Volume 54, Number 3 · March 1, 2007
Dim Beginnings
By Melvin Konner
The Old Way: A Story of the First People
by Elizabeth Marshall Thomas
Sarah Crichton Books/Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 343 pp., $27.00
Since ancient times, historians and chroniclers have cited reports of travelers about people beyond the edge of civilization, usually to underscore their own superiority. But with the first colonial encounters in the New World, philosophic attempts by Europeans to find lessons in 'savage' societies became more insistent. Montaigne, in 1580, held up Brazilian cannibals as a mirror to civilization and found much to admire:
Review, 4890 words
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