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KLMNO Book World EVOLUTION REVIEW BY DEBORAH BLUM
In this dance, one species always leads
ALMOST CHIMPANZEE Searching for What Makes Us Human, in Rainforests, Labs, Sanctuaries, and Zoos By Jon Cohen Times. 369 pp. $27.50
D
uring the early 1920s, the pioneering primatologist Robert Yerkes kept two young chimpanzees — cleverly named Chim and
Panzee — at his home to observe them in a human environment. He became particularly attached to Chim (later identified as a bonobo), admiring the animal’s obvious intelli- gence and generous nature. When Panzee became ill, Chim actively tried to comfort and care for her. Yerkes de- scribed this behavior in a 1925 book he titled “Almost Human,” although he admitted that he worried about “idealizing an ape.” It has been years, decades really, since researchers worried about ideal- izing chimpanzees or emphasizing their similarities to ourselves. The shift is largely credited to the field- work and educational activism of an- other pioneering scientist, Jane Good- all. Indeed, as Jon Cohen points out in his gently provocative new book, “Al- most Chimpanzee,” the conservation- minded Goodall deliberately dwelled on people-parallels. “She believed that a critical mass of humans would most likely come to her cause if they imag- ined their own hands reaching for the curl of a chimpanzee’s finger.” But today, Cohen suggests, it may be time to dwell again on our differ- ences. Chimpanzees are well estab- lished as our closest cousins on Earth; some research sets the genetic differ- ence at a mere 1 percent. On the other hand, even that slight deviation set us on widely divergent evolutionary paths and, in the end, provided only one species with real power over life on Earth. “Humans will determine the fate of chimpanzees,” Cohen notes. “Chimpanzees of course will have no say in the fate of humans.” Cohen’s book, then, is a meticulous
exploration of how both small quirks and large kinks in biology and culture led to such different destinations. He searches for the best evidence of when human and chimpanzee ances- tors first separated — usually fixed at about 5 million years ago — and whether it was a genuinely dramatic break. He mulls over why small ge- netic variances have such enormous impact, leading him into a wonder- fully weird discussion of whether hu- man-chimpanzee hybrids are possi- ble — a notion dubbed “humanzees” by some researchers. In a chapter called “Carnal Knowl- edge,” Cohen delves further into hu-
man vs. chimpanzee reproduction, comparing everything from essential body parts to fertility issues. For in- stance, while healthy human males produce an average of 66 million sperm per milliliter, chimpanzees ap- parently clock in closer to an average of 2.5 billion. “Logically enough, high- er sperm counts require larger testi- cles,” he writes, citing evidence that the ratio is 3 to 1 in favor of chimps. A longtime correspondent for the journal Science, Cohen has a gift for unearthing small and telling details. At the same time, he occasionally falls into a research-publication style of storytelling that undermines his ef- fectiveness. When I read a sentence
LAUREN NASSEF
3 books about food
Foodies have it pretty good these days. Farmers mar-
kets abound. Reality TV shows serve up every conceivable kitchen-related scenario. A bounty of new culinary books comes out each year, from gloriously illustrated cook- books to engaging reads on where food really comes from, how it’s processed and why you shouldn’t be eating so much of it. Here are three that caught our eye.
1
“Eating for Beginners: An Education in the Pleasures of Food From Chefs, Farmers, and One Picky Kid,” by
Melanie Rehak (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $25) After reading Eric Schlosser’s
“Fast Food Nation” and Michael Pollan’s “The Omnivore’s Dilem- ma,” Melanie Rehak, an avid cook, began to think differently about food and her relation to it. But those books’ tenets could be confusing and often downright inconvenient, if not impossible to follow. Organic? Local? What do those labels actually mean? And then it hit her — in an amusing Cheerios moment — that her son
was just reaching that stage when he would start eating solid foods, a hefty responsibility for any parent. For Re- hak, armed with her new food savvy, it was intimidating. Her solution, and the book’s delightful premise, was to don a chef’s apron in the kitchen at Applewood, a Brook- lyn restaurant dedicated to sustainable agriculture and lo- cally grown produce. She lent a hand on local farms and a fishing trawler that supply the restaurant. And she came to her own conclusions about food and doing the right thing for both her son and the planet. Ironically, it turned out he didn’t want to eat anything at all, whether organic or packed with artificial sweeteners, which gives the jour- ney a charming twist. The recipes at each chapter’s end are a bonus: Don’t miss the Easy Flip Raisin French Toast.
