Joel Dinerstein's "The Origins of Cool in Postwar America"

Joel Dinerstein is the author of The Origins of Cool in Postwar America (2017), American Cool (2014), Coach: A Story of NY Cool (2016), and Swinging the Machine (2003). He is a Professor of English at Tulane University and has taught a course on "The History of Cool" for 20 years.

Dinerstein applied the “Page 99 Test” to The Origins of Cool in Postwar America, and reported the following:

Page 99 is a great intro to The Origin of Cool's themes and history, and theory. It kicks off a section analyzing This Gun for Hire, a surprise box-office hit from 1941, and one of the very first film noirs. This is part of my analysis of noir cool, a distinctive quality of the genre that I define as a certain stylish stoicism in its best actors and cinematography. This Gun for Hire also marked the debut of Alan Ladd, a postwar icon and one of the few true precursors of James Dean. It was the first film that paired Ladd with actress Veronica Lake. Reviewers noted Ladd's combination of toughness and vulnerability (the keynote of postwar masculine cool) while Lake's slow-burn sexuality that had men yelling out her name in movie theaters. The source novel was written by acclaimed British novelist Graham Greene and the screenplay co-authored by the noir master, W.R. Burnett.

Many reviewers identified a "strange" new mood to the film and its emotionally reserved young couple: they were groping for the word "cool" to identify the film's detached, low-key emotional mode, but only African-American jazz musicians then used the term. Contemporary film scholars today nearly always invoke the word "cool" to describe both Ladd and Lake. One biographer described Ladd this way on page one:

His aura was one of great cool, of a forceful, masculine presence with a strong undercurrent of violence and heavy sex appeal… That's how the fans who went to the movies in the 1940s saw Alan Ladd. He was aloof, self-sufficient, occasionally lonely, and sometimes outside the law.

The New York Times film critic Bosley Crowther nearly captured the appeal of cool in Alan Ladd's for a younger generation and I quote it at length on page 99. Crowther often watched films with swing-era youth since a given program included a band and a movie. Crowther referred to Ladd's performance as that of a "sympathetic rebel" since he projected a "gangster toughness combined with a touch of pathos." A decade later, this combination was the stock-in-trade of Marlon Brando, James Dean, and Elvis (on stage and screen), and as well to Miles Davis, Frank Sinatra, and Neal Cassady. Crowther considered the attraction of this new kind of cool: "Do they see in him their own insecurities, a sympathetic rebel against the problems and confusions of modern youth? And do they find vicarious pleasure in his recourse to violence?" Rebellion was the keynote of postwar cool, with the threat of violence hanging in the background.

The word "teen-ager" had only just been coined and was not yet in common usage before World War II. But once you have teen-agers, the conditions are set for the importance of cool. I define cool as the process of negotiating an individual identity in modernity through the use of popular culture. Alan Ladd and Veronica Lake were two iconic figures that provided models for teen-agers of the 1940s. Ladd and Lake made seven films together, as successful in their way as Astaire and Rogers or Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland before them.

Visit Joel Dinerstein's website.

My Book, The Movie: The Origins of Cool in Postwar America.

--Marshal Zeringue

Helene Stapinski's "Murder in Matera"

Helene Stapinski began her career at her hometown newspaper, The Jersey Journal. She is the author of the memoirs Five-Finger Discount: A Crooked Family History and Baby Plays Around: A Love Affair, with Music. Her essays have appeared in several anthologies, most recently, Drinking Diaries: Women Serve Their Stories Straight Up. Stapinski has also written extensively for The New York Times, for Travel & Leisure, Food & Wine, Salon, Real Simple, New York magazine and dozens of other newspapers, magazines and blogs. She’s been featured on NPR’s All Things Considered, The Today Show and as a performer with The Moth main stage.

Stapinski applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Murder In Matera: A True Story of Passion, Family, and Forgiveness in Southern Italy, and reported the following:

Page 99 is a turning point in the book. After ten years, I finally decide to return to Southern Italy and take another stab at finding the family murder, the first crime we know of from the 1800s. I had gone ten years earlier, but couldn't find the story, primarily because I had my four year old and one year old with me. Doing serious research with small children is impossible. Once the children were grown, I decided to go back. Alone. For a month. And this passage describes everything I had to do to prepare for re-entry.

