Nonfiction
Uranium War, Energy, and the Rock That Shaped the World, by Tom Zoellner, $26.95
Journeying to such far-flung sites as Congo’s Shinkolobwe uranium mine and a smuggling route along the Russia-Georgia border, Tom Zoellner examines how uranium has helped shape our recent history and could determine our future.
His lively prose carries the reader through physics and history lessons alike, never failing to remind us what’s at stake when it comes to uranium — “a heroic war-ender, a prophet of utopia that never arrived, a polluter, a slow killer, a waster of money, an enabler of failed states, a friend to terrorists, the possible bringer of Armageddon, an excuse for war with Iraq, an incitement for possible war in Iran, and now, too, a possible savior against global warming.”
Zoellner vividly conveys both the potential benefits and harm that uranium holds for human civilization.
Although he dwells only briefly on the recent debate over whether to launch a renewed push for nuclear power — a negligence that is the book’s biggest fault — policymakers and citizens alike need to read “Uranium.”
Nonfiction
Sex and War How Biology Explains Warfare and Terrorism and Offers a Path to a Safer World, by Malcolm Potts and Thomas Hayden, $24.95
Malcolm Potts, an obstetrician-scientist, is a hero of the international movement to improve women’s health. Here, with journalist Thomas Hayden, he offers a lively and highly readable account of the evolution of war and terrorism. Potts’ interest in this subject stemmed from his own experience treating women who had suffered unspeakably.
Rape, he learned, is war’s fellow traveler, and the perspectives of anthropology and Darwinian theory suggest why.
For Potts, “team aggression” in chimpanzees is a touchstone: Several males find a solitary male or female from a neighboring group and punch, bite, kick and stomp that victim to death. This occurs too often to be an anomaly and has analogies to ambush raids by male humans. In both the ape and human cases, females may be spared and impregnated by the foreign males; the Bible, “The Iliad” and other sources tell us this was routine in ancient wars.
Another touchstone is a simple fact of genetics: One in 12 men in Central Asia today descends from a single man of Genghis Khan’s era who, according to the chroniclers, was a serial rapist. Similar findings in Ireland suggest the descent of 2 million of 3 million from the warrior- king Niall.
With fossil and archaeological evidence, these facts describe a pattern of killing men and raping women that has been with us for so long that the inclination is built into our genes and brains. The authors condemn the pattern but believe we will be in a better position to control and prevent it if we grasp its evolutionary foundations. So do I.
“Sex and War” is an important effort to raise our species’ consciousness of its ugliest behaviors. Yet there are problems with its argument. The authors know that bonobos, as near to us genetically as chimps, have no such aggressive pattern, but they don’t explain why they focused on chimps instead. They assume that hunter-gatherer cultures were as violent as later ones; most anthropologists demur.
And their politicizing is sometimes distracting. The authors deem the ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan utter failures triggered by a chimp-like overreaction to the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. But the U.S. “overreaction” was undertaken with a calculated sense of what might happen in the future if the response did not restore respect for the attacked nation’s power. None of which a chimp would understand.
Reviewed by Juliet Eilperin Washington Post Writers Group Reviewed by Melvin Konner, who teaches at Emory University, is author of “The Tangled Wing: Biological Constraints on the Human Spirit” and “The Jewish Body,” Washington Post Book World Service.
