I want to give readers of the Loom a heads up about book that I’ve edited that’s coming out in November. The author is a very interesting writer named Charles Darwin.

In 1871 Charles Darwin published pretty much his first and last word about human evolution: The Descent of Man. It’s a marvelous, but sometimes maddening book. Darwin did a remarkably good job of hypothesizing how humans evolved, especially when you consider that barely any hominid fossils had yet been found. But Darwin packed the book with detail, a lot of it having to do with all sorts of animals other than Homo sapiens. I’ve selected some key portions of the book for what I and my publisher are calling “the