Lets face it fame is fickle and fleeting. This book was once a best seller from famed anthropologist Richard Leaky. The lake is Turkana and the time is fifteen million years ago.
This book covers Leakey's finds and his interpretation of such finds. There is s small black and white glossy section that displays the lake and several ancestors (including Australopithecus.)
The table of contents is:

People of the Lake
A question of survival
In the Beginning
A New Perspective on Human origins

The Human Family Unearthed
Lessons from Bones and Stones
An Ancient way of life
The first Affluent society
The nature of Intelligence
The Origins of Language
Sex and the need for Women's Liberation
An End to the Hunting Hypothesis

As you can see this is not just a book about bones. He also quotes a lot of Freud. So I do not know why this book fell out of favor. However it makes for some good background reading.

ITs essential to read this book, in order to get a good handle on paleontology, anthropology ,and sociological phenomenon. Really explains alot about humankind.

This book is a very interesting book. It talks about the past five major extinctions in the past, and how the Earth's organisms that survive rebound. Today, there is more species diversity than ever before, but we find ourselves in another mass extiction: one caused by humans. This book explains how humans are throwing nature into chaos, and Leakey gives insight to get humans back on track to peace with nature.

The Sixth Extinction by Richard Leakey outlined the five past major extinctions in the history of the Earth and the trends toward a sixth extinction of the Homo Sapien species. Leakey emphasized negative effects humans have on species diversity. He also stressed the importance of species diversity in the stability of ecosystems. With 30,000 species going extinct every year, humans are having adverse effects on the life on Earth, and eventually it will effect the human race. The book was intuitive and tied together wonderfully with references to many studies and research by various other scientists and philosophers.

This 1995 book by Leakey and Lewin, although very well written, ultimately proved to be somewhat of a disappointment to me. It is not that I disagree with any particular thesis in the book, as much as that I've read it all elsewhere. Those well read in Stephen Jay Gould, Richard Dawkins, or David Raup will find nothing new here; which is not to say that the message does not bear repeating to the world. Leakey and Lewin observe that the current worldwide extinction rate of species equals that of various Mass Extinctions of geologic history. Their point is that we are experiencing, and will continue to experience a loss of bio-diversity that will have profound consequences for humanity. In order to establish this thesis, they give a brief review of the history of life on this planet, the rise of Darwinism, Uniformitarianism, and now Neo-Catastrophism. The extent and nature of past Mass Extinctions are examined, along with various theories as to their cause. They continue with a discussion on ecology and the current loss of species, bio-diversity, etc. Through the bulk of this book are scattered frequent refernces to the thinking of various authors, pro and con. One gets the creepy sensation that one is reading a college book report. The sole chapter of original contribution by Leakey himself (i.e. not a paraphrase of what he has read elsewhere) is that of today's plight of the modern elephant. While not a matter of pressing concern to the average person, it is symptomatic of the problem at large which is (or should be!) of concern to us all. This book thus serves as a compilation of alarm messages sounded by many others, and as such ought to serve a useful function. Leakey, who has had an active role in efforts to save the elephant, is exquisitely sensitive to the needs of expanding human population; but the book then breaks down in it's concluding pages by viewing the main problem to be that of ecology and species loss. It is that, of course, but the root causes and possible solutions are not simple. While the authors do note the exponential rise in human population, they choose not to discuss the obvious solution (birth control). Nor do they choose to dwell on the gloomy hopelessness of achieving a solution. We have achieved our success in large part by the efficiency with which we breed, and are (alas) slave to our evolutonary past. Unfortunately all the Goulds, Leakeys, and Lewins will not be persuasive enough to enable the uneducated masses to rise above the imperitives of their genes. But they can try, and this book is a grand attempt.

I read this for a class, and I honestly tried to make this enjoyable but it wasn't. I learned a lot - but the delivery of the material was very droll. But it's a very informative book - providing you can stay awake.

