What do you think?
Rate this book
Man: An Autobiography
The story of man through the ages, told briefly and simply as history, anthropology, and human drama.
- GenresHistory
310 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1946
1 person is currently reading
32 people want to read
About the author
George R. Stewart
75 books209 followersGeorge Rippey Stewart was an American toponymist, a novelist, and a professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley. He is best known for his only science fiction novel Earth Abides (1949), a post-apocalyptic novel, for which he won the first International Fantasy Award in 1951. It was dramatized on radio's Escape and inspired Stephen King's
The Stand
.
His 1941 novel Storm , featuring as its protagonist a Pacific storm called Maria, prompted the National Weather Service to use personal names to designate storms and inspired Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe to write the song "They Call the Wind Maria" for their 1951 musical "Paint Your Wagon." Storm was dramatized as "A Storm Called Maria" on a 1959 episode of ABC's Disneyland. Two other novels, Ordeal by Hunger (1936) and Fire (1948) also evoked environmental catastrophes.
Stewart was a founding member of the American Name Society in 1956-57, and he once served as an expert witness in a murder trial as a specialist in family names. His best-known academic work is Names on the Land A Historical Account of Place-Naming in the United States (1945; reprinted, New York Review Books, 2008). He wrote three other books on place-names, A Concise Dictionary of American Place-Names (1970), Names on the Globe (1975), and American Given Names (1979). His scholarly works on the poetic meter of ballads (published under the name George R. Stewart, Jr.), beginning with his 1922 Ph.D. dissertation at Columbia, remain important in their field.
His 1959 book Pickett's Charge is a detailed history of the final attack at Gettysburg.
His 1941 novel Storm , featuring as its protagonist a Pacific storm called Maria, prompted the National Weather Service to use personal names to designate storms and inspired Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe to write the song "They Call the Wind Maria" for their 1951 musical "Paint Your Wagon." Storm was dramatized as "A Storm Called Maria" on a 1959 episode of ABC's Disneyland. Two other novels, Ordeal by Hunger (1936) and Fire (1948) also evoked environmental catastrophes.
Stewart was a founding member of the American Name Society in 1956-57, and he once served as an expert witness in a murder trial as a specialist in family names. His best-known academic work is Names on the Land A Historical Account of Place-Naming in the United States (1945; reprinted, New York Review Books, 2008). He wrote three other books on place-names, A Concise Dictionary of American Place-Names (1970), Names on the Globe (1975), and American Given Names (1979). His scholarly works on the poetic meter of ballads (published under the name George R. Stewart, Jr.), beginning with his 1922 Ph.D. dissertation at Columbia, remain important in their field.
His 1959 book Pickett's Charge is a detailed history of the final attack at Gettysburg.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
October 5, 2014
Like Sheep Rock, Man, an Autobiography is a concept book: what if Man, himself (in the generic, larger sense) were to tell his own story in a broad, collective way, part historical overview, part journey from animals in trees to people in cities?
The idea is interesting, and the volume starts well: “I, Man, having attained some maturity of years, feel a desire to write my autobiography.” But where to go from there? Stewart answers that question in scholarly fashion. He give equal time to very early development, detailing descent from the trees, social groupings, and his “essential five” – tools, speech, fire, cookery, and clothing, then extends these in an evolutionary way to the present day (the mid 20th century). Interesting. The result is something of an anthropological chronicle with no characters or consistent narrative threads, a recitation of facts from a 30,000 foot perspective, which is informative first, entertaining second, and in which individuals are irrelevant, as is much of civilization, aside from that it existed and grew, and as is Man himself, in the cosmic sense. But while this perspective affords a lofty view, it also separates the material from the reader.
Having established the goal of Man’s autobiography, how should one proceed? It would be all too easy to be drawn down into the minutia of lives of numerous well-remembered figures history paints as drivers of the human race, both good and bad, at the cost of the overview itself: the higher vantage is required to tell the entire story – to see the entire story and unfold it in a consistent way.
That is the conundrum. The work as a concept is intriguing, but due to its necessary distance from humanity, as a novel it fails to sufficiently engage.