The page starts mid sentence. As if getting ready to give birth, for the next eight months "...I prepped and researched and hunkered down for the blessed event." This is a perfect line to hit on, since much of the book deals with motherhood and genetics: Whether or not crime is passed down through genes (my family has a long history of crime). What a mother will do to protect her children and escape a place like Bernalda (like my great great grandmother, Vita did after the murder). Even the name of the book (and the province in which it takes place) is derived from the word Mater -- which means mother.

The page ends with me telling my mother I'm going back to Southern Italy. "I could hear the disapproval and worry in her voice. What kind of Italian mother left her kids behind for a month? Now I was slightly sickened by the thought. I didn't eat on the day of my departure, though the refrigerator and freezer were crammed..."

Whenever I leave home, whether it's for a weekend or several weeks, I feel compelled to cook large vats of sauce and meatballs, bake lasagnas and freeze stews, soups and various family favorites. My family makes fun of me, but whenever I come back home, everything is eaten. Everything.

Visit Helene Stapinski's website.

Writers Read: Helene Stapinski.

My Book, The Movie: Murder In Matera.

--Marshal Zeringue

Steven Weitzman's "The Origin of the Jews"

Steven Weitzman is the Abraham M. Ellis Professor of Hebrew and Semitic Languages and Literatures and Ella Darivoff Director of the Herbert D. Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. His books include Solomon: The Lure of Wisdom and Surviving Sacrilege: Cultural Persistence in Jewish Antiquity.

Weitzman applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, The Origin of the Jews: The Quest for Roots in a Rootless Age, and reported the following:

As it happens, page 99 registers an important transition point in the book. To explain, let me offer a few words about the book’s larger goals.

Many Jews—and Christians too— assume they know how the Jews originated. The story of the Jews, we are taught, begins with the story of Abraham, Jacob, and Moses. Over the last 3 centuries or so, however, scholars have come to challenge that narrative, just as scientists challenged the biblical account of creation. I realized that no one had pulled all the research together into a single account, and bringing the reader into all that research was my main objective in this book.

But I had another goal too. One reason it is difficult to pinpoint the origin of the Jews is that it isn’t exactly clear what an origin is, and that fascinated me. Origins are like time—the more one thinks about them, the more puzzling they become. I saw this project as a chance to think about what origins are and how scholars go about finding them.

Page 99 comes at the end of a chapter called “Roots and Rootlessness” which explores how scholars have tried to use linguistics—and more specifically the root letters of the word “Hebrew”—to retrieve the pre-biblical ancestors from which the Israelites are thought to have originated. Scholars would go on to use other methods to investigate the origin of the Jews—archaeology, psychology, genetics—but etymology, the search for the origin of names, was one of the first to be applied to the question.

If the use of “linguistic paleontology” to understand the origin of the Jews wasn’t entirely successful in the end, it is not just because there was so little evidence to work with but also because many scholars have turned away from the concept of origin that informed this kind of research, a kind of genealogical thinking that aims to explain the characteristics of a living people by tracing it back to a distant ancestor who is thought to have bequeathed his qualities to all his descendants. Page 99 is part of a description of how this method has fallen into disfavor, and what it illustrates is how earlier scholars’ optimism about their ability to recover origins—linguistic and ethnological—has given way to skepticism about origins and about the kind of scholarship that claims to be able to retrieve it.

Learn more about The Origin of the Jews at the Princeton University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Benjamin Heber Johnson's "Escaping the Dark, Gray City"

Benjamin Heber Johnson is Associate Professor of History at Loyola University Chicago and the co-editor of the Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. His books include Revolution in Texas: How a Forgotten Rebellion and Its Bloody Suppression Turned Mexicans Into Americans (2003) and Bordertown: Odyssey of an American Place (2008).

Johnson applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Escaping the Dark, Gray City: Fear and Hope in Progressive-Era Conservation, and reported the following:

From page 99:

Dana Bartlett’s Los Angeles, like most American cities, and perhaps even more so, did not follow his advice. Private property, not a municipal plan or government, determined the metropolis’s explosive growth in subsequent decades. City fathers set aside very little park space. Later generations of the very Angelenos on whose behalf Bartlett labored so much—its recently arrived immigrants, congregating in the urban core, out of easy reach of the beach and mountain retreats—ended up the most deprived of regular contact with the larger rhythms of nature. The Los Angeles River, which Bartlett and other conservationists envisioned as a key public space and environmental amenity became, in the nature writer Jennifer Price’s words, “an outsize open sewer that carved a no-man’s-land through many of the city’s most fragmented and park-starved areas.”

