The Buried Soul

Praise

Blazingly smart and deeply human.–Mary Roach, author of Stiff: The Curious Lives of Cadavers

“Taylor makes sense of the ghastly and the seemingly insensible-African muti killings, human sacrifice, vampires, and triple-killed bog bodies. Archaeology was never so entertaining, and entertainment never so edifying. There is not a trite thought or lazy idea in this book.”–Mary Roach, author of Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers

“The Buried Soul is an extraordinary immersion experience . . . I had always supposed that archeology was as dry as the dust and bones it traffics in, as pedestrian as the catalogs it compiles. On the contrary, when expounded by a masterly storyteller like Taylor, it resembles psychoanalysis at its best . . . I haven’t space to illustrate how ingeniously Taylor assembles his interpretations, patiently working out the barely intelligible motives and beliefs of the creatures who became us . . . Wherever else you travel, you should consider a trip into ‘deep time’ with The Buried Soul.”–George Scialabba, Boston Globe

“Learned and impassioned . . . the lesson of Mr. Taylor’s unsparing book is that . . . for most of human history, our attempts to deal with death-to appease it, master it, or simply make sense of it-have been deeply irrational and often cruel. More than any other human experience, death makes us savage.”–Adam Kirsch, New York Sun

“Absorbing and challenging . . . The Buried Soul is vast, ambitious, and contentious. It ranges over two million years, from a cut-marked skull of Homo habilis to the death of a young man in 2000.”–Katherine Ashenburg, American Scholar