There's a class of optical illusions called cognitive illusions in which simple shapes are arranged in such a manner as to take advantage of our tendency towards perceptual organization. The silhouettes of faces that look to one another became a vase in white; a sketched animal might be a duck or a rabbit. It's possible to create such an effect in prose as well, to give the world a half-twist and re-write our perceptions. It's mostly a matter of voice, telling the story in a manner that is both particularly clear and spectacularly unique.
Hannah Holmes finds that voice in 'The Well-Dressed Ape: A Natural History of Myself,' her entertainingly dispassionate view of the Human Animal. The premise of this innovative work of non-fiction is quite simple. 'The Well-Dressed Ape' is a 300 page-plus "fact sheet" for homo sapiens. By unplugging her perceptions of humans as humans and re-jiggering her view so that she sees and speaks of us as animals, Holmes manages to engagingly entertain her readers while elucidating just what it means to be human.
Holmes' narrative is straightforwardly organized. First she describes our bodies ("Quick As A Cricket: Physical Description"), then our brains, organs of perception, range, tendency towards territoriality, diet, reproduction, behavior, communication, predators and our impact on the ecosystems we inhabit. I listed them all because that seems like a pretty tall order in a pretty readable and skinny book. But Holmes has that voice, that narrative storytelling style that helps her reign in each of her areas of interest so that she covers the ground without seeming to skimp.
'The Well-Dressed Ape' is simply a delight to read. Holmes prose is often very funny and very informative in the same sentence, tweaking our sensibilities with her skewed point-of-view. She refers to our "fur" and "this pinnal flap of mine. It's no thing of beauty. It's a bald ruffle of cartilage, immobile as an owl's eye." (It's her ear.) She's simultaneously sharp and silly. By taking a single step back and viewing humans as animals, she's free to choose words that are quite appropriate, yet rarely applied to the human realm. The craft of writing in this book is quite superb. She does reign herself in nicely, never pushing the prose, but simply following her muse. Readers will follow with great reading pleasure.
Beyond the prose, Holmes offers a wide variety of the latest science discoveries clearly explained and expertly threaded through her story arc. You'll learn far more than you thought possible without ever losing the page-turning quality that makes this book so much fun to read. For a book focused on humans, she manages to pack in a fair amount of stuff about other animals as well. Everything's referenced and indexed, which lends the whole proceeding a soothing assurance that we're not just getting another "pop-sci" book, but a scholarly, if entertaining and a bit odd work of actual science.
And that's the thing about 'The Well-Dressed Ape.' It is in the end a fine work of science writing, a book in which the prose craftsmanship plays as important a part as the facts that underlie the work. This is humanity as we might seem if viewed by benevolent aliens, surveying all the life on earth. Sure, there are a lot of facts here. But the real science is in the writing, in the half-twist perception that we aren't just humans, we are animals as well. We look in the mirror and see one; to see the Other requires the gift of language.
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