The burying of a once vibrant vision of urban environmental reform is the subject of page 99 of my book. In the late twentieth century, the city of Los Angeles had become the epitome of many of the nation’s environmental ills. Chained to their cars and highways, Angelenos drowned in smog, with the city’s poor out of reach of the beach and mountain retreats available to the wealthy.

It wasn’t always so. Ford Madox Ford’s page 99 test works for my book, more or less, because one of its main ambitions is to show how powerful urban conservation was in early twentieth century cities, including Los Angeles. Page 99 is the downbeat to a more optimistic take on the conservation movement. Many of us remember Gifford Pinchot and John Muir as the apostles of environmental enlightenment in this period, but who has heard of Dana Bartlett or Mira Lloyd Dock? The Reverend Dana Bartlett, a prominent civic leader in the Los Angeles of the 1910s and 20s, was a remarkable environmental thinker and activist who urged the city’s leaders to mandate extensive parks and playgrounds so that that all of the city’s residents had access to nature. He wanted the Los Angeles river to be a ribbon connecting the city and giving citizens a sense of a shared place and purpose.

Bartlett’s plans, like many Progressive measures, ran headlong into the power of real estate interests, as described on this page. Looking at what L.A. became decades later, it was easy to forget that it had been a seedbed of innovative environmental ideas. But decades later, as health and environmental conditions became intolerable – and the Los Angeles river became a huge open sewer whose only purpose seemed to be the filming of iconic chase scenes from Greased Lightning and Terminator -- local environmental activists began proposing many of the same measures.

Today, as efforts to meet such environmental challenges as climate change are again stymied by vested economic interests, perhaps excavating this past can help us understand our current predicament.

Learn more about Escaping the Dark, Gray City at the Yale University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pierre-André Chiappori's "Matching with Transfers"

Pierre-André Chiappori is the E. Rowan and Barbara Steinschneider Professor of Economics at Columbia University and a Distinguished Fellow at the Becker Friedman Institute for Research in Economics at the University of Chicago.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Matching with Transfers: The Economics of Love and Marriage, and reported the following:

From page 99:

A striking feature of historical matching patterns is that even when traditional households are the dominant form of household organization, we do not observe strong negative assortative matching patterns. One possible explanation is that domestic production includes not only simple chores, but also raising children, and the parents’ human capital stocks are important inputs in the latter process. Such a feature may actually restore positive assortative matching; I will come back later to this very important issue.

This excerpt from page 99 of the book summarizes one of the main issues I discuss, namely the links between the economic role of the family and the matching patterns observed on what economists call the ‘marriage market’. Back in the 70s, the dominant model of family organization was based on strict specialization, one spouse (usually the husband) being the breadwinner and working full time on the labor market while the other specializes in domestic work. The explosion of this ‘traditional’ model is due to several causes, from technological progress in domestic production (what some economists have called ‘engines of liberation’, from the dishwasher to the microwave) to the spectacular increase in female education (in the recent generations, more women than men receive a university degree). In the book, I argue that another factor plays a crucial role in explaining recent evolutions – namely, the increased importance of education and human capital in modern societies. While fertility has always been a major motivation for family formation, the level of time, effort and resources spent on children’s education, especially at the top of the income distribution, is unprecedented.

Our models predict that this evolution should result in a higher tendency to marry ‘assortatively’ (i.e., a spouse with a similar level of human capital), particularly for educated people. This prediction is well supported by the data, although the empirical evaluation of these effects is technically challenging; actually, a significant part of the book is devoted to such methodological issues. Importantly, it raises the risk of an ‘inequality spiral’, whereby children from a privileged background receive more and better education, intermarry, and invest massively in their own children’s human capital, generating even more inequality (in income, in human capital, and more importantly in opportunities) for the next generation. It also points to the importance of early interventions: a policy aimed at reducing inequality should primarily provide children from disadvantaged backgrounds with better support during the first years of their life.

