explored in my books." For Quinn, a related goal was to answer the question, "How do you do what you do?" for himself. The result provides no startling insights for anyone familiar with the author's essential thinking, though it does occasionally depict Quinn as a cranky and condescending guru, as he challenges his visitor on such topics as world history, religion and God's compassion, abortion and capital punishment, and overpopulation. The essence of the q&a exercise boils down to challenging received wisdom, pulling back to look at the big picture and examining all assumptions. Two essays, one on whether humanity can save itself from environmental doom and one on animism as religion, add some much-needed heft.
-Publishers Weekly © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc.

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		Excerpt from If They Give You Lined Paper, Write Sideways by Daniel Quinn The New Renaissance (edited) Address delivered by Daniel Quinn at the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston, March 7, 2002 Download PDF (108k)

The Evolution of Culture An Interdisciplinary View
Edited by Robin Dunbar, Chris Knight and Camilla Power (Edinburgh University Press, 1999)

The Evolution of Culture seeks to explain the origins, evolution and character of human culture, from language, art, music and ritual to the use of technology and the beginnings of social, political and economic behavior. It is concerned not only with where and when human culture evolved, but also asks how and why. The book draws together original contributions by archaeologists, anthropologists, linguists and psychologists. By integrating evolutionary biology with the social sciences, it shows how contemporary evolutionary thinking can inform the study of the peculiarly human phenomenon of culture. The contributors call into question the gulf currently separating the natural from the cultural sciences. Human capacities for culture, they argue, evolved through standard processes of natural and sexual selection and can be properly analyzed as biological adaptations. The Evolution of Culture is fully referenced and indexed and contains a guide to further reading. It is accessibly written and will be sure to appeal to the growing multidisciplinary readership now asking questions about human origins. -summary from the back cover

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Additional Articles by Jessica Seigel

• The Lion, the Witch, and the Metaphor (New York Times Op-Ed) 
• Bent out of Shape: Exposing the bosom of the bra industry  (Lifetime Magazine, Front Page Award) 
• Digging at the Biblical Site of Armageddon (National Geographic Traveler)

Additional Articles by Kelpie Wilson

• Blockading Logging Companies and Abortion Clinics: What Shelley Shannon and I Have in Common
• Children of Men (movie review) 
• Plan B and Plan B
• Telling Stories: The Restorative Power of Myth
•  What Moral Values?

Scientist Finds the Beginnings of Morality in Primate Behavior
By Nicholas Wade, New York Times
March 20, 2007

Download PDF (103k)

Marching With a Mouse
By Thomas L. Friedman, New York Times
March 16, 2007

Download PDF (80k)

Equality Between the Sexes: Neanderthal Women Men in the Hunt
By Nicholas Wade, New York Times
December 5, 2006

Download PDF (80k)

Explaining what William McNeill called The Rise of the West has become the central problem in the study of global history. In Guns, Germs, and Steel Jared Diamond presents the biologist's answer: geography, demography, and ecological happenstance. Diamond evenhandedly reviews human history on every continent since the Ice Age at a rate that emphasizes only the broadest movements of peoples and ideas. Yet his survey is binocular: one eye has the rather distant vision of the evolutionary biologist, while the other eye--and his heart--belongs to the people of New Guinea, where he has done field work for more than 30 years. -Amazon.com

Noted primatologist de Waal (Chimpanzee Politics) thinks human behavior cannot be fully explained by selfish genes and Darwinian competition. Drawing on his own primate research on chimpanzees and bonobos—our closest animal relatives—he shows how much we can learn from them about ourselves: our qualities of "fellow feeling and empathy" as well as our power-obsessed, violent side. We are "bipolar apes," de Waal says, as much like bonobos as like chimps. The latter are known for their viciousness and "red in tooth and claw" social politics, but bonobos offer a radically different social model, one of peace and hedonistic orgies; de Waal offers vivid, often delightful stories of politics, sex, violence and kindness in the ape communities he has studied to illustrate such questions as why we are irreverent toward the powerful and whether men or women are better at conflict resolution. Readers might be surprised at how much these apes and their stories resonate with their own lives, and may well be left with an urge to spend a few hours watching primates themselves at the local zoo. -Publishers Weekly © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc.

