So You Want To Be An Anthropologist

Most career books for kids list duties and stop. Linda Soules does something harder: she teaches a way of thinking, then shows it working. The book's spine is the anthropologist's credo, "make the strange familiar, and the familiar strange," and it keeps its promise. The "Field Report: The Curious Customs of Grown-Ups" (the "sacred drawer" of rubber bands and dead batteries, the child's full middle name as "a sign of great danger") hands a ten-year-old the method and then asks them to try it on their own kitchen. That is a takeaway a reader can put into practice by dinner.

The substance is honest and unusually brave for the form. The "Hardest Parts" chapter gives the field's racist skull-measuring history, NAGPRA, and repatriation plain, adult-grade treatment without scaring the reader off. Evidence earns its claims throughout: Bohannan telling the Tiv elders Hamlet, Nandy of Shanidar Cave surviving with a body that could not hunt alone, the Simeulue islanders whose grandmother-songs about "smong" meant seven deaths instead of thousands. These are moving because they're specific and true, and they carry a real argument: that understanding people saves lives.

The "Myth or Fact?" section, the Piltdown hoax, and the Garbage Project's fibbing households keep the tone light and the rigor intact. A good book changes one specific thing about your week; this one will make a kid watch who sits where at the next family meal.