Learn more about Matching with Transfers at the Princeton University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Claire D. Clark's "The Recovery Revolution"

Claire D. Clark is an assistant professor of Behavioral Science in the College of Medicine at the University of Kentucky, secondarily appointed in the Department of History, and associated with the Program for Bioethics. Dual trained as an historian of medicine (PhD) and behavioral scientist (MPH), today she spends most of her time integrating these disciplinary perspectives into health professions education.

Clark's research explores the contested medicalization of socially unacceptable behaviors over time. Her first book, The Recovery Revolution: The Battle Over Addiction Treatment in the United States, traces therapeutic community activists' influence on addiction treatment since the 1960s.

Clark applied the “Page 99 Test” to The Recovery Revolution and reported the following:

The Recovery Revolution describes how a group of self-described "ex-addicts" helped build the addiction treatment industry beginning in the 1960s. Before the treatment revolution, therapeutic options for drug addiction were limited to a few hospitals and correctional facilities. Revolutionaries helped create a controversial peer-led treatment model called the "therapeutic community." They attracted powerful supporters in both business and government, and their moral treatment philosophy had an outsized influence on the treatment system that developed in the decades that followed.

Essentially, the book argues that although a radical change in addiction treatment was necessary in the 1960s, these ex-addict revolutionaries made a kind of Faustian bargain in order to accomplish their goal: their successful campaigns for new treatment options reinforced dehumanizing stereotypes about people who used drugs- stereotypes that recovery activists today are still struggling to transcend.

Page 99 of the book describes a schism that occurred at the therapeutic community Daytop in 1968. Some of the organization's members wanted to expand the community's mission from drug treatment to leftist social revolution, and the organization split along political lines. The upheaval was historically significant for a couple reasons. First, many of the ex-addicts who left Daytop founded other therapeutic communities and contributed to the spread of the therapeutic model. Second, the way Daytop reigned in leftist radicalism in 1968 foreshadows how the politics of the therapeutic community model would come to be associated with social conservatism in the 1970s and 1980s.

Visit Claire D. Clark's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Christopher J. Fuller's "See It/Shoot It"

Christopher J. Fuller is lecturer in modern American history in the faculty of humanities at the University of Southampton.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, See It/Shoot It: The Secret History of the CIA’s Lethal Drone Program, and reported the following:

Opening up to page 99 drops the reader straight into one of the many controversial debates around U.S. counterterrorism policy covered in the book. It explores the aftermath of Operation El Dorado Canyon, an American bombing raid launched against Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi in retaliation for his connection to the bombing of a nightclub in West Berlin frequented by U.S. service personnel in 1986.

The Reagan administration’s use of a large-scale bombing raid was controversial for a number of reasons. First, despite his tough rhetoric, the bombing marked the first time Reagan had directly authorized the use of military force in retaliation for a terrorist attack. This decision is still significant today as it marks the first time the United States shifted from treating terrorism as a criminal offense to a matter of national security.

Second, as the page reveals, the investigative journalist Seymour Hersh later uncovered evidence that members of Reagan’s National Security Council (NSC) had ordered the U.S. Air Force bombers to target Gaddafi’s personal residence in an attempt to kill the Libyan dictator. In targeting a head of state, the Reagan administration had technically acted in breach of international law, and Reagan’s own Executive Order 12333 (EO12333). A restatement of Gerald Ford’s Executive Order 11905, signed in the aftermath of the Church Committee’s investigations into CIA wrongdoing, Reagan’s order barred U.S. forces from engaging in any act that could be construed as political assassination. EO12333 is still in place today, although the United States’ counterterrorism efforts have long since evolved legally, with the U.S. authorizing targeted killings of members of terrorist groups based upon the state of non-international armed conflict America now argues it is in. This reveals that while the counterterrorism objective has very much remained the same – the elimination of terrorist leaders and their sponsors – the legal language and approach to this has become significantly more nuanced.

