![]() ![]() ![]() When finally revealed to the public, Ardi stunned scientists around the world and challenged a half-century of orthodoxy about human evolution-how we started walking upright, how we evolved our nimble hands, and, most significantly, whether we were descended from an ancestor that resembled today’s chimpanzee. Radiometric dating of nearby rocks indicated the resulting skeleton, classified as Ardipithecus ramidus-nicknamed “Ardi”-was an astounding 4.4 million years old, more than a million years older than the world-famous “Lucy.” The team spent the next 15 years studying the bones in strict secrecy, all while continuing to rack up landmark fossil discoveries in the field and becoming increasingly ensnared in bitter disputes with scientific peers and Ethiopian bureaucrats. It is the ultimate mystery: where do we come from? In 1994, a team led by fossil-hunting legend Tim White uncovered a set of ancient bones in Ethiopia’s Afar region. A work of staggering depth." -Minneapolis Star TribuneĪ decade in the making, Fossil Men is a scientific detective story played out in anatomy and the natural history of the human body: the first full-length account of the discovery of a startlingly unpredicted human ancestor more than a million years older than Lucy In this, he is every bit as good as the best scientist writers." -New York Times Book Review (Editors' Choice) ![]() ![]() Pattison's uncanny ability to write evocatively about science. Genre: Life Sciences,Books,Science & Nature,. ![]()
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![]() ![]() The life of Ambros Adelwarth describes a more colorful but no less destructive arc as the young manservant (the narrator's great uncle) finds employment with one of the most prominent ÇmigrÇ families in New York. ![]() ![]() Similarly, Paul Bereyter, the narrator's retired and reclusive grade-school teacher, ends his life by lying down in front of a train, prompting his ex-pupil to explore his past, discovering Bereyter's consuming and destructive relationship with Nazism. Soon after this confession, he shoots himself. In a unique confessional moment, this friendly if distant neighbor reveals his lower-class Lithuanian origins and the process of his assimilation into British society, which in his retirement he finds increasingly foreign. Selwyn, whom the narrator meets in the garden of an English country house. Bending each narrative into a form of personal reminiscence, complete with photographs woven into the text, the tribulation of each elusive subject is patiently uncovered by the narrator, starting with old Dr. ![]() An evocative work by a prize-winning German author, now England-based, consists of four distinct stories of Jewish emigration over the last century: in each piece, not only the personal drama but the zeitgeist of the occasion is cannily, compellingly revealed. ![]() ![]() ![]() In addition to being an analytic assessment tool, the SUCCES list also works as an inventional aid – when crafting messages in any media for any context, authors can turn to the list to ensure that they are, for example, using the right kind of story for their purposes, and that they are not falling victim to the two biggest sticky idea villains: “The Curse of Knowledge” and “burying the lead.” Heath & Heath sum up the core of their book like this: “There are two steps in making your ideas sticky – Step 1 is to find the core, and Step 2 is to translate the core using the SUCCES checklist” (28).Īlthough their methodology for generating the list is severely flawed (i.e. The SUCCES “checklist” thus emerges as a tool people can use to evaluate the stickiness of ideas. proverbs, Chicken Soup for the Soul), and extrapolated 6 traits that all seemed to share. ![]() Although they don’t go into any depth about their methodology, the brothers essentially did a content analysis of things they considered to be sticky (e.g. ![]() Brothers Chip and Dan Heath set out to answer the question of what makes ideas “sticky” (memorable + actionable) in this engaging book. ![]() |