Books published by publisher Pantheon Books

Front flap: "Once a man and woman and boy were wrecked on an uninhabited coast. The boy's mother and father grew old, and at last the boy, a man now, was left alone. There in the wilderness he saw and did many wonderful things, but he had no one to show what he had seen or tell what he had done - he was alone. This is the story of how, one by one, the man found himself a family. Almost nowhere in fiction is there a stranger, dearer, or funnier family - and the life that the members of The Animal Family live together, there in the wilderness beside the sea, is as extraordinary and as enchanting as the family. If you like wild animals and desert islands, if you want a second family besides your own, this is the book for you, a book that will find a place in your heart alongside Randall Jarrell's and Maurice Sendak's famous The Bat-Poet."

In this landmark book of popular science, Daniel E. Lieberman—chair of the department of human evolutionary biology at Harvard University and a leader in the field—gives us a lucid and engaging account of how the human body evolved over millions of years, even as it shows how the increasing disparity between the jumble of adaptations in our Stone Age bodies and advancements in the modern world is occasioning this paradox: greater longevity but increased chronic disease. The Story of the Human Body brilliantly illuminates as never before the major transformations that contributed key adaptations to the body: the rise of bipedalism; the shift to a non-fruit-based diet; the advent of hunting and gathering, leading to our superlative endurance athleticism; the development of a very large brain; and the incipience of cultural proficiencies. Lieberman also elucidates how cultural evolution differs from biological evolution, and how our bodies were further transformed during the Agricultural and Industrial Revolutions. While these ongoing changes have brought about many benefits, they have also created conditions to which our bodies are not entirely adapted, Lieberman argues, resulting in the growing incidence of obesity and new but avoidable diseases, such as type 2 diabetes. Lieberman proposes that many of these chronic illnesses persist and in some cases are intensifying because of “dysevolution,” a pernicious dynamic whereby only the symptoms rather than the causes of these maladies are treated. And finally—provocatively—he advocates the use of evolutionary information to help nudge, push, and sometimes even compel us to create a more salubrious environment. (With charts and line drawings throughout.)

Suburban Seattle, the mid-1970s. We learn from the out-set that a strange plague has descended upon the area’s teenagers, transmitted by sexual contact. The disease is manifested in any number of ways — from the hideously grotesque to the subtle (and concealable) — but once you’ve got it, that’s it. There’s no turning back.As we inhabit the heads of several key characters — some kids who have it, some who don’t, some who are about to get it — what unfolds isn’t the expected battle to fight the plague, or bring heightened awareness to it , or even to treat it. What we become witness to instead is a fascinating and eerie portrait of the nature of high school alienation itself — the savagery, the cruelty, the relentless anxiety and ennui, the longing for escape.And then the murders start.As hypnotically beautiful as it is horrifying, Black Hole transcends its genre by deftly exploring a specific American cultural moment in flux and the kids who are caught in it- back when it wasn’t exactly cool to be a hippie anymore, but Bowie was still just a little too weird. To say nothing of sprouting horns and molting your skin…

From one of Granta’s Best Young British Novelists, a stunningly insightful, emotionally powerful new novel about an outsider haunted by an inescapable past: a story of loneliness and survival, guilt and loss, and the power of forgiveness. Jake Whyte is living on her own in an old farmhouse on a craggy British island, a place of ceaseless rain and battering wind. Her disobedient collie, Dog, and a flock of sheep are her sole companions, which is how she wants it to be. But every few nights something—or someone—picks off one of the sheep and sounds a new deep pulse of terror. There are foxes in the woods, a strange boy and a strange man, and rumors of an obscure, formidable beast. And there is also Jake’s past, hidden thousands of miles away and years ago, held in the silences about her family and the scars that stripe her back—a past that threatens to break into the present. With exceptional artistry and empathy, All the Birds, Singing reveals an isolated life in all its struggles and stubborn hopes, unexpected beauty, and hard-won redemption.

This is a book about a world in a life. Conceived in Jamaica and possibly mixed-race, Elizabeth Marsh (1735-1785) traveled farther and was more intimately affected by developments across the globe than the vast majority of men. She was the first woman to publish in English on Morocco, and the first to carry out extensive explorations in eastern and southern India. A creature of multiple frontiers, she spent time in London, Menorca, Rio de Janeiro, and the Cape of Africa. She speculated in Florida land, was caught up in the French and Indian War, linked to voyages to the Pacific, and enmeshed as victim or owner in three different systems of slavery. She was also crucially part of far larger histories. Marsh’s experiences would have been impossible without her links to the Royal Navy, the East India Company, imperial warfare, and widening international trade. To this extent, her career illumines shifting patterns of Western power and overseas aggression. Yet the unprecedented expansion of connections across continents occurring during her lifetime also ensured that her ideas and personal relationships were shaped repeatedly by events and people beyond Europe: by runaway African slaves; Indian weavers and astronomers; Sephardi Jewish traders; and the great Moroccan sultan, Sidi Muhammad, who schemed to entrap her. Many biographies remain constrained by a national framework, while global histories are often impersonal. By contrast, in this dazzling and original book, Linda Colley moves repeatedly and questioningly between vast geopolitical transformations and the intricate detail of individual lives. This is a global biography for our globalizing times.

Dust jacket notes: "Out of Africa comes the story of the most remarkable association between man and wild beast ever told. Joy Adamson is the wife of a game warden in Kenya. One day her husband was called out to deal with a man-eating lion. While stalking the lion he was suddenly charged by a lioness whom he had to shoot in self-defense. In the crevice of some nearby rocks he found three cubs. They decided to rear one of them as a pet. This is by no means the first case of a lion cub being reared by Europeans. But in all previous instances, the foster parents eventually had to face up to the problem of how to dispose of a fully grown lion; they had to choose between the two alternatives, consigning it to a zoo or giving it a freedom which it was unfit to enjoy or even survive. The Adamson's foresaw this dilemma and worked out a solution. They deliberately set about training their lioness, Elsa, to kill and fend for herself. They succeeded in turning her back into the fierce wild animal nature had intended her to be. At the same time they preserved undiminished the bond of confidence and affection which they had established with her as a pet. Today the lioness lives the proud life of the king of beasts. She has found a mate and had produced a litter of cubs. Her foster parents visit her at regular intervals. On arrival in her area they fire a few shots in the air and wait for her to come bounding out of the bush. She is always touchingly glad to see them and gives them a boisterous welcome. Hers is a unique story-of a lion who has bridged the gulf between two worlds, that of the jungle and of man, to enjoy the freedom of both. Never before has the life history of a wild animal been so intimately recorded over such a long period or been documented at every stage by such a remarkable collection of photographs, numbering in the thousands, of which over one hundred are reproduced in the book."