This book deserves its description as introductory,and therefore it shouldn't be confused with more advanced works,but within the outlined scope a very outstanding quality has been reached in elaboration of highly particular issues which are of crucial relevance for gaining threedimensional perspective-spatial,temporal and causal-not only in classical introductory remarks that are to be found in similar books,but also in succesfull blending of these with wealth of theoretical insights into evolutionary process and biocultural adaptation.Bibliographic entries are few,provided with each chapter,but this is not deficit for such brief book.Highly recomendable for primary knowledge of evolution-it is neither too simplistic,and also not too elitistic.

Well-written for a freshman physical anthropology course, complete with numerous illustrations and charts. Roger Lewin explains in concise and easily-understandable language not only the field of paleoanthropology, but basic evolutionary theory, dating techniques, and paleoprimatology. The book presents multiple views on any debated issue, which should encourage open-mindedness and objectivity among students. However, "Principles of Human Evolution" afforded inadequate coverage to the earliest hominids, instead devoting the whole first half of the text to non-paleoanthropological background information. While this may be useful to beginners, readers who already possess the necessary background will feel inclined to skip ahead. There is also a lack of much anatomical detail, with which the text might have been much more informative and appealing to more advanced anthro readers. Overall, a good book, but there is still room for improvement.

I enjoyed this book, which is essentially a general text on modern anthropology. It discusses not only the physical evidence for human evolution, it also outlines for the student the history and current status of controversies within the field. The latter includes such topics as the "lumping" and "splitting" of species, the "out of Africa" verses the "multi-regional" theories of modern human origins, the Neanderthal controversey, and the evolution of consciousness as the true measure of what it means to be "human." The book would make a good text for an introductory college level course to physical anthropology but might also interest the high school level student.

The scope of complexity science is vast, encompassing many disciplines. This book focuses on how the new idea of complexity relates to biology by discussing the idea with many leading biologists of the day. Other reviewers were put off by the book's lack of definition of what complexity is, and the lack of resolution as to what terms such as "edge of chaos" mean. But that is exactly the point. These terms do not have clear definition today. Complexity is a very immature field, frequently pursued at the visceral level. It is hard to define what it *is*, but frequently easy to identify it where it exists. I can understand the other reviewers' concerns with the lack of definition, and can only suggest that because of the narrower focus (biology), this is an appropriate second book on complexity.

As a second book, narrowly focused on the question of complexity in biology, it is outstanding. Specifically, the question is one of how self-organization (complexity) relates to evolution and what this means for natural selection. Complexity is frequently talked up as the unifier of the sciences. Lewin takes a balanced approach, taking the time to talk to complexity theorists and understand their ideas, then talking to mainstream biologists to see how the ideas relate. His conclusion shows no inherent bias. Where other books on complexity show extreme (perhaps undue) enthusiasm, Roger Lewin's concusion is decidedly "wait and see". I found his insights to be on target and relevant.

I mentioned that this is a good second book. For an introduction to complexity, read John Holland's "Hidden Order". For a history of the Santa Fe Institute and some of the personalities there, read Mitchell Waldrop's "Complexity". Either or both of these would serve as an adequate introduction to this book.

Roger Lewin engagingly writes of his discussions with leaders in the field of complexity, the study of non-linear, dynamical systems in the life sciences. Studies in 'chaos' theory and related fields like cellular automata have led to new formulations of self-organization and non-vitalistic emergence in living systems. Although still considered a fringe element by some of their colleagues, people like Stuart Kauffman, Chris Langton, Norman Packard and others are exploring models of "...common dynamical patterns in the realms of physics, biology, and society..." (193) which may radically change our understandings of evolution and consciousness. A cheering trend toward non-aristotelian directions.

I am not a scientist. I am, however, interested in a wide variety of subjects and fascinated by complexity. I am not referring now to the book, or the subject but the expression in the real world of all that there is to know and understand. How can anyone live and not recognise at the deepest levels of their understanding that everything that exists does so in dependence on other things that exist and that this interdependence, because of the number of dynamic variables, cannot be described otherwise than a complex system. It is at this point that anyone who has read the book or who is a part of this book will protest that I have missed the point. I have not. This book isn't about a vague subjective comprehension of all things being related. It is much more scientific than that. I have started off this way because I am aware that in the hustle of everyday life-the place where most readers of books reside-the subject of the science of complexity is beyond even the periphery of what might occur to them as a topic to take an interest in, let alone find relevant. Having a general, non-expert appreciation for the immense complexity of which we are a part is an appropriate mindset to bring to any reading of the subject. The book is deserving of a wider appeal than for just new wave idea groupies.

