The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous
(Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $35)
“If you are reading this, you are very probably WEIRD,” said Daniel Dennett in The New York Times. Don’t be offended: In social science lingo, the acronym describes anyone who is Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic, and as Harvard anthropologist Joseph Henrich has argued before, WEIRD people comprise just 12 percent of humanity but are so overrepresented in psychological research that our understanding of human nature has been skewed. In his “extraordinarily ambitious” new book, Henrich identifies an unexpected origin for the WEIRD mind, arguing that humanity’s prevailing clan-oriented mentality was dismantled in the West when the early Roman Catholic church began prohibiting marriage between cousins. Soon enough, states replaced tribes and law replaced custom, creating a new type of human. The case Henrich lays out is beyond fascinating. It’s “brimming with evidence.”
“Henrich’s ambition is tricky,” said Judith Shulevitz in The Atlantic. He wants to explain why the West rose to world dominance while he simultaneously tames Western arrogance. To do so, he insists that we recognize that culture, defined broadly, changes the way the brain functions— cultivating certain capabilities while pushing aside others. He further contends that the West’s ostensible crowning achievements,
(Little, Brown, $ 30)
“We think of secession and civil war as something long settled,” said Eric Herschthal in The New Republic. But journalist Richard Kreitner’s provocative new book argues that there has rarely been a moment when separatism ceased to be a threat to the union. Kreitner’s kitchen-sink account casts some secessionist movements as “more serious threats than they were,” but he offers useful insights—and his contention that we lie to ourselves by imagining a lost age of national unity is “certainly worth heeding.”
Sue Miller “remains one of the finest cartographers of the territory of marriage,” said Lorraine Berry in The Washington Post. In her incisive 11th novel, a photographer learns shortly after being widowed that her gregarious husband of 30 years had engaged in an affair. The revelation complicates the grief process for Annie, who shares narrative duties with various people in the couple’s orbit, all contributing new insights. Miller’s skillfulness with the device “makes a familiar plot into an original story.”