Nine of the world's leading primatologists come together in this engaging volume to discuss many of the evolutionary forces that have created Homo sapiens. Edited by the eminent de Waal (The Ape and the Sushi Master, Forecasts, Feb. 19) of Emory University, all nine essays find an appropriate middle ground neither too technical nor too simplistic. Each also summarizes the current state of research into some aspect of primate behavior and what we can learn from it about the evolution of human life and culture. The acquisition, distribution and preparation of food is central to the contributions by Craig Stanford and Richard Wrangham. Stanford argues that collaborative hunting may be responsible for the development of social intelligence, while Wrangham cogently links the discovery of cooking to the creation of the human mating system. Richard Byrne's contribution discusses the evolution of human intelligence by examining patterns of tool use and food manipulation in living primates. Charles Snowdon explores the twin concepts of communication and language by looking broadly across the animal kingdom and wrestling with the question of whether or not there is such a thing as a language instinct. William McGrew does much the same for culture, effectively demonstrating that humans can no longer be considered the sole purveyors of culture. With nine separate essays, it is not surprising that a fair amount of repetition occurs, but the strengths clearly outweigh the shortcomings in this provocative book. -Publishers Weekly, © 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

Scientific discoveries about the animal kingdom fuel ideological battles on many fronts, especially battles about sex and gender. We now know that male marmosets help take care of their offspring. Is this heartening news for today's stay-at-home dads? Recent studies show that many female birds once thought to be monogamous actually have chicks that are fathered outside the primary breeding pair. Does this information spell doom for traditional marriages? And bonobo apes take part in female-female sexual encounters. Does this mean that human homosexuality is natural? This highly provocative book clearly shows that these are the wrong kinds of questions to ask about animal behavior. Marlene Zuk, a respected biologist and a feminist, gives an eye-opening tour of some of the latest developments in our knowledge of animal sexuality and evolutionary biology. Sexual Selections exposes the anthropomorphism and gender politics that have colored our understanding of the natural world and shows how feminism can help move us away from our ideological biases. As she tells many amazing stories about animal behavior--whether of birds and apes or of rats and cockroaches--Zuk takes us to the places where our ideas about nature, gender, and culture collide. -Amazon.com

This is the story of one man’s experiences inside the intrigue, greed, corruption and little-known government and corporate activities that America has been involved in since World War II, and which have dire consequences for the future of democracy and the world. -Amazon.com

In this revision of her ground-breaking atlas, Joni Seager draws on a vast amount of new global data to explore the key issues facing women today: equality, motherhood, feminism, beauty, culture, women at work, women in the global economy, changing households, domestic violence, time budgets, children, lesbian rights, women in government, and more. -Amazon.com

The author brings a fresh, unique approach that rests on a solid biological foundation. Using fields as diverse as anthropology, primatology, social history, neurophysiology, and evolutionary biology she builds a convincing argument that a warless future is not an impossibility. This is a book to be read, savored, and shared with anyone wanting to help create a better world.

For Frans de Waal, man is not the only moral entity, as he made clear in his last book--Good Natured: The Origins of Right and Wrong in Humans and Other Animals. The author has long been intrigued by chimpanzee politics and mores, and now he has turned his human heart and scientific mind to a species science has tended to celebrate solely for its sex drive. Bonobos may look like chimps, but they are actually even closer to us--far more upright, physically, for a start. Furthermore, where chimpanzees hunt, fight, and politic like mad, bonobos are peaceful, often ambisexual, and matriarchal. (Of course, hyenas are matriarchal too, but that's another story ...) De Waal's collaborator, Frans Lanting, has been photographing these gentle creatures for some years and augments the primatologist's explorations and interviews with hundreds of superb color shots. The penultimate picture is of bonobos crossing a road while schoolchildren stand watching, a short distance away. If, as the truism goes, all books about animal behavior are ultimately about us, this exploration of the bonobo may be a step in the right direction. -Amazon.com