I find Lewin strikes the right balance with his reader presenting difficult concepts with elegant clarity yet providing enough detail to challenge the reader. To make the material too simple would leave the concepts incoherent-to provide too much would leave the reader behind. He also presents a balanced view of the subject. There are detractors in the scientific community. They are heard from. Lewin develops various concepts directly related to complexity rather cleverly. We are given a piece of concept that is added onto later in a different context providing us with a kaleidoscopic way of thinking of the material. It is all connected but our focus shifts slightly giving us a new view of the subject. In the beginning there were Boolean Networks. Other concepts follow: edge of chaos; complex adaptive systems; emergence. If anyone has ever wondered even in passing why is it that discrete bits of biota or data that do not amount to much in themselves can produce not only something more complex when put together but something that is more than the sum of its parts then Complexity is of interest to you.

This book doesn't have to be the final authority or explain it all to be a very good read. And, in reference to other reviews, novel new ways of approaching scientific inquiry don't come from just anyone. Personalities matter. Putting the subject of complexity in the context of those who have been pursuing its secrets is not only acceptable but adds to our understanding. The implications for the opening up of new ways of seeing what we've heretofore been looking at 'through a glass darkly' are incredible. I can see why some of the leading scientists might find the subject worth their time and energy. So many things we wish to fix about how we operate within the system that supports us have proved intransigent to change. Perhaps this is because up to now we have been hampered by a too narrow view of what dynamics are relevant to a particular line of inquiry.

Lewin has presented complexity as a good mystery novel. It is a non-fiction mystery novel the ending of which has yet to be written.

Sometimes, first sentences can really sell a book. Consider "Call me Ishmael." In "Java Man" we get the less memorable "Garniss, lend me your knife for a second, will you?" It never got any better.

As it happens, I had rather high hopes for this book, but those hopes will have to be satisfied by another author. This thin volume, just a tad over 200 pages, packs less information per word than any non-fiction book I've ever read. What little there is about Java Man, Solo Man and other Asian links in the human chain is interesting, even if it is presented as notes an anthropology student might write in preparation for a final. But there is far too little of that sort of information - the sort of information that caused me to read the book in the first place - and far too much personal invective. Although they claim to have no stake in the various theories of human origins (which would be a reasonable claim for geochronologists, primarily interested as they are in the age of rocks), even the casual reader will be struck by the snide and puerile assaults against one side of the debate.

It probably does not help that none of the "authors" is an expert in the field of human evolution. Swisher and Curtis are geochronologists, and Lewin, who actually did the writing, is a science writer by trade. A better writer might have done more with this material, perhaps, and would hopefully have opted to omit the utterly unnecessary diatribes against former colleagues. It may be news to non-scientists that scientists, as all humans, are capable of vain and stupid behavior. But that observation, if useful at all, belongs in a book devoted to the psychology of science, not one ostensibly devoted to a serious scientific issue. But much of the book is just an ambling array of irrelevant observations. I do not know whether they were included to add heft to this otherwise empty volume, or whether Lewin actually believes that they are interesting. Besides those that serve to lash out at professional enemies, much of the prose is devoted to such banalities as what people ate, the roads they drove, the view from the hotel, and so on.

Worst of all, perhaps, is that much of the book involves dead ends. Science is like that, of course. But there is a saying in the theater that, if you bring a cannon on stage in the first act, you must fire it by the third. A book about science (which this purports to be, and which is fundamentally different from a science book) should follow the same rule. This is, after all, an effort to tell a story. But here we have an opening sentence that alludes to the discovery of volcanic material in a Homo erectus skull from Java. We learn that this material could provide a reliable radiometric date of the age of the specimen. We also learn that the Indonesian curator offers to let the American scientists collect dateable material, and that rich benefactors underwrite a spur-of-the-moment trip to collect the samples. But then, at the last minute, we learn that the Indonesian curator changes his mind, and all is for naught. Why we make such a laborious literary detour to learn all this is hard to understand, and makes the book even harder to justify recommending.

