Nonfiction Book: Lives in Ruins by Marilyn Johnson

The Friday 56: *Grab a book, any book. *Turn to page 56 or 56% in your eReader  *Find any sentence, (or few, just don't spoil it) that grabs you. *Post it. *Add your (url) post in Linky at Freda's Voice. Also visit Book Beginnings at Rose City Reader.

Lives in Ruins: Archaeologists and the Seductive Lure of Human Rubble
Author: Marilyn Johnson
Expected publication: November 11, 2014; Harper
Genre: research, nonfiction

Book beginning:

DOWN AND DIRTY
Studying the people who study people 

No dinosaurs appear in these pages. If you are looking for scientists who study dinosaurs, you want to pick up a book about paleontologists. This is about archaeologists - people who study people and the things they leave behind - their bones, their trash, and their ruins. 

These brief excerpts from the book are from an uncorrected proof. The final copy may differ.

Page 56:

In Auel's hands (author of Clan of the Cave Bear), Ayla becomes a kind of ambassador between the slow, tough, paternalistic Neandertals and the flexible, innovative, woman-centered Homo sapiens. 

Publisher description: 

The author of The Dead Beat and This Book is Overdue! turns to the archaeologists who sort through the muck and mire of swamps, ancient landfills, volcanic islands, and other dirty places to reclaim history for us all. 

Where are the archaeologists behind these stories? What kind of work do they actually do, and why does it matter? 

 Marilyn Johnson’s book looks at the lives of contemporary archaeologists as they sweat under the sun for clues to the puzzle of our past. Johnson digs and drinks alongside archaeologists, chases them through the Mediterranean, the Caribbean, and even Machu Picchu, and excavates their lives. Her subjects share stories we rarely read in history books, about slaves and Ice Age hunters, ordinary soldiers of the American Revolution, children of the first century, Chinese woman warriors, sunken fleets, mummies. 

What drives these archaeologists is not the money (meager) or the jobs (scarce) or the working conditions (dangerous), but their passion for the stories that would otherwise be buried and lost.

I am eager to get into this book. History and archaeology has always been an interest of mine!

Thanks to the publisher for an uncorrected proof of this book.