Stirring and original

A vivid and probing introduction for perplexed outsiders

Salman Rushdie's extraordinary book...is a masterpiece of sympathetic yet critical reporting, graced with his marvellous wit, quietly assertive style, odd and yet always revealing experiences

He makes JFK as alive and compelling as if you were reading about him for the first time

JFK is biography at its very best

Written with verve and authority, this exciting – even entrancing – story follows the first cultural anthropologists to far-flung field sites that suggested antidotes to the racism and xenophobia of society

Stunning. Wickedly perceptive, a scholarly masterpiece

Elegant and kaleidoscopic … this looks to be the perfect moment for King’s resolutely humane book

Deeply intelligent and immensely readable

The notion of cultural relativism was as unique in its way as was Einstein’s theory of relativity in the discipline of physics, a shattering of the European mind. This remarkable book explains why. Franz Boas’s intuitions and insights, distilled in theory and practice by generations of scholars, a lineage that includes Ruth Benedict, Margaret Mead, and Zora Neale Hurston, all brilliantly portrayed in the book, continue to inform contemporary anthropology, allowing the discipline to stand today as the antidote to nativism and the poisonous rhetoric of political demagogues. The entire purpose of anthropology, wrote Ruth Benedict, is to make the world safe for human differences. Never has the voice of anthropology been more important, and the arrival of this astonishing book can only be described as a gift to us all

Masterful. A vital book for our times

Engaging, deeply thought-provoking and brilliantly written. Charles King takes you on an unforgettable journey as daring anthropologists unravel the profound mysteries of culture and mankind

Vitally relevant

A motley crew of rebellious young female scientists, inspired by a scar-faced mad-genius professor, boldly set out on intrepid journeys to study strange far-flung worlds, and discover that their own home-world is stranger than they thought. Along the way, they have tempestuous love-affairs, scary adventures, swashbuckling battles against armies of racists, sexists and eugenicists. In the end, they change our moral universe. Sounds like a sci-fi fantasy movie? It happened, here on Earth, nearly a century ago. A fascinating and important story, beautifully told

As told very engagingly by Charles King, their research turned upside down the then unshakeable assumption that certain people were innatley superior to others, because of their skin colour, culture and gender

Nothing short of magnificent … in many ways a deeply touching book. Charles King’s prose is immensely readable and perceptive and lends itself perfectly to telling one of the most fascinating tales of twentieth-century science

No one until now has told this story of anthropology’s rise to [its] ‘master key’ status … Charles King’s book … does this with both subtlety and panache … A compelling account of mutliculturalism’s intellectual precursors

King's book tells this many-layered, mostly forgotten story cogently and compellingly ... a gift to the field of anthropology and to us all

King's book tells...[a] many-layered history, mostly forgotten story cogently and compellingly, and his collective method is a wise and welcome departure from the standard genre of a book focused on one towering individual... it also enriches our understanding of his [Boas's] female students, especially Hurston, enabling us to appreciate that she worked to develop innovative, story-driven ways of communicating anthropological insights... In breathing new life Boas's story he [Charles King] has given a gift to the field of anthropology and to us all

Franz Boas, whose achievements are set out in Charles King's The Reinvention of Humanity, recast the foundations of American anthropology. Against the prevailing political and intellectual orthodoxy, Boas and his students insisted that the basic unity of humankind was beyond dispute, and that within this unity there was no natural hierarchy of races, languages or cultures... That their ideas were found radical and strange is an indictment of their culture; that King's book seems timely is an indictment of our own

Timely stuff.

An intricate biographical essay.

[A] richly entertaining study.

A masterful portrayal of the Belle Epoque.

A personal meditation on the belle époque… The Man in the Red Coat is one long, meandering essay in Montaigne mode.

The book is at once a biography of Pozzi in the context of his time and a picture of the time as refracted by Pozzi. Barnes constructs it as a kind of mosaic.

Elegant and resonant.

I’ve just started Julian Barnes’s The Man in the Red Coat, and I am already hooked.

A tour de force… Dr Pozzi may not be remembered in medical history but his legacy is an artwork of himself in his prime that has transcended time.

Steeped in the luxury and scandal of Belle Epoque Paris and London, Barnes resurrects the charming, philandering Pozzi.