Book of the Week (4/9/2018)

The Hidden Life of Life: A Walk Through the Reaches of Time by Elizabeth Marshall Thomas (University Park, Pa. : Penn State University Press, 2018).

NH author and anthropologist Elizabeth Marshall Thomas brings us another fascinating and thought provoking book that focuses on the connections and similarities between very different species.

An iconoclast and best-selling author of both nonfiction and fiction, Elizabeth Marshall Thomas has spent a lifetime observing, thinking, and writing about the cultures of animals such as lions, wolves, dogs, deer, and humans. In this compulsively readable book, she provides a plainspoken, big-picture look at the commonality of life on our planet, from the littlest microbes to the largest lizards.
Inspired by the idea of symbiosis in evolution—that all living things evolve in a series of cooperative relationships—Thomas takes readers on a journey through the progression of life. Along the way she shares the universal likenesses, experiences, and environments of “Gaia’s creatures,” from amoebas in plant soil to the pets we love, from proud primates to Homo sapiens hunter-gatherers on the African savanna. Fervently rejecting “anthropodenial,” the notion that nonhuman life does not share characteristics with humans, Thomas instead shows that paramecia can learn, plants can communicate, humans aren’t really as special as we think we are—and that it doesn’t take a scientist to marvel at the smallest inhabitants of the natural world and their connections to all living things.
A unique voice on anthropology and animal behavior, Thomas challenges scientific convention and the jargon that prevents us all from understanding all living things better. This joyfully written book is a fascinating look at the challenges and behaviors shared by creatures from bacteria to larvae to parasitic fungi, a potted hyacinth to the author herself, and all those in between.-- Publisher's website

Join Elizabeth on the following dates where she will be discussing her new book:

Tuesday, April 10th at 7:00 PM at Water Street Bookstore in Exeter, NH
Saturday, May 19th at 2:00 PM at Gibson's Bookstore in Concord, NH

NHPR will also be interviewing Elizabeth Marshall Thomas at the Toadstool Bookstore in Peterborough on Wednesday, April 25th from 7:00 to 8:00 PM. All are welcome to attend.