The final point of continued relevance covered on page 99 is the reason Gaddafi survived. Despite the aggression of launching a bombing raid on Libya’s capital, the United States went to significant lengths to try to limit civilian casualties. The bombers were fitted with state of the art laser-guidance systems — a precursor to the precision strike technology utilized for today’s drone strikes. On the night of the raid, these systems malfunctioned on four of the nine aircraft tasked with attacking Gaddafi’s compound. As the Rules of Engagement — written to limit collateral damage — stated any aircraft that was not 100 percent functional was to be withdrawn, these bombers never dropped their payloads, and Gaddafi’s compound was spared the sixteen two-thousand pound bombs they carried. Post-strike photography revealed a line of craters leading right to his home. Had the additional munitions been employed it is unlikely the dictator would have survived. In the end, the very technology designed to allow the U.S. to more accurately eliminate its foes saved Gaddafi’s life. Furthermore, despite these efforts the raid still killed dozens of Libyan civilians, revealing the enduring problem of utilizing military tools against terrorists who hide among innocent citizens.

It is apt that page 99 discusses the Gadaffi raid. As this book goes on to reveal, the failure of this raid, and the high collateral damage it incurred played a key role in inspiring the CIA to seek a more precise method of eliminating those responsible for prosecuting terrorism against the United States. That pursuit would eventually inspire the very technology that would evolve into the armed drones that have become so integral to the United States continued pursuit of security against terrorist threats.

Learn more about See It/Shoot It at the Yale University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Wayne Franklin's "James Fenimore Cooper: The Later Years"

Wayne Franklin is professor of English at the University of Connecticut, Storrs. His biography James Fenimore Cooper: The Early Years was selected as an Outstanding Academic Title in 2008 by the AAUP and Choice magazine.

Franklin applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, James Fenimore Cooper: The Later Years, and reported the following:

This page in James Fenimore Cooper: The Later Years concerns an episode during Cooper’s European sojourn (1826-1833). After producing six books in as many years in New York, Cooper had gone abroad as the first internationally famous American novelist. Almost against his better judgment, he soon became entangled in the tumultuous politics of post-Napoleonic Europe. At this particular moment in the story (December 1830), he has just arranged a “grand dinner” among his fellow ex-pats in Paris to celebrate the Marquis de Lafayette’s seemingly triumphant role in a political uprising that began late the previous July and promised welcome liberal reforms for France. Cooper’s toast to Lafayette was unusually warm. Having specified the services Lafayette had performed not only for France but also for the U.S. during its own Revolution, the novelist proclaimed that his countrymen of course had deep respect and admiration for the idealistic nobleman. But their feelings went deeper. “Gentlemen,” Cooper added with an unusual show of public affection, “we love him.” Almost immediately, as Cooper’s report to a New York newspaper continued, the eighty Americans present jumped to their feet as if they “had but one soul and delivered nine such cheers as have rarely been heard within the walls of Paris.” When the uproar subsided, Cooper said, “Yes, gentlemen, and we have reasons to love him,” and once more the assembly burst into loud applause. The elation, though, was to be short-lived. Within a few days, the new monarch whom Lafayette had helped place at the head of a hopeful new republican state, the seemingly liberal Louis Philippe, dismissed the old statesman from his role as head of the National Guard and cynically tightened his own hands on the reins of power. The latest French revolution thus came to an ignominious end.

Learn more about James Fenimore Cooper: The Later Years at the Yale University Press website.

Writers Read: Wayne Franklin.

--Marshal Zeringue

Daniel Brückenhaus's "Policing Transnational Protest"

Daniel Brückenhaus is Assistant Professor of History at Beloit College. He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Policing Transnational Protest: Liberal Imperialism and the Surveillance of Anticolonialists in Europe, 1905-1945, and reported the following:

Page 99 tells the story of how, in 1919 and 1920, French officials decided to send secret agents into Germany, to observe the political activities of Cameroonian immigrants living there. The French were especially worried about one of these Cameroonians, Martin Dibobe. As an informant had told them, Dibobe had agreed to a deal with the German government to carry out an anti-French campaign in his African home country. A former German colony, most of Cameroon had just been given to France as a League of Nations mandate after the German defeat in World War I.

This story brings together several main themes of my book. First, it shows the high level of pro-colonial surveillance in Europe during the first half of the twentieth century. Second, it illustrates the fact that much of this surveillance was carried out across inner-European borders, often as a result of anti-colonial activists moving from one European country to the next.