The idea is interesting, and the volume starts well: “I, Man, having attained some maturity of years, feel a desire to write my autobiography.” But where to go from there? Stewart answers that question in scholarly fashion. He give equal time to very early development, detailing descent from the trees, social groupings, and his “essential five” – tools, speech, fire, cookery, and clothing, then extends these in an evolutionary way to the present day (the mid 20th century). Interesting. The result is something of an anthropological chronicle with no characters or consistent narrative threads, a recitation of facts from a 30,000 foot perspective, which is informative first, entertaining second, and in which individuals are irrelevant, as is much of civilization, aside from that it existed and grew, and as is Man himself, in the cosmic sense. But while this perspective affords a lofty view, it also separates the material from the reader.
Having established the goal of Man’s autobiography, how should one proceed? It would be all too easy to be drawn down into the minutia of lives of numerous well-remembered figures history paints as drivers of the human race, both good and bad, at the cost of the overview itself: the higher vantage is required to tell the entire story – to see the entire story and unfold it in a consistent way.
That is the conundrum. The work as a concept is intriguing, but due to its necessary distance from humanity, as a novel it fails to sufficiently engage.
January 25, 2017
Stewart is a man who is not afraid to use his powers of logic and deduction. This work starts out brilliantly and touches on many interesting points regarding human evolution, which I have to say I had not heard explained so logically before. Very interesting and compelling. He traces the human story from beginning to end (up to 1945, that is) tackling some very difficult concepts in his own unique way.
Stewart, however, reveals too much of his personal bias and mildly contrary nature in the late chapters of the book starting, say, at 1700 AD. Even earlier, he, no doubt intentionally, surprises the reader by downplaying many of the Greek and all of the Roman contributions to civilization in direct contradiction to the history lessons we have all learned so well.
As he approaches closer and closer to modern times, his conclusions become less convincing and his predictions somewhat laughable, although I grant that there a few few gems of insight in this later part of the text as well.
Overall, he does a good job in tackling a monumental task and completing it in 300 or so pages of which two thirds or three quarters are a showcase of good ideas that I can recommend to anyone.
Stewart, however, reveals too much of his personal bias and mildly contrary nature in the late chapters of the book starting, say, at 1700 AD. Even earlier, he, no doubt intentionally, surprises the reader by downplaying many of the Greek and all of the Roman contributions to civilization in direct contradiction to the history lessons we have all learned so well.
As he approaches closer and closer to modern times, his conclusions become less convincing and his predictions somewhat laughable, although I grant that there a few few gems of insight in this later part of the text as well.
Overall, he does a good job in tackling a monumental task and completing it in 300 or so pages of which two thirds or three quarters are a showcase of good ideas that I can recommend to anyone.
February 26, 2012
An admixture of evolutionary biology and the kind of anthropological history that can be found in Jared Diamond's work, this slyly narrated book was years ahead of its time when it was published in 1946. It is dedicated to "Canis, best of friends."
April 22, 2019
“Aside from not having been very much influenced by formal disciplines, I have also been a lonely scholar, and have not been greatly influenced by people with whom I have associated” [George R. Stewart, “A Little of Myself,” an oral history interview with Susan Reiss, May 26, 1971, p 19, http://digitalassets.lib.berkeley.edu...].
In spite of what he says in the interview, I can’t help but wonder just how much he might have been influenced in the writing of this volume, Man, and others such as Earth Abides, by having been at the University of California, Berkeley, at the same time as the anthropologist Alfred Kroeber. Parenthetically, I can’t help but wonder just how much of an influence Stewart himself might have been on the writings of Ursula K. Le Guin, Kroeber’s daughter, who was born into the Berkeley milieu just a few years after Stewart started his long career at Cal.
Speculation.
Appropriate as Man has been described as “speculative anthropology” [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_...]. Speculation, I think, implies a bit of philosophizing. I’d say that’s the best part of the story Stewart has contrived here.
Did I like this book. Yes. I’ve liked everything I’ve read by Stewart.
In spite of what he says in the interview, I can’t help but wonder just how much he might have been influenced in the writing of this volume, Man, and others such as Earth Abides, by having been at the University of California, Berkeley, at the same time as the anthropologist Alfred Kroeber. Parenthetically, I can’t help but wonder just how much of an influence Stewart himself might have been on the writings of Ursula K. Le Guin, Kroeber’s daughter, who was born into the Berkeley milieu just a few years after Stewart started his long career at Cal.
Speculation.
Appropriate as Man has been described as “speculative anthropology” [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_...]. Speculation, I think, implies a bit of philosophizing. I’d say that’s the best part of the story Stewart has contrived here.
Did I like this book. Yes. I’ve liked everything I’ve read by Stewart.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews