A Meeting Of Clans–in the new world 14000 years ago

Sometimes it’s the misfits who are the heroes.

Kathleen Flanagan Rollins has hit upon this important benefit to the human race in her series of books. The latest, A Meeting Of Clans: A Misfits and Heroes Adventure tells a story, richly researched in what is known about life in southern Mexico 14000 years ago. She makes a small group of people come alive by supplying stories, poetry, drawings, dreams, and crafts, not to mention personalities, to characters living 14000 years ago

When I say come alive, I mean really well-drawn characters facing a wide range of adventures and personality challenges. Seldom have I come across a character as rich and complex as Sula, for example. She was once the foremost beauty in her world. But she suffered a disfiguring injury. She mourns the loss of her previous beauty and power. She becomes a warrior, but then, just when it seems happiness is hers again, vanity almost destroys her. What a story! And Sula is just one of the characters.

It’s hard to set off for the unknown and try new things. Sometimes the ability to be objective, non empathetic, and perhaps a bit mad are just the qualities adventurers and explorers need to survive.

A Meeting Of Clans is the third book in the series. The first book details life in Africa circa 14000 years ago as a group finds its way west across the Atlantic to Central America. Past The Last Island has another group crossing the Pacific to the west coast of Central America. The  group who survived the Pacific crossing are now exploring the new world in A Meeting Of Clans.

Rollins has created a series of books both imaginative and entertaining. As part of the adventure, the reader gets to vicariously live as a misfit and hero, or maybe a psychopath

While studying the brain scans of serial killers, the research scientist doing the study discovered his own brain scan fit the criteria for a psychopath. Only a psychopath would be untroubled by that!

Even the writer interviewing the research scientist was alarmed to be in the same room with a psychopath.

http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science...

Why are some people born with a brain configuration that we’ve discovered leads to lack of empathy? Wouldn’t that characteristic make living with others too dangerous (to others)? The lack of development of this empathetic part of the brain seems to be genetic. So, there must be a evolutionary survival benefit to this trait that outweighs the costs to human groups. Rollins may be onto something.