The Reinvention of Humanity

An intellectual adventure story of the best sort - elegantly written, thought-provoking and full of biographical riches

SARAH BAKEWELL, author of At the Existentialist Café

Engaging, deeply thought-provoking and brilliantly written. Charles King takes you on an unforgettable journey as daring anthropologists unravel the profound mysteries of culture and mankind

DAVID HOFFMAN, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Dead Hand

Masterful. A vital book for our times

IBRAM X. KENDI, National Book Award-winning author of How To Be An Antiracist

Written with verve and authority, this exciting – even entrancing – story follows the first cultural anthropologists to far-flung field sites that suggested antidotes to the racism and xenophobia of society

DAVA SOBEL, author of Longitude

Stunning. Wickedly perceptive, a scholarly masterpiece

DAVID OSHINSKY, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Polio

Elegant and kaleidoscopic … this looks to be the perfect moment for King’s resolutely humane book

NEW YORK TIMES

Vitally relevant

GILLIAN TETT, Financial Times

Deeply intelligent and immensely readable

Alison Gopnik, Atlantic

A motley crew of rebellious young female scientists, inspired by a scar-faced mad-genius professor, boldly set out on intrepid journeys to study strange far-flung worlds, and discover that their own home-world is stranger than they thought. Along the way, they have tempestuous love-affairs, scary adventures, swashbuckling battles against armies of racists, sexists and eugenicists. In the end, they change our moral universe. Sounds like a sci-fi fantasy movie? It happened, here on Earth, nearly a century ago. A fascinating and important story, beautifully told

KATE FOX, author of Watching the English

Magnificent ... In this brilliantly written and deftly organised book, Charles King tells the story of how the study of humankind [was revolutionised] in the first half of the 20th century

Kathryn Hughes, Guardian

Hugely informative and adhesively readable

John Carey, Sunday Times

Stunning ... every syllable seems perfectly positioned for pitch, stress, euphony and evocative power; the brilliant vignettes of the anthropologists’ leisure moments … the vividness with which their private lives, sexual intrigues and secret thoughts are captured … elegant and entertaining

Literary Review

Charles King, author of this illuminating biographical history [has] a great gift for nicely balanced epigrammatic prose … as King writes with a typically fine flourish, Boas can be seen to have been "on the front line of the greatest moral battle of our time" and he, along with the talented women who learnt from him, won out in the end

Lucy Hughes-Hallett, New Statesman

As told very engagingly by Charles King, their research turned upside down the then unshakeable assumption that certain people were innatley superior to others, because of their skin colour, culture and gender

Julia Lllewellyn Smith, *****Mail on Sunday

Nothing short of magnificent … in many ways a deeply touching book. Charles King’s prose is immensely readable and perceptive and lends itself perfectly to telling one of the most fascinating tales of twentieth-century science

All About History

No one until now has told this story of anthropology’s rise to [its] ‘master key’ status … Charles King’s book … does this with both subtlety and panache … A compelling account of mutliculturalism’s intellectual precursors

Peter Mandler, History Today

The notion of cultural relativism was as unique in its way as was Einstein’s theory of relativity in the discipline of physics, a shattering of the European mind. This remarkable book explains why. Franz Boas’s intuitions and insights, distilled in theory and practice by generations of scholars, a lineage that includes Ruth Benedict, Margaret Mead, and Zora Neale Hurston, all brilliantly portrayed in the book, continue to inform contemporary anthropology, allowing the discipline to stand today as the antidote to nativism and the poisonous rhetoric of political demagogues. The entire purpose of anthropology, wrote Ruth Benedict, is to make the world safe for human differences. Never has the voice of anthropology been more important, and the arrival of this astonishing book can only be described as a gift to us all

Wade Davis, author of Into the Silence

King's book tells this many-layered, mostly forgotten story cogently and compellingly ... a gift to the field of anthropology and to us all

TLS

Franz Boas, whose achievements are set out in Charles King's The Reinvention of Humanity, recast the foundations of American anthropology. Against the prevailing political and intellectual orthodoxy, Boas and his students insisted that the basic unity of humankind was beyond dispute, and that within this unity there was no natural hierarchy of races, languages or cultures... That their ideas were found radical and strange is an indictment of their culture; that King's book seems timely is an indictment of our own

Francis Gooding, London Review of Books