in the planet’s history. There’s a terrific section on life ex-
pectancy built around the evolution- ary biology work of University of Utah anthropologist Kristen Hawkes that neatly connects everything from chimpanzee menopause to the role of elderly females in hunter-gatherer so- cieties. And there’s a fascinating look at the importance of cooking food, which allowed early humans to spend less energy sleepily digesting their dinners and more, apparently, devis- ing a route to world domination. All of this leads to the ever-troubling question of what comes next. Many scientists working with chimpanzees in labs find their studies restricted or too expensive to maintain over the long term. And many conducting field research wonder how much longer the animals will last as a wild species, be- cause of habitat loss, poaching and the notorious African bush meat trade. One scientist Cohen interviewed pre- dicted that within 50 years, only cap- tive chimpanzees will be left alive, al- most entirely because of the activities of their human cousins. Out of this gathering cloud of dis-
such as “Surface molecules on chim- panzee erythrocytes, in contrast, have loads of Neu5Gc and a sprinkling of Neu5Ac,” I tend to look for my science dictionary rather than marvel over the facts in question. But “Almost Chimpanzee” is not in- tended as a literary meditation on our place in the natural world (I had somewhat expected that based on the searching-for-ourselves implication of the subtitle). It is, instead, a briskly written, clear-headed survey of re- search that looks at the innate differ- ences between two closely linked spe- cies, never forgetting that one of those species — at least for now — stands as the most successful primate
may comes one of my favorite quota- tions in the book, a description of a dedicated and cynical conservationist. “He’s seen so many disgusting people,” explains one of his friends, “and so few disgusting chimps.” It’s not meant to be a measure of all humans, but it defi- nitely works as a measure of how far we’ve come from Yerkes’s time, when a scientist might hesitate to idealize apes but never ourselves.
bookworld@washpost.com
Deborah Blum is a Pulitzer-Prize winning science writer and the author of two books about primate research, “The Monkey Wars” and “Love at Goon Park.”
2
“Immortal Milk: Adventures in Cheese,” by Eric Le- May (Free Press, $22)
What’s that smell? If you’re re-
ferring to a particularly pungent cheese, chances are Eric LeMay will know exactly what it is. After all, he has crisscrossed the globe, accompanied by his female friend Chuck, in search of unique and exceptional cheeses, unraveling the classifications of curd, texture, rind and age, and meeting passionate cheesemak- ers who revel in their craft. LeMay aims to encourage readers to
delve into the world of cheese without trepidation, even supplying a helpful gazetteer of cheese sources and a chart for pairing food and cheese fearlessly. Try that Lim- burger, chèvre, Rocamadour or Gouda, and remember Le- May’s contention that all cheese really means to please. Just don’t dwell on the fact that it’s essentially rotting milk.
3
“The I Hate to Cook Book: 50th Anniversary Edi- tion,” by Peg Bracken (Grand Central, $22.99)
First published in those “Mad
Men” days when women were of- ten consigned to cleaning the house and arranging their hus- bands’ business dinners, this book’s strident title belies both its usefulness and its popularity. Peg Bracken faced the burden of being a full-time writer, a full-time mother and a full-time house- wife. To buy herself a bit more time for other pursuits, she and her friends collected a host of
easy, stress-free recipes. What’s truly wonderful is Brack- en’s droll delivery and the more than 200 recipes that run the gamut from appetizers to desserts. With millions of copies sold, the book clearly found a ready and willing au- dience, and it’s about to be tested all over again. This edi- tion has a foreword from the author’s daughter, Jo Brack- en (her mother died in 2007), as well as whimsical illustra- tions by Hilary Knight. The opening of the book’s original introduction is priceless: “Some women, it is said, like to cook. This book is not for them.”
