Gods of the Upper Air
How a Circle of Renegade Anthropologists Reinvented Race, Sex, and Gender in the Twentieth Century
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Narrated by:
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January LaVoy
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By:
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Charles King
About this listen
2020 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award Winner
Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award
From an award-winning historian comes a dazzling history of the birth of cultural anthropology and the adventurous scientists who pioneered it - a sweeping chronicle of discovery and the fascinating origin story of our multicultural world.
A century ago, everyone knew that people were fated by their race, sex, and nationality to be more or less intelligent, nurturing, or warlike. But Columbia University professor Franz Boas looked at the data and decided everyone was wrong. Racial categories, he insisted, were biological fictions. Cultures did not come in neat packages labeled "primitive" or "advanced". What counted as a family, a good meal, or even common sense was a product of history and circumstance, not of nature. In Gods of the Upper Air, a masterful narrative history of radical ideas and passionate lives, Charles King shows how these intuitions led to a fundamental reimagining of human diversity.
Boas' students were some of the century's most colorful figures and unsung visionaries: Margaret Mead, the outspoken field researcher whose Coming of Age in Samoa is among the most widely read works of social science of all time; Ruth Benedict, the great love of Mead's life, whose research shaped post-Second World War Japan; Ella Deloria, the Dakota Sioux activist who preserved the traditions of Native Americans on the Great Plains; and Zora Neale Hurston, whose studies under Boas fed directly into her now classic novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God. Together, they mapped civilizations from the American South to the South Pacific and from Caribbean islands to Manhattan's city streets, and unearthed an essential fact buried by centuries of prejudice: that humanity is an undivided whole. Their revolutionary findings would go on to inspire the fluid conceptions of identity we know today.
Rich in drama, conflict, friendship, and love, Gods of the Upper Air is a brilliant and groundbreaking history of American progress and the opening of the modern mind.
©2019 Charles King (P)2019 Random House AudioListeners also enjoyed...
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Critic reviews
"Elegant and kaleidoscopic... This looks to be the perfect moment for King’s resolutely humane book." (Jennifer Szalai, The New York Times)
"Thoughtful, deeply intelligent, and immensely readable." (Alison Gopnik, The Atlantic)
"King’s comprehensive archival research illuminates intellectual giants.... With a light yet unmistakable touch, King connects the dots from Boas’s time to ours. He mentions President Donald Trump’s describing of Mexicans as ‘rapists’ during the kickoff of his presidential campaign, and we get the point: The reduction of human beings to types - people stereotyped as inferior and menacing, deserving of being keep out or cast out - is a clear and present danger. Reading Gods of the Upper Air, though, provides inspiration. The anthropology of equality tells us that every population is as fully human as any other, and deserving of understanding and compassion." (Barbara J. King, NPR.org)
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Most people assume that racism grows from a perception of human difference: the fact of race gives rise to the practice of racism. Sociologist Karen E. Fields and historian Barbara J. Fields argue otherwise: the practice of racism produces the illusion of race, through what they call “racecraft.” And this phenomenon is intimately entwined with other forms of inequality in American life. So pervasive are the devices of racecraft in American history, economic doctrine, politics, and everyday thinking that the presence of racecraft itself goes unnoticed.
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A loose collection of essays
- By Texas Mama on 11-18-21
By: Karen E. Fields, and others
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Time of the Magicians
- Wittgenstein, Benjamin, Cassirer, Heidegger, and the Decade that Reinvented Philosophy
- By: Wolfram Eilenberger, Shaun Whiteside
- Narrated by: Rhett Samuel Price
- Length: 13 hrs
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The year is 1919. The horror of the First World War is fresh for the protagonists of Time of the Magicians, each of whom finds himself at a crucial juncture. Benjamin is trying to flee his overbearing father and floundering in his academic career, living hand to mouth as a critic. Wittgenstein, by contrast, has dramatically decided to divest himself of the monumental fortune he stands to inherit, in search of spiritual clarity.
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Narrator butchers foreign many language quotations
- By William G. Brown on 08-31-20
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Frank Ramsey
- A Sheer Excess of Powers
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- Narrated by: Liam Gerrard
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When he died in 1930 aged 26, Frank Ramsey had already invented one branch of mathematics and two branches of economics, laying the foundations for decision theory and game theory. Keynes deferred to him; he was the only philosopher whom Wittgenstein treated as an equal. Had he lived he might have been recognized as the most brilliant thinker of the century. This amiable shambling bear of a man was an ardent socialist, a believer in free love, and an intimate of the Bloomsbury set. For the first time Cheryl Misak tells the full story of his extraordinary life.
