Olga Tokarczuk’s 10th novel “will make
you want to read everything that she
has written,” said Nilanjana Roy in the
Financial Times. The Polish novelist
“seems to reinvent herself with every
book she writes,” and this latest work to
be translated into English makes a de-
tour into thriller territory. Its protagonist,
a woman in her 60s who lives alone in
a remote village, begins writing letters
to officials arguing that a string of mys-
terious deaths might be attributable to
the local wildlife fighting back against
hunting and other forms of human cru-
elty. She’s too smart for us to concur
with her neighbors’ quick judgment that
she’s a kook. It’s also no accident, said
Sloane Crosley in The New York Times,
that the more her sanity is called into
question, “the more relatable her plight
becomes.” Tokarczuk manages sus-
pense brilliantly, but “this book is not a
mere whodunit: It’s a philosophical fairy
tale about life and death that’s been
trying to spill its secrets. Secrets that, if
you’ve kept your ear to the ground, you
knew in your bones all along.”(^22) ARTS
Review of reviews: Books
“This looks to be the perfect moment for
Charles King’s resolutely humane book,”
said Jennifer Szalai in The New York
Times. It reminds us that, a mere century
ago, bigotry was so thoroughly supported
by the science of academic elites that to
question whether Western culture was
more evolved than all others was “not just
threatening but unfathomable.” German-
born anthropologist Franz Boas thought
differently. He had realized while young that
the complex culture of the Inuits was better
suited to the Arctic, and by his 40s, he was
mentoring a generation of anthropologists—
Margaret Mead, Zora Neale Hurston, Ruth
Benedict, and Ella Cara Deloria—whose
fieldwork finally proved the old science
wrong. As King’s “elegant and kaleido-
scopic” account shows, “they dismantled it
by showing it wasn’t scientific at all.”
“Anyone who has
spent time on a
college campus has
probably intuited
that innate intel-
ligence and common
sense don’t neces-
sarily go hand in
hand,” said Emily
Bobrow in The
Wall Street Journal.
But David Robson’s
new book is armed
with specifics. The British science writer
offers “a raft of studies” that show all the
ways a fine mind can falter, and the howl-
ing blunders of many intellectual giants
back him up. But we all could use better
ways to think about thinking, especially in
this age of partisanship and misinforma-
tion, and “Robson’s book would be a good
place to start.”
He ought to examine his own thinking first,
said Aron Barbey in ScienceMag.org. Much
of Robson’s book advances a questionable
argument: that people with high IQs are
Book of the week
Boas and friends faced stiff opposition,
said Patrick Iber in The New Republic.
Early last century, three-quarters of U.S.
universities offered courses in eugenics,
and Columbia University canceled Boas’
program for undergraduates to protect the
students’ impressionable minds. Still, Boas’
teachings appealed to many young listen-
ers, especially to female students unsatisfied
with society’s notions about their “natural”
roles. Hurston, after studying under Boas,
did important work in Florida’s African-
American communities; Deloria, a Dakota
Sioux, gathered insights about Great
Plains cultures. But even amid such stellar
company, Mead stands out, said Barbara
King in NPR.org. That’s partly because
she was bristling at the constraints of
monogamy while doing the fieldwork
that underlies her landmark book,
Coming of Age in Samoa. Unfortunately,
King’s version of the story “borders on
casting Mead as oversexed.”
The romantic intrigue, in any case, is
“central to the book’s argument,” said
Alison Gopnik in The Atlantic. For Mead,
discovering that different cultures man-
aged sex differently showed that the code
of conduct accepted in the West was just one
possibility, not the best or only solution. She
and Boas’ other disciples championed what
they called “cultural relativity,” the idea that
all societies face the same basic challenges—
love, work, children, and death—then
develop ways to address them that shouldn’t
be judged on a value scale. Some thinkers
even today blame that idea for a perceived
moral decline in American society, but I
think that insight has made our world better.
“The early anthropologists made us realize
just how many ways there are to be human.”
Gods of the Upper Air:
How a Circle of Renegade
Anthropologists Reinvented
Race, Sex, and Gender...
by Charles King (Doubleday, $30)
Novel of the week
Drive Your Plow Over the
Bones of the Dead
by Olga Tokarczuk (Riverhead, $27)
The Intelligence Trap: Why Smart
People Make Dumb Mistakes
by David Robson (Norton, $27)
possibly more prone to decision-making
mistakes than people of average intelligence.
But researchers have found no such thing;
in fact, when they isolate IQ from decision-
making skills, they find a high correlation
between the two. Still, Robson is not wrong
that smart people sometimes make big
mistakes, and his engaging storytelling will
awaken many readers to common mental
traps, such as confirmation bias (curating
evidence to fit preconceptions) and earned
dogmatism (letting your expertise prevent
you from considering alternate points of
view). Among his many captivating exam-
ples: how Nobel winner Linus Pauling, the
father of molecular biology, became con-
vinced that vitamins could cure cancer.
Robson’s remedies might be even better, said
James McConnachie in The Sunday Times
(U.K.). His first tip? Slow down: Though
we expect smart people to be “quick,” the
intuitive answer isn’t always the right one. A
pause can provide time to run through some
useful checks. He’s also great on both how
to stay curious and the value of struggle in
learning, and he makes every insight feel
exciting and cutting-edge. Still, any reader
who remembers the ancient Greeks might
find his advice familiar. “Curiosity, intel-
lectual humility, reflectiveness, autonomy? It
sounds like good old-fashioned skepticism.”
Mead in Papua New Guinea, 1928
Courtesy of the Margaret Mead Papers/Library of Congress