Thorough and sensitive ... Not a history of prehistory, exactly; it is a history of how various accounts of prehistory have been put to political use ... It complicates the increasingly widespread narrative that paints pining for the past as an exclusively conservative pastime.
Spirited ... Geroulanos, who started his research for this project more than a decade ago, includes so many thinkers and theories that it can be hard to keep track of the mounting contradictions. But the tumbling cadence of conflicting ideas also serves to illustrate his point. He is dismantling, not synthesizing.
Geroulanos surveys many of the fantasies and self-serving myths that have been used to fill in the dangerously wide-open blank space between the emergence of humans and the invention of writing ... The strength of Mr. Geroulanos’s book lies in its breadth. It ranges easily from the pseudoscience of Freud and Jung (for both of whom idiosyncratic notions of prehistory were important) to Nazi obsessions with origins.
All of this is fascinating—or would be, but for major problems. For one thing, Geroulanos is not a congenial companion ... Worse is the snark, which is relentless, and mostly aimed at nothing worse than the routine careerism of intellectual life ... Instead of coming to his subject with a scholar’s open-mindedness—this, alas, is no surprise these days—he does so with self-righteousness and an agenda.
Original and exciting ... A dazzling survey of countless anthropologists, scientists, and artists ... Geroulanos is right to describe prehistory as a Rorschach test onto which the present’s concerns are projected. But what his book does not consider as much as it should is whether this malleability can also serve creative and less narcissistic goals.
Accompanied by eye-catching illustrations, his study mulls over both "science and speculation" ... The power (in this case, often ferocious and pejorative) of language and connotations is admirably addressed.
An incisive and captivating reassessment of prehistory ... In lucid prose, Geroulanos unspools an enthralling and detailed history of the development of modern natural science. It’s a must-read.