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Great biography, not appropriate as an audiobook
- By Scott on 06-18-24
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The Metaphysical Club
- By: Louis Menand
- Narrated by: Henry Leyva
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Hardly a club in the conventional sense, the organization referred to in the title of this superb literary hybrid (part history, part biography, part philosophy) consisted of four members and probably existed for less than nine months.
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The Great American Experiment
- By Victoria on 12-08-03
By: Louis Menand
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The Invisible History of the Human Race
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- Narrated by: Justine Eyre
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In The Invisible History of the Human Race, Christine Kenneally draws on cutting-edge research to reveal how both historical artifacts and DNA tell us where we come from and where we may be going. While some books explore our genetic inheritance and some popular television shows celebrate ancestry, this is the first book to explore how everything from DNA to emotions to names and the stories that form our lives are all part of our human legacy.
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Who are you really. Who am I?
- By Annie M. on 10-28-14
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Diderot and the Art of Thinking Freely
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Denis Diderot is often associated with the decades-long battle to bring the world's first comprehensive Encyclopedie into existence. But his most daring writing took place in the shadows. Thrown into prison for his atheism in 1749, Diderot decided to reserve his best books for posterity - for us, in fact. In the astonishing cache of unpublished writings left behind after his death, Diderot challenged virtually all of his century's accepted truths, from the sanctity of monarchy, to the racial justification of the slave trade, to the norms of human sexuality.
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lifelong coverage of his life.
- By Michael Daly on 03-22-21
By: Andrew S. Curran
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Humankind
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- By: Rutger Bregman, Erica Moore, Elizabeth Manton
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If there is one belief that has united the left and the right, psychologists and philosophers, ancient thinkers and modern ones, it is the tacit assumption that humans are bad. It's a notion that drives newspaper headlines and guides the laws that shape our lives. From Machiavelli to Hobbes, Freud to Pinker, the roots of this belief have sunk deep into Western thought. Human beings, we're taught, are by nature selfish and governed primarily by self-interest.
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He’s correct but he misrepresented the data
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The Hidden Habits of Genius
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What is genius? The word evokes iconic figures like Einstein, Beethoven, Picasso, and Steve Jobs, whose cultural contributions have irreversibly shaped society. Yet Beethoven could not multiply. Picasso couldn’t pass a fourth grade math test. And Jobs left high school with a 2.65 GPA. The Hidden Habits of Genius explores the meaning of this contested term, and the unexpected motivations of those we have dubbed "genius" throughout history, from Charles Darwin and Marie Curie to Leonardo Da Vinci and Andy Warhol to Toni Morrison and Elon Musk.
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Click-bait title, minimal substance inside
- By James S. on 11-27-20
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The compelling story of the effect of Charles Darwin's book On the Origin of Species on a diverse group of American writers, abolitionists, and social reformers, including Henry David Thoreau and Bronson Alcott, in 1860.
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Oversold
- By Roger on 03-03-17
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Sontag
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No writer is as emblematic of the American 20th century as Susan Sontag. Mythologized and misunderstood, lauded and loathed, a girl from the suburbs who became a proud symbol of cosmopolitanism, Sontag left a legacy of writing on art and politics, feminism and homosexuality, celebrity and style, medicine and drugs, radicalism and Fascism and Freudianism and Communism and Americanism, that forms an indispensable key to modern culture.
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Cloying voice
- By Suzanne on 11-02-19
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Square Haunting
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Mecklenburgh Square has always been a radical address. Nestled in the heart of Bloomsbury, these townhouses have borne witness to the lives of some of the century's most revolutionary cultural figures - many of whom were extraordinary women. United by their desire to experiment with new ways of living - and, therefore, of being - these authors and thinkers were trailblazers in their commitment to creative independence.
By: Francesca Wade
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The Age of American Unreason
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Combining historical analysis with contemporary observation, Susan Jacoby dissects a new American cultural phenomenon - one that is at odds with our heritage of Enlightenment reason and with modern, secular knowledge and science. With mordant wit, Jacoby surveys an antirationalist landscape extending from pop culture to a pseudo-intellectual universe of "junk thought".
