Discoveries

The Old Way

A Story of the First People

Elizabeth Marshall Thomas

Farrar, Straus & Giroux: 346 pp., $27

IN 1950, when she was 19, Elizabeth Marshall Thomas went with her father, mother and brother to the Kalahari Desert, 120,000 square miles in southwestern Africa. Hers was one of the life-altering educations we all wish we could give our children. Her father, the founding president of Raytheon, was a gentleman explorer and anthropologist intent on mapping the area and making a survey of its hunter-gatherers, known collectively as Bushmen. At the time, 10,000 Bushmen lived in the Kalahari (one for every 12 square miles), in groups of roughly 25. They were, Thomas writes, “the most successful culture that our kind has ever known,” living in “the old way,” gently and sustainably, for 1,500 centuries. When she and her family lived among them, on and off for five years, they had no agriculture, no domesticated animals, no cloth. They had, however, a sophisticated understanding of their environment.

In “The Old Way,” Thomas revisits the conclusions drawn in her first book, “The Harmless People,” and includes excerpts from her original diaries and her mother’s journals. It’s fascinating to see how Thomas has honed her observational powers over the years (surely through her studies of dogs and other animals, though they’re barely mentioned here) and how her notion of “culture” has broadened. She’s not romantic about Africa: Her views on the threats to the Bushmen’s way of life are incredulous and outraged rather than nostalgic.

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A Small Moment of Great Illumination

Searching for Valentine Greatrakes, the Master Healer

Leonard Pitt

Shoemaker & Hoard: 196 pp., $22

THIS little book is a testament to the joys of pure research. Pitt (a performer and onetime mime) is fascinated by a footnote in an article on the history of medicine referring to a 17th century Irish healer named Valentine Greatrakes. He sets out to learn more about Greatrakes and to find a copy of Greatrakes’ 1666 book, “A Brief Account.” He’s joined by his friend Iain Boal, an academic who is heartened by the support and credibility Greatrakes received from some of the great scientists of his time, like Sir Robert Boyle.

Greatrakes began his healing career at age 34. After several successes, particularly with leprosy, deafness and a form of tuberculosis known as “the king’s evil,” he achieved a celebrity that drew the attention of King Charles II, who brought him to England. Independently wealthy, he never charged for his work. His favored method was a kind of laying on of hands, sometimes vigorous, and the movement of energy through the body. Eyewitness accounts of his ministrations are not all favorable. Pitt, a digresser of the first rank, gambols through Greatrakes’ life and legend, leaving the reader with a light hunger for more on the subject.

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Red, White, and Drunk All Over

A Wine-Soaked Journey From Grape to Glass

Natalie MacLean

Bloomsbury: 288 pp., $23.95

NATALIE MACLEAN confesses -- by way of a gentle critique of her fellow wine writers -- that she often gets “the odd impression that [wine] has no alcohol in it.” “My subject,” she merrily admits, describing elite tastings in which she looks around the room only to realize that she’s lustily downed two glasses while her colleagues are decorously sipping their first, “is addictive.” This and other examples of MacLean’s cheerful style put the lay reader at ease. She visits the Pinot Noirs of Burgundy at the tony home of Domaine de la Romanee-Conti; the backyards of Santa Cruz (the Rhone zone); and the Willy Wonkaesque president of Bonny Doon, Randall Grahm -- always projecting her contagious enthusiasm. Everything about wine fascinates her, from the terroir in which it grows to the personalities (Robert Parker, Chuck Hayward, Jancis Robinson) who guide and inform our choices. “Red, White, and Drunk All Over” will please the palates of wine lovers everywhere.