The couple of dozen or so pages that actually discuss Dubois, radiometric dating, and human evolution are fairly well done, and quite useful. Were this the only book on the subject, I'd recommend it notwithstanding is otherwise objectionable qualities. But I am certain it is not the only source available to the non-expert. Were I now looking, I would not stop here, but would continue my search.

The book "Java Man" is a very interesting story about the dating of the fossil skull found on the island of Java in 1892. The "Homo Erectus" fossil was discovered by the Dutch scientist Eugene Dubois. The early chapters are a short chroncile of the discovery made by Dubois and the subsequent scientific debate created by the discovery of the fossil that was, at the time, touted as the "missing link". The fossil is now known to be a "Homo erectus" child. The book goes on to describe modern geochrnology techniques and the farcical attempts by the scientists to obtain some material from the skull for dating. They manage to obtain a very small sample from the mysterious, ethereal professor Jacob on the equally backward and primitive island of Java. The dating of the fossil causes a stir in the cut throat world of paleoanthropology. The story is gobbled up and disseminated by a hungry press. What follows is a polarized account of the geochronologists battle with their patrons at the Institute for Human Origins, founded by the brilliant scientist Donald Johanson, discoverer of the "Lucy" fossil. The "divorce" of the geochronologists from the Institute of Human Origins is laundered with a number of parting shots at Donald Johanson. The latter part of the book is devoted to evaluating current hypotheses about ancient man, the evolution of bipedalism and the evidence for the development of tools and language by our ancestors. Included in this section is the current debate about the spread of man throughout the ancient world, leading to the current, overpopulated state of "Homo Sapiens". The "single-species" versus the "multi-regional" hypotheses are covered in depth, with the scientists clearly favoring the "single-species" hypothesis. The book concludes with the publication of the scientific paper titled, "Latest "Homo Erectus" of Java: Potential Contemporaneity with "Homo Sapiens" in Southeast Asia." The paper buries the "multi-regional" hypothesis and causes a paradigm shift in the world of paleoanthropology.
The book is, at times, needlessly verbose. The story, though interesting, could be told in half the number of pages. The "divorce" from the Institute of Human Origins should have been completely eliminated. I find it tedious that scientists are continually waging their battles with other scientists in print.

Swisher, Curtis, and Lewin tell three stories in this one brief book. The first is the fieldwork of anthropologists in Java from Eugene Dubois to the present. The second is the formation of the Berkeley Geochronology Center and its affiliation and finally legal seperation from the Institute of Human Origins. And lastly the dating of Javanese fossils and their impact on the interpretations of modern paleoanthropological thought, especially the multiregional evolution hypothesis and the Out of Africa or single-origin hypothesis. The authors breath new life into the human origins debate (which had seemed to have cooled off from its popular frenzy of the 1980's) and show how their work (geochronology or the dating of fossil finds by analysis of the radioactive decay of isotopic elements in soil samples) forms a part of modern scientific approaches to human origins (along with physical anthropology or bone and brain work and molecular biology or mitochondrial DNA analysis). Their conclusions will be debated for years in the scientific literature and only time will tell the ultimate effect their research has on the field, but this book lets the general reader inside their lab and alongside their work in the field, where we can draw our own conclusions.