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Interesting, but explanation by redescription
- By T. Andrew Poehlman on 07-15-08
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There are many stories we can spin about previous ages, but which accounts get told? And by whom? Is there even such a thing as “objective” history? In this “witty, wise, and elegant” (The Spectator), book, Richard Cohen reveals how professional historians and other equally significant witnesses, such as the writers of the Bible, novelists, and political propagandists, influence what becomes the accepted record. Cohen argues, for example, that some historians are practitioners of “Bad History” and twist reality to glorify themselves or their country.
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Missing 20 pages from book
- By Rick, Austin on 04-23-22
By: Richard Cohen
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What listeners say about Gods of the Upper Air
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Anonymous User
- 12-22-22
This book is fantastic
I am someone whose obsessed with anthropology and I found this book to be very insightful. Boas, Mead, Hurston, and hell even the reference to “two crows” is something that I’ve always saw in other books introducing the topic to me but now I feel I have a much stronger idea of their contributions to this field.
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- Edward Foley
- 03-05-21
splendid in breadth, engaging in content
Seldom is the history of a science [here anthropology] so well told. Inventively it is narrated through real people's lives, their struggles and triumphs, and their passion about asserting the common humanity we all share.
Renegade is one way to characterize Franz Boaz and his students; misfits also might do it. But it is the quite amazing and often bizarre lives of these folk that makes the material so accessible and engaging. Would that other writings about the sciences had not only this breadth [they often do] but also such smart storytelling.
Before I ordered the book I read one review that gave very poor ratings for the narrator, apparently for very poor pronunciation of "foreign" words, especially German and French. I am fluent in both of those languages, and while I would not hire the narrator as a language instructor, her performance in general was splendid and her negotiation of the languages good.
This is a source I will go back to in my own writing and teaching for years to come. Bravo!
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- Oona
- 08-25-19
Fascinating Look at Early Anthropologists and Their Legacy
I came to this book knowing about Margaret Meade and Zora Neale Hurston, but not that they had worked for the same mentor (Franz Boaz), and not that the work they did directly confronted home-grown racist assumptions promoted by other early anthropologists. King's writing is engaging and accessible, following the lives of Boaz, Meade, Hurston, and a representative group of colleagues while also exploring the ways that American Jim Crow laws and American supporters of the eugenics movement were cited by the Nazis to further their own program. Readers who pay even minimal attention to current events will find chilling parallels in our daily news. Highly recommended. January LaVoy is an excellent reader.
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3 people found this helpful
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- Amazon Customer
- 08-26-19
eye opening
this his/her story is as relevant today as it was in the days of Boas and company. An important read.
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2 people found this helpful
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- Pedro
- 02-20-22
An illuminating read
This was the perfect mix of biography and distillation of big ideas by a diverse cast of anthropologists. Not only is every chapter fascinating, but the whole thing adds up to something much bigger: a powerful examination of racism, sexism, ableism and other injustices. I’m in grad school working on issues close to the topic of the book and learned lots of new things. Definitely worth your time.
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- Laura Gerardi
- 09-11-21
Love it
It was a bit slow to start but gets better with each chapter. Author did a great job of providing history in the format of an engaging story. I have never felt more at home in a book before then I did in this one.
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- Evelyn
- 11-27-22
Gods of the Upper Air is brilliant
This is an extraordinary record of the development of anthropology as foreground, with historical events as background. Thank you January LaVoy for reading it with such clarity and expression.
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- Adriana Aquino
- 08-26-19
A must read
This is a very special book. The intellectual courage of Boas and his students and their research questions are as important as they were 100 years ago. A great read for understanding a bit better modern racism.
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2 people found this helpful
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- S. M. B.
- 10-16-19
An entertaining education in anthropology
This is a very well-performed, well-written, and overall entertaining and digestible history of the Boaz circle and American anthropology. I found this super packed with new concepts and intellectual histories, reading this as someone with training in sociology and social theory, but it could easily be a fresh, first-foray into the origins of ongoing debates in social sciences and the human condition. Highly recommended.
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1 person found this helpful
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- Anonymous User
- 01-05-23
Good writing, good performance.
Good writing, good performance, great experience. I enjoy it a lot, thanks you for this product.
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