MKonner

Personal

Bio

Melvin Konner is the author of The Tangled Wing: Biological Constraints on the Human Spirit (Holt, Rinehart, Winston, 1982, American Book Award nominee). A completely revised edition of The Tangled Wing was published by Holt/Times Books/W.H. Freeman in January, 2002. His other books include Becoming a Doctor: A Journey of Initiation in Medical School (Viking/Elisabeth Sifton, 1987; front page review, New York Times Book Review; Georgia Author of the Year, Nonfiction, 1988); with S. Boyd Eaton and Marjorie Shostak, The Paleolithic Prescription: A Guide to Diet and Exercise and a Design for Living (Harper and Row, 1988); Why the Reckless Survive, And Other Secrets of Human NatureChildhood, book for a major nine-hour public television series on which he appeared (Little, Brown, 1991); Medicine at the Crossroads: The Crisis in Health Care (Pantheon, 1992), for a seven-hour WNET/BBC series; Dear America: A Concerned Doctor Wants You to Know the Truth About Health Reform (Addison-Wesley, 1993); and Unsettled: An Anthropology of the Jews (Viking Penguin 2003). Childhood Evolving: Relationships, Emotion, and Mind is under contract to Harvard University Press and currently under review, and The Jewish Body is under contract to Nextbook/Schocken for their “Jewish Encounters” book series. (Viking, 1990);

Dr. Konner is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and a member of the Board of Trustees of the Russell Sage Foundation. He has testified twice at United States Senate Committee hearings on health care reform and on the care of the dying. He has published seven columns on The New York Times Op-Ed page, was a regular contributor to the "Body and Mind" column of The New York Times Magazine, and wrote the regular column "On Human Nature" for The Sciences, the prizewinning magazine of the New York Academy of Sciences. He has written for Newsweek, The American Prospect, M.D., Psychology Today, Omni, Ms., and other magazines, and has reviewed books for Science, Nature, Scientific American, The New York Review of Books and The New York Times Book Review. He has been a fellow of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, and the Foundations’ Fund for Research in Psychiatry, and the recipient of the American Anthropological Association’s Anthropology in Media Award for 2004. His distinguished lectures include the 15th Annual Raymond D. Pruitt Lecture, The Mayo Clinic and Mayo Medical School (1995) and the McGovern Lecture in Medical Humanities, Yale University School of Medicine (1996). He was named “Best Local Intellectual” in Creative Loafing’s annual “Best of Atlanta” edition for 2004. He holds Ph.D. and M.D. degrees from Harvard University, and is Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor in the Department of Anthropology and the Program in Neuroscience and Behavioral Biology. He spent two years among the !Kung San (Bushmen), and has taught at Harvard and then at Emory, for over 30 years. He teaches courses on human biology, human brain/behavior relations, biological approaches to childhood, human nature, medicine and society, and the anthropology of the Jews. He was widowed (Marjorie Shostak, d. 1996) and the single father of three, now grown. His wife's eight years with cancer stimulated an interest in that disease and in the psychology of terminal illness. He is now remarried (to Ann Cale Kruger, Ph.D., a developmental psychologist) and has found happiness again after much suffering.

 

URL

http://www.anthropology.emory.edu/FACULTY/ANTMK/