Jared Diamond’s other worlds, compulsory reading for the military, grandiose triptychs

 

In this week's TLS - A note from the History Editor

 

The layperson
used to have a pretty good idea of what anthropologists did. They were white
men (usually men) from “civilized” countries who went to “live among” a tribe
and record their ancient ways. This was the model that Margaret Mead (the
exceptional woman) promoted when she became perhaps the world’s best-known
anthropologist in the middle of the last century. Anthropologists’ discoveries
were also offered as instructions for how to improve our own ossified Western
ways of doing things, from making war to bringing up children. But this kind of
anthropology started to get a bad name, as it was realized that, in various
ways, it valued cultures differently. Anthropologists started to turn up in
coffee bars or offices more often than longhouses. Reviewing a new work by
Jared Diamond, one of the best known anthropologists since Mead, Ira Bashkow
welcomes a return to the sort of anthropology that unashamedly sees indigenous
societies as offering lessons to the West. But he also warns against the
“historical” view that such societies demonstrate “how all of our ancestors
lived” in the not too distant past, which leads Diamond down some murkier
byways.

Our reviewers’
discriminating natures tend to ensure that books are rarely greeted with
unstinting praise in our pages, so it may be worth pointing out that this week,
two new masterpieces are announced. Michael Howard reviews War from the Ground
Up by Emile Simpson, a former Gurkha officer in Afghanistan, and finds a “work
of such importance” that it should be “compulsory reading” for all levels of
the military. He concludes that the book “deserves to be seen as a coda to
Clausewitz”. In Fiction, Hal Jensen puts aside his initial scepticism about the
latest Faber Finds reissue, the work of the little-known American novelist
David Stacton, and discovers an “astoundingly good” writer. Stacton wrote
contemporary novels and pulp productions under various pseudonyms, but it was
in his three historical “triptychs” that his “melodramatic and a mite
grandiose” talents really shone through.

DH