—Christopher Schoppa
schoppac@washpost.com
SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 12, 2010
HISTORY REVIEW BY WILLIAM STUECK Six decades later, the fog of war still lingers I
THE KOREAN WAR A History
By Bruce Cumings Modern Library 288 pp. $24
n 1981, Bruce Cumings, now a professor of history at the Uni- versity of Chicago, became a hero to left-wing thinkers in the United States and South Korea
with the publication of the first vol- ume of his massive study on the ori- gins of the Korean War. His arguments that the war originated in conflicts in- ternal to the peninsula and that, dur- ing its occupation, the United States consistently favored repressive right- wing forces that had collaborated with the Japanese gained currency with a range of scholars. The volume remains aclassic in the literature on the Korean War. Since 1981, Cumings has written widely on Korean history and the international politics of northeast Asia, but he has never matched the quality of his first book. His latest, “The Korean War,” does not break that pattern. Written for the general public, the volume begins with a chronological survey of the war’s headline events, from the mili- tary attack of June 25, 1950, by the So- viet-sponsored communist regime in North Korea on the U.S.-sponsored
regime in South Korea to the armi- stice on July 27, 1953. It then provides a series of topical chapters on the civil conflict in Korea before the war, the brutality of the war itself and memo- ries of the war, or lack thereof, in the United States, Korea and Japan. While Cumings offers insights into the perspectives of North Korean leaders and South Koreans of a pro- gressive stripe, his account falters in other areas. Most important, Cumings displays a limited grasp of sources that have emergedsince he published his second volume on the war’s origins in 1990. Since then an enormous number of government documents have become available on the roles of the United States, the Soviet Union and China in the origins, course and impact of the war, and historians have produced a substantial new literature devoted to interpreting them. For example, in “Undermining the Kremlin: America’s Strategy to Subvert the Soviet Bloc, 1947-1956,” Gregory Mitrovich demon- strates that George F. Kennan’s version of containment during 1948 and 1949
was not limited to Western Europe and Japan, as Cumings suggests. Mi- trovich and others have demonstrated that the Kennan-drafted National Se- curity Council Document 48 provided the rationale for an active if non- military campaign to roll back Soviet power. Cumings’s apparent unfamil- iarity with this revelation leads him to misinterpret the evolution of American views on the nature of the Soviet threat. Cumings also ignores evidence from archives in China and Russia that sheds light on the lead-up to North Korea’s invasion of the South. Cumings lays emphasis on a Chinese role in the attack, but newly released documents show that Beijing was largely left out of the prewar plan- ning while Moscow was intimately involved. Cumings’s assertion that the Repub-
lic of Korea government in the South was “in total disarray” on the eve of the North Korean attack ignores or plays down the fact that it had recently de- feated the guerrilla movement below the 38th parallel and implemented im-
portant measures to control inflation and advance land reform. Cumings dwells on the failures of South Korea’s army during the war, totally ignoring the contribution the army made to the defense of the Pusan Perimeter and its manning by mid-1952 of more than 50 percent of the front line on the United Nations side. Cumings makes some striking omissions, too. He spends
In the sense that it left Korea divided and in a tense state that has lasted to this day, he is right. In other ways, though, he is wide of the mark, as fighting never resumed on a large scale, the Republic of Korea was saved, and the Western alliance grew and armed itself in a manner that made a great-power confrontation less likely. For readers desiring a sermon on the
Cumings declares that the Korean War was “all for naught.”
considerable space on such topics as the North Korean perspective and American atrocities from 1950 to 1953. He fails, however, to explain U.S. policy during the occupation or describe the eventual emergence of the Republic of Korea as a prosperous and democratic state that contrasts dramatically with North Korea, an economic basketcase under a brutal regime. Not surprisingly, Cumings declares
that the Korean War was “all for naught” and that it “solved nothing.”
shortcomings of the United States in Korea from World War II to the pre- sent, this book is a must read. Those wanting an up-to-date account of the war in all its complexity should look elsewhere.
bookworld@washpost.com
William Stueck is the author of, among other works, “The Korean War: An International History” and “Rethinking the Korean War.”
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