Books about Anthropologists from Amazon.com

Amazon.com Exclusive: Jeffery Deaver on Devil Bones
Jeffery Deaver is the bestselling author of The Broken Window, The Sleeping Doll, The Cold Moon, The Blue Nowhere, The Bone Collector, The Empty Chair, The Devil's Teardrop, and fifteen other suspense novels. His book A Maiden's Grave was made into an HBO movie starring James Garner and Marlee Matlin, and his novel The Bone Collector was made into a feature release from Universal Pictures, starring Denzel Washington. He lives in North Carolina.

It's always a pleasure to see a new installment in the saga of Temperence Brennan, the forensic anthropologist who plies her trade in both Charlotte, North Carolina, and Montreal.

Devil Bones, set in the U S of A, opens with a grisly discovery that offers a very different take on This Old House. Tempe is pulled from staid academia to investigate the troubling and mystifying scene, which involves cauldrons, ceremonial religious artifacts and, most troubling, the severed head of a teenage girl.

Another torso is located nearby, and the story is off and running.

Tempe and Charlotte police department detective Erskine "Skinny" Slidell, follow leads that take them through the seamier and the chicer sides of North Carolina's largest city--the worlds of Santeria, voodoo, the Wiccan religion (any witches out there: I'm not lumping them together!), and male prostitution. Our heroine also locks horns with a crusading minister turned politician, and there's a reporter who manages to show up at all the wrong moments.

Reichs juggles the questions of who done it (and who's gonna get done next) until the very end with consummate skill. In series books, readers treat characters as friends and follow those storylines as ardently as the ones involving murder and mayhem. Not content to keep things simmering on low boil, Reichs dunks her protagonist into a pressure cooker, with plenty of turmoil stirred up by a former lover, a--possibly--current one and, most significantly for this reader, yet another ghost of life past, about which I'll say no more here. Trouble on campus also surfaces for Professor Brennan, with whom we experience one of the most harrowing moments in the book: a meeting of professors and department heads (university politics as weapon of mass destruction). Oh, and we can't forget some brief appearances by the ex, who is behaving just like, well, an ex.

It might have been my imagination but I believe too that I saw the bones, if you will, of a possible subplot involving Tempe's daughter, Katy, who's working in the public defender's office. I'm looking forward to seeing Reich confirm or deny this in the next installment.

In Devil Bones we get plenty of what we've come to expect in a Reichs novel: engrossing details on forensic anthropology and anatomical science. Her mastery, and love, of those subjects, which Reichs herself practices (in both Montreal and Charlotte, by the way), is evident in her writing. We're also treated to plenty of esoterica about non-mainstream religions and history (I mean, I live in North Carolina and didn't know Charlotte was named for a seventeen-year-old German duchess). The author deftly negotiates that fine line between using such information to enhance the experience of reading a novel and padding prose. She gives us what we need to know--to enrich plot, character or atmosphere--and then gets back to the story.

And speaking of which: As an author writing in the same genre, I was impressed with Reichs's ability to keep the roller coaster on track and speeding along, page after page. She's a true master of cliff hangers--a neglected skill in a field where far too many lazy authors end chapters with people leaving rooms, falling asleep or offering hand-tipping foreshadowings of what's to come. I call this the question-mark factor and when writing my thriller I actually tally up the number of scenes that end in a compelling, unresolved issue that drives the reader forward.

Reichs has question marks aplenty.

My one complaint: I read the novel in one sitting. But I'm hoping that while poor Tempe may want a break after everything that happens to her in Devil Bones, author Reichs isn't giving her any rest and is hard at work on number 12.

--Jeffery Deaver

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Jodi Picoult's novels have been hailed as "engrossing" (People) and "addictively readable" (Entertainment Weekly). Now, the author of Salem Falls and Plain Truth examines the fault lines of a troubled marriage in Picture Perfect-an "unfailingly intelligent ..undeniably literary psychological drama."(Booklist)

"Picoult writes with an all-knowing and piercing eye. Hers is an important book from a talented writer we hope to hear from again and again." (Library Journal).
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"Fans of TV's CSI: Crime Scene Investigation should be in heaven" (People) stepping into the world of forensic anthropologist Dr. Temperance Brennan, star of Kathy Reichs' electrifyingly authentic bestsellers

Her life is devoted to justice -- for those she never even knew.

In the year since Temperance Brennan left behind a shaky marriage in North Carolina, work has often preempted her weekend plans to explore Quebec. When a female corpse is discovered meticulously dismembered and stashed in trash bags, Tempe detects an alarming pattern -- and she plunges into a harrowing search for a killer. But her investigation is about to place those closest to her -- her best friend and her own daughter -- in mortal danger. . . ..
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The works of neurologist Oliver Sacks have a special place in the swarm of mind-brain studies. He has done as much as anyone to make nonspecialists aware of how much diversity gets lumped under the heading of "the human mind."

The stories in An Anthropologist on Mars are medical case reports not unlike the classic tales of Berton Roueché in The Medical Detectives. Sacks's stories are of "differently brained" people, and they have the intrinsic human interest that spurred his book Awakenings to be re-created as a Robin Williams movie.

