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Sunday, February 1, 2009

Books This Week in the Book Section

Posted by Paul Constant on Sun, Feb 1, 2009 at 12:49 PM

This week in the books section, I write about Desmond Morris' The Naked Ape, which attained a kind of popularity that most science books can only dream of:

People are still arguing with The Naked Ape. Last month, the Christian Courier published an article "debunking" Desmond Morris's popular 1967 book about animal behavior: "The cumulative evidence forces the honest investigator to admit that man's ancestry is not to be found in the savagery of the animal kingdom," the article declares. Just about any good used bookstore has at least one battered paperback copy of The Naked Ape on its shelves, and to look at the book—it's thin and often adorned with a satisfying line drawing of a simian or two on the cover—it's hard to believe the furor it caused.

And I relate that to a lovely pop-science book that's just been published called The Well-Dressed Ape:

Holmes is a better writer than Morris; in the chapter about ears, she begins: "Reading last evening on the couch I was distracted by a scratch. A scuttle. The plastery gritching of Mus musculus, the house mouse." It's not far from the "plastery gritching" to Holmes's ear itself: "So let's take a look at this pinnal flap of mine. It's no thing of beauty. It's a bald ruffle of cartilage, immobile as an owl's eye."

Please take a look if you have a moment, won't you?.