Man: An Autobiography

$2.75

FEELING that conventional histories “make a tedious and complicated matter out of what is really a simple one, Mr. Stewart has condensed and blended zoology, anthropology, archeology, and history into a narrative that makes Wells’s Outline look like The Statistical Abstract. We shall be lucky if the experts throw up only their hands, but despite their assured condemnation Mr. Stewart is to be congratulated on his self-assumed role of missionary to the layman. The general reader needs desperately to know what is known today and it is more important to get the facts to him in a way that will compel attention than to follow the party line that every college department has erected to protect its vested interests.

The device of having man tell his own story has the virtue of identifying the reader with the events and the drawback of forcing the narrator to seem pretty fnzzyminded. For, of necessity, the hero has to use a great many “perhaps’s" and “it might have been, but I don’t know’s” in telling his story. Stewart conceives of man in general as being gentle, genial, democratic, and skeptical. All points are questionable. His speech is rustic and borders on the puerile. Perhaps that’s in character. Some like it; others find that homespun makes them itch.

The facts that he has to present will not be new to the educated reader, but the continual play this exploring imagination and light humor gives them fresh interest. Such airy generalizations as that the whole of Greek and Roman culture is of less importance “than the domestication of sheep” and that religion, “the beating of tom-toms and whirling of bull-roarers,” has really contributed nothing of value to civilization will cause dusty indignation in some quarters and cackling satisfaction in others.

The author is strangely credulous in his incredulity. Some of his assumptions about animals could have come right out of Ernest Thompson Seton. His picture of the chivalrous Cro-Magnon males covering the retreat of their females and “roaring out defiance" and his vignette of a playful Pithecanthropus teasing a buffalo and “enjoying the frustration of the charging monster" are worthy of Edgar Rice Burroughs. And his proposition that (a) we ate plants before we ate meat; (b) women are more conservative than men; and hence (c) women eat more salads for lunch than men do simply leaves you silent on a peak in Darien.

Still, it’s no more absurd or biased than a great deal of orthodox textbook stuff and it’s a great deal more diverting.

BERGEN EVANS