Mike Shea on the month’s new releases
Jon Kalb
copernicus
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This is a genre-buster if ever there was one. Austin paleontologist Jon Kalb set out to chronicle his seven years of fossil hunting in Africa in the seventies, but the final product is far more than "science adventurism" (his term). The subtitle, though a bit daunting—The Race to Discover Human Ancestors in Ethiopia's Afar Depression—helps conjure the dusty romance of paleontology and the enduring thrill of great discoveries by the likes of Louis Leakey. But Kalb's book encompasses more. In an easy style that is scholarly but entertaining, the author interweaves his memories of the forbidding Afar nomads who wander the fossil-rich plains; the war and desperation that ravaged the rest of the country; and the petty egotism that drove many of his colleagues. He even throws in a few wild-animal stories (camp-threatening lions, for one) and celebrity anecdotes (he dined with Haile Selassie). Like the fossil beds Kalb once explored, Adventures in the Bone Trade is crammed with valuable bits and pieces—some on the surface, some buried deep below.
Robert Justin Goldstein
University Press of Kansas
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When Gregory Lee Johnson burned an American flag while demonstrating outside the 1984 Republican National Convention in Dallas, the police hauled him in for violating a 1973 flag protection law. Big surprise. But no one anticipated that Johnson's insurgency would lead to the U.S. Supreme Court's 1989 ruling that torching the Stars and Stripes is protected by the Constitution. The national furor that resulted is wonderfully detailed in Flag Burning and Free Speech: The Case of Texas v. Johnson (University Press of Kansas), by Robert Justin Goldstein, a professor at Michigan's Oakland University. President George Bush and most of Congress immediately spearheaded a movement to ban flag desecration by means of a constitutional amendment. It required a diabolical strategy and (arguably dishonest) testimony from liberals to divert votes and momentum away from the amendment and toward a Flag Protection Act—which the libs knew would be unconstitutional. Goldstein offers penetrating insight into America's near-mystical reverence for the flag, wading through the judicial and sociopolitical mire to explain it all to the man on the street.
