I’m skeptical about short books on human evolution. I cringe at the thought of simplistic family trees misleading readers into thinking we’ve got human ancestry all figured out. But opening Pamela Turner’s How to Build a Human, I first saw the broadly smiling face of Dr. Habiba Chirchir, photographed holding two femurs, one a fossil, one modern. Dr. Chirchir, I knew from a recent talk she gave to a paleontology group at the University of Washington, is the real deal and would not lend her endorsement to anything full of errors and overstatements. So I jumped in to read this beautifully produced volume aimed at middle school readers and was pleasantly surprised on almost every page.
Pamela Turner writes breezily, engagingly, and well. Though there’s plenty of technical information to be found in How to Build a Human, none of it is presented in alienating, pretentious language. It...