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Tim White's Top Book Recommendations

Want to know what books Tim White recommends on their reading list? We've researched interviews, social media posts, podcasts, and articles to build a comprehensive list of Tim White's favorite book recommendations of all time.

1
This is the story of the search for humanity's origins--from the Middle Ages, when questions of the earth's antiquity first began to arise, through to the latest genetic discoveries that show the interrelatedness of all living creatures.
Central to the story is the part played by fossils--first, in establishing the age of the Earth; then, following Darwin, in the pursuit of possible -Missing Links- that would establish whether or not humans and chimpanzees share a common ancestor. John Reader's lifelong passion for this quest--palaeoanthropology--began when he reported on the celebrated...
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Recommended by Tim White, and 1 others.

Tim WhiteThe best available book on the history of paleoanthropology. It looks at how these finds have been made ever since Darwin. (Source)

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2
This dynamic chronicle of the race to find the “missing links” between humans and apes transports readers into the highly competitive world of fossil hunting and into the lives of the ambitious scientists intent on pinpointing the dawn of humankind.
 
The quest to find where and when the earliest human ancestors first appeared is one of the most exciting and challenging of all scientific pursuits. The First Human is the story of four international teams obsessed with solving the mystery of human evolution and of the intense rivalries that propel them.
 
An...
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Recommended by Tim White, and 1 others.

Tim WhiteThis book gives the reader the most up-to-date knowledge of how modern paleoanthropology is done. It gives you a sense of the personalities involved and the breadth of science. (Source)

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3

The Journals of Lewis and Clark

The Journals of Lewis and Clark are "the first report on the West, on the United States over the hill and beyond the sunset, on the province of the American future" (Bernard DeVoto).

In 1803, the great expanse of the Louisiana Purchase was an empty canvas. Keenly aware that the course of the nation's destiny lay westward—and that a "Voyage of Discovery" would be necessary to determine the nature of the frontier—President Thomas Jefferson commissioned Meriwether Lewis to lead an expedition from the Missouri River to the northern Pacific coast and back. From 1804 to...
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Recommended by Tim White, and 1 others.

Tim WhiteLewis and Clark setting off into a geography and a biology and an anthropology that was then just completely unknown. (Source)

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4

Voyage of the Beagle

s/t: Charles Darwin's Journal of Researches
When the Beagle sailed out of Devonport on 27 December 1831, Charles Darwin was twenty-two and setting off on the voyage of a lifetime.
It was to last five years and transform him from an amiable and somewhat aimless young man into a scientific celebrity. Even more vitally, it was to set in motion the intellectual currents that culminated in the arrival of The Origin of Species in Victorian drawing-rooms in 1859. His journal, reprinted here in a shortened version, is vivid and immediate, showing us a naturalist making...
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Recommended by Tom Clarke, Tim White, and 2 others.

Tom ClarkeDarwin sees Valparaiso destroyed by an earthquake erupting and is horrified by the brutality of nature. (Source)

Tim WhiteDarwin is a great writer and an excellent observer so it is a good place to start understanding where we came from, and how we came to that understanding. (Source)

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5
Darwin's theory of natural selection issued a profound challenge to orthodox thought and belief: no being or species has been specifically created; all are locked into a pitiless struggle for existence, with extinction looming for those not fitted for the task.

Yet The Origin of Species (1859) is also a humane and inspirational vision of ecological interrelatedness, revealing the complex mutual interdependencies between animal and plant life, climate and physical environment, and—by implication—within the human world.

Written for the general reader, in a style...
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Neil deGrasse TysonWhich books should be read by every single intelligent person on planet? [...] On the Origin of Species (Darwin) [to learn of our kinship with all other life on Earth]. If you read all of the above works you will glean profound insight into most of what has driven the history of the western world. (Source)

Mark KurlanskyIt is one of the most important books written, and I always urge people to read it. (Source)

Darren Aronofsky[Darren Aronofsky recommended this book on the podcast "The Tim Ferriss Show".] (Source)

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