Bart Gravendaal Książki

Drawing on pathbreaking research in archaeology and anthropology, the authors show how history becomes a far more interesting place once we learn to throw off our conceptual shackles and perceive what's really there. If humans did not spend 95 percent of their evolutionary past in tiny bands of hunter-gatherers, what were they doing all that time? If agriculture, and cities, did not mean a plunge into hierarchy and domination, then what kinds of social and economic organization did they lead to? The answers are often unexpected, and suggest that the course of human history may be less set in stone, and more full of playful, hopeful possibilities, than we tend to assume

A biting satire about a young man's isolated upbringing and a race trial that leads him to the Supreme Court, this novel showcases a comic genius at the height of his craft. It challenges the core principles of the U.S. Constitution, urban life, the civil rights movement, father-son dynamics, and the quest for racial equality—embodied in the black Chinese restaurant. The narrator, raised in the "agrarian ghetto" of Dickens on the outskirts of Los Angeles, resigns himself to a life of lower-middle-class stagnation, reflecting on the cracks in his childhood bedroom ceiling. His upbringing under a single father, a controversial sociologist, subjects him to racially charged psychological studies, leading him to believe his father's work will culminate in a memoir that could solve their financial struggles. However, after his father's death in a police shoot-out, he discovers the memoir never existed, leaving him with only a bill for a drive-thru funeral. Driven by this betrayal and the decay of his hometown, he embarks on a mission to restore Dickens, which has been erased from the map. Teaming up with the town's most famous resident, the last surviving Little Rascal, he undertakes the outrageous act of reinstating slavery and segregating the local high school, ultimately landing him in the Supreme Court.