Roger A. Lewin, Lamentations (Evanston Publishing, 1993)

Thank you, Oscar Wilde, for having the stones to say something that allows the rest of us to quote you and thus not come off sounding like such hard-hearted bastards: "all bad poetry is sincere." The problem with reviewing (much less critiquing) bad poetry is that it makes the reviewer, oft-times, feel like an ogre. You pick up a book full of thoroughly awful verse about a topic that it would be heresy to bash. There are an awful lot of bad poems about rape, child molestation, and other such light and airy topics; one need not look far to find a thousand examples. In this case, your obstreperous, bullheaded reviewer is going to take on one hundred twenty-eight pages written by Dr. Roger A. Lewin about the death of his wife and the effect it had on him and his two-year-old daughter. And, so I don't sound like too much of an ogre, let me, dear reader, gently remind you of Wilde's quote, and say that denigration of the work is not denigration of the inspiration of the work.

Roger Lewin is a psychiatrist. Roger Lewin is also an exceptionally bad poet. I have no idea if these two things are combined, but I suspect that, at least in Lewin's case, it is. Lewin manages to flaunt all the rules of what makes good poetry, sometimes all of them in a single poem. We have expressionless laundry lists of verbs, we have telling and not showing, bad puns, little psychological tricks, the whole painful mess of teen angst. Which might be forgivable if Lewin were still a teen; one does not want to make assumptions regarding his age, but his late wife would have been forty-nine when the book was published; thus, one guesses his teen days are relatively far behind him. Growing up and gaining life experience has not made the man a better poet.

In the great tradition of "I don't know art, but I know what I like," a few examples of what I'm talking about above:

"The range
of verbs
is too narrow
to name
my horrified
acquiescence
in your demise."
("Autumn Voice")

Let me point out the piquancy of word choice here, and say that I have never before seen the phrase "horrified acquiescence" in a poem. And I hope to never see it in a poem again. (As you may be able to guess from the first few lines of the strophe, this was preceded by, yes, an expressionless laundry list of verbs.)

"Language
is
spoken;
otherwise
it's
broken."
("My Lips, Your Face")

Do I need to say anything about that? It's the kind of thing college freshmen should be getting in poetry 101 classes as examples of how not to write poetry.

Perhaps the most painful thing about reading a Lewin collection is that on very, very rare occasions, he gets it right. Not in the way an Ira Sadoff or a Debra Allbery gets it right, not with a whole, sustained poem that sings its perfection to the heavens. But he'll come up with a line, or even a whole strophe, that Hilda Doolittle, T. S. Eliot, and Ezra Pound look down and smile upon. The image is concrete, there are no extraneous words; there may still be bad line breaks, but it's as good as Lewin gets:

"First hard frost
like hair spray
arrests
the willow's branches
leaning south and east
in memory
of last night's breeze."
("Soon After My Wife's Death")

A tad long for haiku, but with the same economy of tone and verbiage. In a hundred-twenty-eight page book, you get more of these minor gems than you do in a smaller book like New Wrinkles, but an increase in pearls guarantees you a greater increase in swine. Ultimately, it's not worth the frustration.

The vanity press business has flourished for decades, if not centuries, and one suspect that it's been feeding off the blood of aspiring (and very bad) poets since its very inception. For all I know, poets were the reason for the genesis of the vanity press business. Evanston Publishing (and its more recent and equally loathsome subsidiary, Chicago Spectrum Press) claims it is not a vanity publisher, but someone who takes your money and lets you self-publish using their equipment. (The difference: you, not the press, keep the rights to your work.) It's not exactly a difference of semantics, but the end result is the same. This is the third offering from Evanston/Chicago Spectrum I have had the misfortune to read, and if I remember to check from now on, it will be the last. *

Roger A. Lewin, New Wrinkles (Chicago Spectrum Press, 1996)

Better than Lewin's Lamentations, if only because it's half as long. Less swine to root through for the elusive pearls. But my god, what swine.

"Poetry has the wind
for a coat of arms, the wind
for a coat of harms, the wind
for a coat of charms."
("Poetry Has the Wind")

In some twisted way, I can see this book becoming a cult classic, elevating Lewin to the same status as the triumvirate of Horrible American Poets-Rod McKuen, Susan Polis Schutz, and Helen Steiner Rice. Lord knows there's stuff in here that puts him at the heights, or lows, of what those three have been able to accomplish. New Wrinkles, as with all of Lewin's work, is best taken with large doses of alcohol. * ½