The Reinvention of Humanity by Charles King

The Reinvention of Humanity by Charles King

*THE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER*
'Magnificent' Guardian / 'Hugely informative and adhesively readable' Sunday Times
The Reinvention of Humanity tells the riveting story of a small circle of renegade scientist-explorers who changed something profound: what it means to be normal.

In the early twentieth century, these pioneering anthropologists, most of them women, made intrepid journeys that overturned our assumptions about race, sexuality, gender and the nature of human diversity. From the Arctic to the South Pacific, from Haiti to Japan, they immersed themselves in distant or isolated communities, where they observed and documented radically different approaches to love and child-rearing, family structure and the relationship between women and men. With this evidence they were able to challenge the era’s scientific consensus – and deep-rooted Western belief – that intelligence, ability and character are determined by a person’s race or sex, and show that the roles people play in society are shaped in fact according to the immense variety of human cultures.

Theirs were boundary-breaking lives, filled with scandal, romance, rivalry and tragedy. Those of Margaret Mead and her essential partner Ruth Benedict resulted in fame and notoriety. Those of Native American activist Ella Deloria and the African-American writer and ethnographer Zora Neale Hurston ended in poverty and obscurity; here their achievements are brought fully into the light for the first time. All were outsiders, including the controversial founder of their field, the wild-haired professor, German immigrant and revolutionary thinker, Franz Boas.

The Reinvention of Humanity takes us on their globe-spanning adventures and shows how, together, these courageous and unconventional people created the moral universe we inhabit today.

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 -- Kathryn Hughes * Guardian *
Hugely informative and adhesively readable -- John Carey * 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 -- Lucy Hughes-Hallett * New Statesman *

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.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9781847924506
ISBN 10	1847924506
Title	The Reinvention of Humanity
Author	Charles King
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	Vintage Publishing
Year published	2019-11-07
Number of pages	448
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.