April 20, 2020
Paleoanthropologist Leakey’s disappointing debut memoir isn’t nearly as illuminating about her storied career as one might hope. Writing with the aid of her daughter Samira, Leakey shares bits of her life, mentioning almost in passing the births of her two daughters and her marriage to a fellow paleoanthropologist, Richard Leakey, but her main focus is on the discoveries she and her team made about the fossil record of early humans and pre-humans. These include the 1999 discovery of a skull that she identified as coming from a previously unknown species of hominin: Kenyanthropus platyops, or “flat-faced man from Kenya.” The fossils drive her story to such an extent that the chronology of her career is difficult to follow. Leakey also spends significant time providing readers with rudimentary scientific grounding largely tangential to her story, discussing, in an accessible, if rather pedestrian, manner topics such as how climate works, the ability that some nonhuman primates have to use language, and the methodology used to acquire and age Antarctic ice cores. Leakey’s fascinating life and work deserve more attention than they received in this volume. Agent: Gillian MacKenzie, MacKenzie Wolf.
May 15, 2020
Another member of human anthropology's "First Family" carries on the high standards of her predecessors. Patriarch Louis Leakey (1903-1972) demonstrated, after a considerable struggle, that humans evolved in Africa and made pioneering discoveries in Kenya along with his wife, Mary, who added her own. Louis' son, Richard, carried on the family tradition. Meave is Richard's wife, and readers need not fear that absence of founder DNA diluted the Leakey genius, because it's clear from this memoir that baby Meave hit the ground running. Daughter of a surgeon in rural Britain, before age 10, she was cultivating and selling eggs, geese, and lambs. As a teenager, she traveled the world, attended a nearly all-male technical school, and fell in love with the ocean during holidays at the beach. After obtaining a degree in marine biology, she discovered that no jobs existed because research ships in the 1960s could not "accommodate" women. Phoning to answer an ad for a research position in Africa, she found herself speaking to Louis Leakey, who hired her after determining that she would work for little money under difficult conditions and possessed the ability to repair a car. She started at a research center in Nairobi, where she cared for and dissected monkeys to obtain her doctorate and met Richard Leakey. She joined him in his field research and proved herself as hardy, obsessive, observant, opinionated, and--essential in searching for human remains--as lucky as her relations. Aided by daughter Samira, who lives with her family in Kenya, Maeve describes a life that many readers will envy. Her discoveries, often after numbingly tedious work in a brutal climate, added new species to our family tree, teased out more information about existing ancestors, and increased our knowledge of how evolution, geology, and climate change gave rise to modern humans. She is not shy about explaining all this, although some details will overwhelm general readers. An illuminating memoir of an impressive scientist.
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Starred review from October 1, 2020
An anxious child of the London Blitz brought to the countryside, Meave Epps became enthralled by nature and committed to science. After earning degrees in marine biology and zoology and being turned down by marine research centers, all claiming to have no facilities for women, she went to work for Louis Leakey, famed mentor of Jane Goodall and Dian Fossey. With a 1965 posting in Kenya, Meave became a keen fossil hunter, a deeply inquisitive expert in human evolution, and, once married to the intrepid Richard Leakey, a key member of the gifted Leakey clan of world-defining paleoanthropologists. With her coauthor and daughter, Meave presents an exciting and richly informative scientist's autobiography, covering personal matters briskly, no matter how dramatic, and passionately sharing her driving fascination with our hominin ancestors and their environments. Chronicling with vivid detail the diligence and fortitude fieldwork demands, the exhilaration of major finds, and the controversies these discoveries engendered, Meave elucidates how fossils inform her compelling theories about our ancestors' ability to outrun prey (thanks to sweat glands), making persistence hunting possible; hominin social bonding and caregiving; and the crucial family role filled by older females. Ultimately, this major work of scientific dedication and original insight illuminates both our distant past and our current, serious, human-caused planetary challenges.Women in Focus: The 19th in 2020(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2020, American Library Association.)
February 1, 2020
Leading paleoanthropologist Leakey discusses not only her enduring hunt for human origins but her life with paleoanthropologist husband Richard, giving him a kidney when needed and managing their expeditions when he was badly injured in a plane crash. With a 35,000-copy first printing.
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September 1, 2020
Paleoanthropologist Meave Leakey (research professor, Stony Brook Univ.) has penned a memoir, cowritten with her daughter Samira, chronicling her life hunting fossils and piecing together the mystery of hominid evolution. Trained as a marine zoologist, Meave was hired by archaeologist Louis Leakey to work at Tigoni Primate Research Centre in Kenya. Invited to Koobi Fora by fellow paleoanthropologist Richard Leakey, Maeve soon became interested in fossil hunting; the two married and worked together until Richard was asked to lead Kenya's wildlife conservation efforts, leaving Meave to coordinate the paleontological fieldwork in the Turkana Basin. While raising a family and dealing with Richard's health challenges, Meave describes life in camp sifting through mounds of soil in search of small bones, punctuated by important discoveries. She weaves hypotheses about hominid evolution, from bipedality to diet changes, including complementary sciences such as dating fossils, cultural anthropology, geological history, and astronomy, through the story of her life, while also touching on other important fossil finds and how they relate to the Turkana Basin discoveries. VERDICT An accessible account of a fascinating life intertwined with well-documented scientific facts and hypotheses. For those who enjoy science memoirs and investigative works on evolution.--Sue O'Brien, Downers Grove, IL
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