The title story in Anthropologist is that of autistic Temple Grandin, whose own book Thinking in Pictures gives her version of how she feels--as unlike other humans as a cow or a Martian. The other minds Sacks describes are equally remarkable: a surgeon with Tourette's syndrome, a painter who loses color vision, a blind man given the ambiguous gift of sight, artists with memories that overwhelm "real life," the autistic artist Stephen Wiltshire, and a man with memory damage for whom it is always 1968.

Oliver Sacks is the Carl Sagan or Stephen Jay Gould of his field; his books are true classics of medical writing, of the breadth of human mentality, and of the inner lives of the disabled. --Mary Ellen Curtin.
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Temperance Brennan is helping her Guatemalan colleagues identify the remains of villagers who were "disappeared" 20 years ago when she's called in to consult on four more recent disappearances. Is there a serial killer loose in Guatemala City, or is the fate of the young women who've gone missing--including the daughter of the Canadian ambassador--connected to the murder of a human-rights investigator looking into the decades-old massacre? Brennan, the protagonist of Reichs's popular series, is literally hip-deep in intrigue, between the well in Chupan Ya where she unearths the bones of women and children slain in Guatemala's bloody civil war and the septic tank in the capital where the remains of one of the missing girls turn up. Tempe is a standout in crime fiction's crowded field of forensics experts--she's one of its more complex and interesting protagonists, dealing with intriguing cases that often cross national borders and a personal life that's rich in possibilities the author skillfully exploits. Tempe--and Reichs--just keep getting better. --Jane Adams.
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Regeneration, one in Pat Barker's series of novels confronting the psychological effects of World War I, focuses on treatment methods during the war and the story of a decorated English officer sent to a military hospital after publicly declaring he will no longer fight. Yet the novel is much more. Written in sparse prose that is shockingly clear -- the descriptions of electronic treatments are particularly harrowing -- it combines real-life characters and events with fictional ones in a work that examines the insanity of war like no other. Barker also weaves in issues of class and politics in this compactly powerful book. Other books in the series include The Eye in the Door and the Booker Award winner The Ghost Road..
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Temperance Brennan, like her creator Kathy Reichs, is a brilliant, sexy forensic anthropologist called on to solve the toughest cases. But for Tempe, the discovery of a young girl's skeleton in Acadia, Canada, is more than just another assignment. Evangaline, Tempe's childhood best friend, was also from Acadia. Named for the character in the Longfellow poem, Evangaline was the most exotic person in Tempe's eight-year-old world. When Evangaline disappeared, Tempe was warned not to search for her, that the girl was "dangerous." Thirty years later, flooded with memories, Tempe cannot help wondering if this skeleton could be the friend she lost so many years ago. And what is the meaning of the strange skeletal lesions found on the bones of the young girl? Meanwhile, Tempe's beau, Ryan, investigates a series of cold cases. Three girls dead. Four missing. Could the New Brunswick skeleton be part of the pattern? As Tempe draws on the latest advances in forensic anthropology to penetrate the past, Ryan hunts down a serial predator..
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The Edgar® Award-winning author of Little Tiny Teeth returns with his professor of forensics, Gideon Oliver, a.k.a. the Skeleton Detective.

“No one does it better than Aaron Elkins,”( San Diego Union-Tribune )–– and this time, Gideon Oliver will be up on the Rock of Gibraltar, where he’ll inspect his oldest bones yet. But a killer’s loose…

Around 25,000 years ago, did the Neanderthal live peacefully with his smarter, handsomer cousin, the Homo sapiens? The answer, recently found in the Rock of Gibraltar, left everyone speechless…

Buried ceremoniously, high in a cave, lies the skeleton of a human woman, clutching the skeleton of a part-human, part-Neanderthal child. Fascinated, Professor Oliver jumps at the chance to attend a conference near there. But two deaths, possibly murders, have rocked Gibraltar. As Oliver tries to piece things together, he’s about to fall for some deadly tricks. After all, unlike the Gibraltar Boy, he’s only human….
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Millions of people around the world today spend portions of their lives in online virtual worlds. Second Life is one of the largest of these virtual worlds. The residents of Second Life create communities, buy property and build homes, go to concerts, meet in bars, attend weddings and religious services, buy and sell virtual goods and services, find friendship, fall in love--the possibilities are endless, and all encountered through a computer screen. Coming of Age in Second Life is the first book of anthropology to examine this thriving alternate universe.

Tom Boellstorff conducted more than two years of fieldwork in Second Life, living among and observing its residents in exactly the same way anthropologists traditionally have done to learn about cultures and social groups in the so-called real world. He conducted his research as the avatar "Tom Bukowski," and applied the rigorous methods of anthropology to study many facets of this new frontier of human life, including issues of gender, race, sex, money, conflict and antisocial behavior, the construction of place and time, and the interplay of self and group.

Coming of Age in Second Life shows how virtual worlds can change ideas about identity and society. Bringing anthropology into territory never before studied, this book demonstrates that in some ways humans have always been virtual, and that virtual worlds in all their rich complexity build upon a human capacity for culture that is as old as humanity itself.

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