62 : a model kit

First published in English in 1972 and long out of print, __62: A Model Kit__ is Julio Cortázar's brilliant, intricate blueprint for life in the so-called "City."Here is an exhilarating intellectual performance, in the tradition of Roger Penrose's __The Emperor's New Mind__ and Steven Pinker's __The Language Instinct__. On the way to showing how the world of our ancient ancestors shaped our modern modular mind, Steven Mithen shares one provocative insight after another as he answers a series of fascinating questions: * Were our brains hard-wired in the Pleistocene Era by the needs of hunter-gatherers? * When did religious beliefs first emerge? * Why were the first paintings made by humankind so technically accomplished and expressive? * What can the sexual habits of chimpanzees tell us about the prehistory of the modern mind? This is the first archaeological account to support the new modular concept of the mind. The concept, promulgated by cognitive... First published in English in 1972 and long out of print, 62: A Model Kit is Julio Cortázar's brilliant, intricate blueprint for life in the so-called "City." As one of the main characters, the intellectual Juan, puts it: to one person the City might appear as Paris, to another it might be where one goes upon getting out of bed in Barcelona; to another it might appear as a beer hall in Oslo. This cityscape, as Carlos Fuentes describes it, "seems drawn up by the Marx Brothers with an assist from Bela Lugosi!" It is the meeting place for a wild assortment of bohemians in a novel described by The New York Times as "Deeply touching, enjoyable, beautifully written and fascinatingly mysterious." Library Journal has said 62: A Model Kit is "a highly satisfying work by one of the most extraordinary writers of our time."