The Invention of Prehistory: Empire, Violence, and Our Obsession with Human Origins
Geroulanos surveys many of the fantasies and self-serving myths that have been used to fill in the dangerously wide-open blank space between the emergence of humans and the invention of writing ... The strength of Mr. Geroulanos’s book lies in its breadth. It ranges easily from the pseudoscience of Freud and Jung (for both of whom idiosyncratic notions of prehistory were important) to Nazi obsessions with origins.
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All of this is fascinating—or would be, but for major problems. For one thing, Geroulanos is not a congenial companion ... Worse is the snark, which is relentless, and mostly aimed at nothing worse than the routine careerism of intellectual life ... Instead of coming to his subject with a scholar’s open-mindedness—this, alas, is no surprise these days—he does so with self-righteousness and an agenda.
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Original and exciting ... A dazzling survey of countless anthropologists, scientists, and artists ... Geroulanos is right to describe prehistory as a Rorschach test onto which the present’s concerns are projected. But what his book does not consider as much as it should is whether this malleability can also serve creative and less narcissistic goals.
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