Buy Skin: A Natural History here, one of 1238 Denmark History books offered for sale at discount prices here in the history books section at R bookshop. There are currently 72309 history books in our history books section, and over 1,000,000 books listed in our book store. We greatly appreciate your patronage at R bookshop and look forward to offering you a large selection of great books at discount prices now and in the future. Thank you for shopping at R Bookshop!
|
You Are Here: Home > History Books > Denmark History > Item 196
 |
Skin: A Natural History
|
by Nina G. Jablonski
Sales Rank: 256795
|
$5.44
At Amazon
on 6-18-2008.
|
|
|
|
Features
Cover Type: Hard Cover with 281 pages
Published by: University of California PressEdition: 1st Edition October 5, 2006
Written in: English
ISBN 10 Number: 0520242815
ISBN 13 Number: 978-0520242814
Book Dimensions:
8.6 x 6.3 x 1.1 inches
Weighs: 1.2 pounds
From Publishers Weekly
This amply illustrated rhapsody to the body's largest and most visible organ showcases skin's versatility, importance in human biology and uniqueness: human skin is hairless and sweaty, has evolved in a spectrum of colors and is a billboard for self-expression. Penn State's anthropology chair, Jablonski nimbly interprets scientific data for a lay audience, and her geeky love for her discipline is often infectious. At her most compelling, Jablonski demonstrates that our hairlessness didn't evolve after humans adopted clothing or because our distant hominid relatives splashed through an aquatic phase like dolphins and whales; rather, it's inextricably linked to our abundance of sweat glands. Similarly intriguing are the notions that indigenous people of the hot tropics are tall and lean because mammals with a high ratio of skin surface area to body weight keep cool in intense heat, and that women have lighter skin color than men because females need to maximize vitamin D production during pregnancy and breastfeeding. Much less successful is a chapter entitled "Wear and Tear," which briefly discusses but sheds little light on such skin conditions as birthmarks, scabs, burns and acne, and serves up the same visual guide to checking moles for melanoma that is found in countless doctors' offices. Color and black and white illus. (Oct.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Product Description
We expose it, cover it, paint it, tattoo it, scar it, and pierce it. Our intimate connection with the world, skin protects us while advertising our health, our identity, and our individuality. This dazzling synthetic overview, written with a poetic touch and taking many intriguing side excursions, is a complete guidebook to the pliable covering that makes us who we are. Skin: A Natural History celebrates the evolution of three unique attributes of human skin: its naked sweatiness, its distinctive sepia rainbow of colors, and its remarkable range of decorations. Jablonski begins with a look at skin's structure and functions and then tours its three-hundred-million-year evolution, delving into such topics as the importance of touch and how the skin reflects and affects emotions. She looks at the modern human obsession with age-related changes in skin, especially wrinkles. She then turns to skin as a canvas for self-expression, exploring our use of cosmetics, body paint, tattooing, and scarification. Skin: A Natural History places the rich cultural canvas of skin within its broader biological context for the first time, and the result is a awesomely engaging look at ourselves.
Reader Reviews
"It isn't good to take for granted something as important as skin," writes Nina G. Jablonski in _Skin: A Natural History_ (University of California Press). Whatever risk you have of taking skin for granted, Jablonski isn't likely to do so. She is a professor of anthropology, and her research has been done on different aspects of skin, especially skin color. She describes her new book as "not a systematic treatise or a manual, but more an idiosyncratic guidebook, replete with personal detours into topics about skin that have most engaged me in my work over the years." Engaged is a good word; she clearly loves her subject, and succeeds in communicating her enthusiasm. Skin itself is of undoubted importance. It is the largest of our organs (just because it is your outer covering and not an inner mound of tissue like your liver doesn't keep it from being a unified organ). It is, unlike the skin of most animals, basically naked, with not very much hair and no scales or feathers. Like any of our other organs, it is a product of evolution that has its current properties because it has done a good job: "Our fabric doesn't wear out, our seams don't burst, we don't spontaneously sprout leaks, and we don't expand like water balloons when we sit in the bathtub." Jablonski is right that we take skin too much for granted, and her book is a happy corrective. In a phrase that has been made famous by pop anthropology, we are "naked apes," but the reason for our hairlessness (at least compared to our primate cousins) has been disputed. Jablonski discusses the best explanation for our not having hair is that we sweat, sweating, of course, being an important function of our skin. As we developed sweating as our cooling system, we lost fur, because sweating into fur is inefficient; the cooling of a body covered with wet fur would occur at the outermost layer of fur but not at the skin so that the body itself could get cool. Jablonski has splendid chapters on skin color, the superficial characteristic on which so much history and sadness has been based. Melanin has become the governor that mediates between the opposing goals of protection from ultraviolet radiation versus synthesis of vitamin D. Humans have by now turned the "natural" and geographic order of skin color into a relative chaos because of the speedy travel that we have been able to accomplish only in the last few centuries, but the play of skin colors originally evolved on strictly geographic lines because skin molecules were being juggled as key mediators of our ability to be out in the sun. Skin colors represent evolution at work in dermatological molecules, and do not have deeper significance. With our tendency to judge and group based on superficialities, skin colors carry a lot more meaning, but not in any biological sense. Jablonski winds up her tour with thoughts about the future of skin. Oh, sure, we will always have skin, but perhaps robots will, too; our skin helps us in measuring tasks as delicate as lending an arm for support to another or turning a doorknob, and artificial skin for robots may do such things, and perhaps even help robots start making the me / not me distinction that is essential for consciousness. If that sounds too far fetched, then consider tattoos of the future that will be essentially permanent until the wearer wants to be rid of them, and does so by shining a light of a single wavelength upon them, breaking down the dye. And if that sounds too frivolous, consider the possibility that burn patients might have a spray put on their wounds consisting of cultures of their own cells, all the many types of cells found in the skin; such a preparation would enable new and natural skin rapidly to regenerate. The speculation is fun, but Jablonski's history of the evolution of skin and the many functions it accomplishes for us brings a complicated topic into deep and appealing focus.
Comment | |
(Report this)
Back To Top
|
Skin: A Natural History
Available from Amazon
Price: $5.44
Updated on 6-18-2008.
|
NOTICE: All prices, availability, and specifications
are subject to verification by their respective retailers.
| We offer Skin: A Natural History and other related Denmark History Books here at Rbookshop.com. To view more books about Denmark History please use the previous and next buttons near the top of this page.
|
|
Search for books at