In this provocative reinterpretation of the human experience, noted historian Robert S. McElvaine bridges the gap between evolutionary biology and history to create a new approach which he terms "biohistory." Here for the first time he presents a startlingly fresh thesis: misperceptions about sexual difference and procreative power have, along with misleading sexual metaphors, been the major forces in history. In a bold departure from the methods of conventional history, Eve's Seed shows how the interplay between our evolutionary heritage and changing environments has shaped the course of history, from the days of hunter-gatherers to the contemporary world. -Amazon.com

King Leopold of Belgium, writes historian Adam Hochschild in this grim history, did not much care for his native land or his subjects, all of which he dismissed as "small country, small people." Even so, he searched the globe to find a colony for Belgium, frantic that the scramble of other European powers for overseas dominions in Africa and Asia would leave nothing for himself or his people. When he eventually found a suitable location in what would become the Belgian Congo, later known as Zaire and now simply as Congo, Leopold set about establishing a rule of terror that would culminate in the deaths of 4 to 8 million indigenous people, "a death toll," Hochschild writes, "of Holocaust dimensions." Those who survived went to work mining ore or harvesting rubber, yielding a fortune for the Belgian king, who salted away billions of dollars in hidden bank accounts throughout the world. Hochschild's fine book of historical inquiry, which draws heavily on eyewitness accounts of the colonialists' savagery, brings this little-studied episode in European and African history into new light. -Amazon.com, Gregory McNamee

Ecology and spirituality are deftly intertwined in this well-written discussion of how we can save and preserve life on earth. Vermont author Thom Hartman offers a highly persuasive argument for adopting the spiritual values of our ancient ancestors, which means living with a strong connection to the earth as well as the sun that nourishes us all. Nowadays, humans often perceive themselves as separate from nature and born to dominate it, says Hartman who lays out some frightening, albeit thorough, research on the destruction of the planet. But as the book progresses, he guides readers into a convincing and intelligent vision for reversing our destructive ways.

Mostly, we could all use an attitude adjustment. For example, he explains how native and tribal cultures often considered all forms of life to be as sacred as human life--an attitude that may be one of our best shots at planetary longevity. Hartman devotes his final section to "What the Average Person Can Do," including chapters titled, "Turn Off the TV," "The Modern-Day Tribe: Intentional Community," and "Reinventing Our Daily Lives and Rituals." -Amazon.com, Gail Hudson

Mother Nature: A History of Mothers, Infants, and Natural Selection should be required reading for anyone who happens to be a human being. In it, Hrdy reveals the motivations behind some of our most primal and hotly contested behavioral patterns--those concerning gender roles, mate choice, sex, reproduction, and parenting--and the ideas and institutions that have grown up around them. She unblinkingly examines and illuminates such difficult subjects as control of reproductive rights, infanticide, "mother love," and maternal ambition with its ever-contested companions: child care and the limits of maternal responsibility. Without ever denying personal accountability, she points out that many of the patterns of abuse and neglect that we see in cultures around the world (including, of course, our own) are neither unpredictable nor maladaptive in evolutionary terms. "Mother" Nature, as she points out, is not particularly concerned with what we call "morality." The philosophical and political implications of our own deeply-rooted behaviors are for us to determine--which can be done all the better with the kind of understanding gleaned from this exhaustive work.

Why and how television soap operas convey a unique portrait of women.

A classic field study of women's reading groups.

Hollywood's changing definitions of intimacy from 1932-2000.

Every scrap of information that could be extracted from the few survivors was recorded somewhere, enabling Mr. Kinder to reconstruct the disaster, and many of the people involved, with hair-raising precision. The people were interesting. One really cares about the literary captain, the honeymooners, the young poet--even the canary. Mr. Kinder makes the shipwreck so enthralling that it seems any later events are doomed to anticlimax. Not so.... Even readers familiar with Mr. Thompson's salvage operation are likely to find new information in Mr. Kinder's text, and for those with no previous acquaintance, it is a truly great tale, cleverly organized and expertly written. -The Atlantic Monthly, Phoebe-Lou Adams

Why did big-brained Homo Sapiens suddenly emerge some 150,000 years ago? In this provocative new book, Leonard Shlain, author of the bestselling Art & Physics and the Alphabet Versus the Goddess, argues that the profound alterations in female sexuality hold the key to this mystery.