Third, the events described on page 99 also illuminate the importance of French fears of Germans (and communists) secretly steering the growing anti-colonial movements directed against the Western empires. However, as becomes clear in the book, French officials severely under-estimated the agency of activists such as Dibobe. It was true that Dibobe had been in touch with the German government. However, it was in fact him who had initiated contact with the German authorities; and in return for his offer of carrying out pro-German propaganda he had made wide-ranging demands. These included the promise of reforms in Cameroon if it were to return to German rule, which would have given Africans a status much more equal to that of Europeans living in the colony, including them being accepted as Germans. Far from mere German puppets, Dibobe and other African activists therefore negotiated their national allegiances in independent and strategic ways.

Over time, the Cameroonians, disappointed with the German authorities’ unwillingness to acknowledge them as Germans, increasingly turned to a more radical, left-wing form of anti-colonialism. As described in later chapters of the book, they sometimes cooperated with organizations such as the League Against Imperialism, founded in 1927, which had its headquarters in Berlin. In the German capital, they worked together with local Indian and Egyptian activists in developing an inherently cosmopolitan vision of fighting colonialism on a global scale, and thus helped lay the foundations for the world-wide wave of decolonization after 1945.

Learn more about Policing Transnational Protest at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Peter S. Ungar's "Evolution’s Bite"

Peter S. Ungar is Distinguished Professor of Anthropology and Director of the Environmental Dynamics Program at the University of Arkansas.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Evolution's Bite: A Story of Teeth, Diet, and Human Origins, and reported the following:

From page 99:

Cerling was an undergraduate majoring in geology and chemistry at Iowa State University in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The geology department there at the time was on the rise, with a fresh infusion of creative and energetic young scholars like Carl Vondra, who studied the accumulation of sediments at fossil hominin sites. And the chemistry department was keen on students double majoring. Harry Svec, an alumnus of the Manhattan Project, was at the time pioneering new approaches to combining chemistry and geology. Cerling took full advantage of the opportunities that Iowa State had to offer and managed to score an invitation to help map sediments on the eastern shore of Kenya’s Lake Rudolf (now Lake Turkana). The hominin fossil rush in eastern Africa was starting to heat up, and there was much to do to understand the geology of the new sites. What he learned in those early years about geochemistry and tracing deposits across the landscape would serve him well into the future.

Cerling continued to work in Kenya through the 1970s during his graduate school years at Berkeley. His passion was the chemistry of sediments, and he began to collect the popcorn-like calcium carbonate nodules that accumulated over time at the sites. He spent months each year walking the deposits, gathering samples from each of the layers that had produced fossil hominins. It was blistering work, tracing layers of rock and sediment mile after mile, day after day, across the hot and dusty badlands on the eastern edge of the lake. The search took him up, down, and around erosional gullies and barren hills broken only by the occasional bush or acacia tree. I’ve always been jealous of geologists who can look out over a desolate landscape and see the past. Rocks and dirt become ancient streambeds, river deltas, and lake shorelines in their mind’s eye. Cerling knew exactly where to sample.

Page 99 of Evolution’s Bite presents the story of Thure Cerling, an important figure in paleoclimate research. He is a founding father of the use of chemical signatures in soils to reconstruct past environments. And his work provided pivotal evidence used to trace the spread of savannas across eastern Africa millions of years ago. This helps us understand the conditions under which our hominin ancestors evolved, those that triggered human origins.

Is page 99 representative of Evolution’s Bite as a whole? Yes and no. The book starts with the premise that we hold in our mouths the legacy of our evolution. The basic idea is that we can use teeth, living and fossil, along with an understanding of climate variation over deep time and how animals earn a living from their surroundings, to understand how a changing world made us human. It begins with the earliest mammals, during the age of the dinosaurs, and takes the reader from milestone to milestone -- our early, apish ancestors, the first humans, the origins of agriculture.

The text on page 99 has nothing to do with teeth and it has nothing to do with human evolution per se. But it does provide a piece to the puzzle. Evolution’s Bite builds the case, bit by bit, bringing together evidence from paleontology, primatology, climate research, archaeology, and myriad other disciplines. And it brings the tale to life through the stories of the scientists, and by peering over their shoulders as they made the discoveries that gave us the knowledge we have today.

Learn more about Evolution's Bite at the Princeton University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue