Konner, Melvin J. 1946–

(Melvin Joel Konner)

PERSONAL: Born August 30, 1946, in Brooklyn, NY; married; children: one daughter. Education: Brooklyn College, City University of New York, graduated 1966; Harvard University, Ph.D., 1973; postdoctoral work at Laboratory of Neuroendocrine Regulation, Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Harvard Medical School, M.D., 1985.

ADDRESSES: Office—106 Geosciences Building, Emory University, Atlanta, GA 30322. E-mail—antmk@emory.edu.

CAREER: Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, professor of anthropology, late 1970s; Emory University, Atlanta, GA, Samuel Candler Dobbs professor of anthropology, associate professor of psychiatry and neurology, and department chair. Culture of Toys project, cochair.

AWARDS, HONORS: Fellowships from Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, Guggenheim Foundation, Social Science Research Council, and Foundations Fund for Research in Psychiatry; research grants from National Science Foundation and National Institutes of Mental Health.

WRITINGS:

The Tangled Wing: Biological Constraints on the Human Spirit, Holt (New York, NY), 1982, revised edition, Times Books (New York, NY), 2002.

Becoming a Doctor: A Journey of Initiation in Medical School, Viking (New York, NY), 1987.

(With S. Boyd Eaton and Marjorie Shostak) The Paleolithic Prescription: A Program of Diet and Exercise and a Design for Living, Harper (New York, NY), 1988.

Why the Reckless Survive: And Other Secrets of Human Nature, Viking (New York, NY), 1990.

Childhood (companion book to the Public Broadcasting Service television series), Little, Brown (Boston, MA), 1991.

Dear America: A Concerned Doctor Wants You to Know the Truth about Health Reform, Addison-Wesley (Reading, MA), 1993.

Medicine at the Crossroads: The Crisis in Health Care (companion to the Public Broadcasting Service television series), Pantheon (New York, NY), 1993.

The Nature of Our Nature: Instinct and Passion in the Human Spirit, W.H. Freeman (New York, NY), 2000.

Unsettled: An Anthropology of the Jews, Viking (New York, NY), 2003.

Contributor to periodicals, including New York Times, American Prospect, and Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

SIDELIGHTS: Anthropologist Melvin J. Konner spent two years studying infant development among the bushmen of Africa before teaching at and earning his medical degree from Harvard University. He then became department chair at Emory University and the author of a number of volumes that benefit from his training and knowledge across disciplines.

Konner's first book, The Tangled Wing: Biological Constraints on the Human Spirit, draws on research in the fields of human biology, genetics, psychology, and ethnography in studying human behavior. Meredith F. Small reviewed the revised second edition for Natural History, noting that "Konner moves easily from chapters on such general topics as human sociality, adaptation, ingenuity, brain development, genes, and culture to those focused on particular aspects of human emotion and desire."

Becoming a Doctor: A Journey of Initiation in Medical School focuses on third-year clinical rotations. Based on Konner's own experiences, it is written for a general audience. Konner is honest in his descriptions of the treatment of medical students, as well as of patients, by indifferent staff and the rare instances of true compassion, competence, and decency. "The result is a thoughtful insider's account of how young men and women with innocent hearts and the best of intentions gradually adopt values and behaviors that render them less and less able to truly care for their patients," noted Tom Ferguson in Medical Self-Care. Ferguson added that "Konner is not a naive critic out to belittle every aspect of modern medicine. His portraits of the rare good doctors he encounters radiate from the page like a powerful beacon of hope." Journal of the American Medical Association reviewer Walter M. Swentko called the book "outstanding" and said that Konner "artistically paints procedures, conditions, and anatomy-physiology with beautiful descriptive phrases." Konner describes a woman's labor as being "like an earthquake inside her body" and cardiopulmonary resuscitation as "squeezing death out of the chest seventy times a minute." Swentko said that "the book is richly endowed with such metaphors and numerous aphorisms."

The Paleolithic Prescription: A Program of Diet and Exercise and a Design for Living is based on assumptions about man's early ancestors gained in part by studying contemporary hunter-gatherer cultures. Konner and coauthors S. Boyd Eaton and Marjorie Shostak note the differences in the fat content of meat hunted and eaten by early man and the high-fat levels found in modern animals bred for food. They demonstrate how the time and energy expended in the quest for food offset the caloric content and how the hunter-gatherers did not exhibit the conditions of aging that we assume to be unavoidable. Their book includes healthy recipes and suggestions for dietary and lifestyle changes.

Konner has become an outspoken advocate for a single-payer health care system, about which he has testified before the U.S. Senate. He has addressed health care in Dear America: A Concerned Doctor Wants You to Know the Truth about Health Reform and Medicine at the Crossroads: The Crisis in Health Care, the latter a companion to a Public Broadcasting Service television series. The latter volume is a series of chapters on a variety of topics, including the history of medicine, contemporary medicine, drug use, genetics, psychiatry, AIDS, and the aged and dying. Commonweal reviewer Madeline Marget called it "a thoughtful survey" and said that Konner "honors both scientific achievement and spiritual life, and sees social progress—especially if it learns from and includes tradition—as the basis for the prevention and cure of suffering."

Konner was a practicing Orthodox Jew until age seventeen and he returned to his faith after the birth of his daughter. Then he traveled to Israel, studied, and wrote Unsettled: An Anthropology of the Jews, a history that begins in the prebiblical period. He takes the approach of an anthropologist in that he makes comparisons between ancient and contemporary times. Jonathan Rosen noted in the New York Times Book Review that "Konner is perfectly comfortable segueing from a discussion of Jews who arrived in China 1,000 years ago to an interview with a Brooklyn woman who moved to Alaska, repeating an ancient pattern in which new communities are pioneered by a handful of settlers."

The volume includes the writings of Holocaust survivors, as well as works from great Hebrew poets, leading Washington Post contributor Stuart Schoffman to comment that it "seems much more an anthology than an anthropology of Jews, with an emphasis on literature no less than on social behavior." It also addresses Jewish ritual, dietary laws, resistance to fascism, and the modern state of Israel. Konner lists Jewish achievers by percentage, claiming that approximately .2 percent of the world's population have garnered 155 Nobel Prizes. He offers his own theory about Jewish intellectual achievement, saying that "the mainstream of Jewish thought went through rabbinical academies, where the best minds gathered, competed, were nurtured, and were married off in every generation, creating a kind of cult of the intellect. With the opening of European secular thought to Jews, these outsiders' contribution was way out of proportion to their numbers." A Kirkus Reviews contributor concluded that "rich in learning and observation, Unsettled ought to inspire discussion, perhaps even controversy at points. A splendid treatise that will inform readers of whatever background."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

BOOKS

Konner, Melvin J., Becoming a Doctor: A Journey of Initiation in Medical School, Viking (New York, NY), 1987.

Konner, Melvin J., Unsettled: An Anthropology of the Jews, Viking (New York, NY), 2003.

PERIODICALS

Austin American-Statesman, May 30, 1999, interview with Konner, p. J2.

Commonweal, October 22, 1993, Madeline Marget, review of Medicine at the Crossroads: The Crisis in Health Care, p. 28.

Journal of the American Medical Association, August 18, 1989, Walter M. Swentko, review of Becoming a Doctor: A Journey of Initiation in Medical School, p. 959; January 26, 1994, Keith Whittaker, review of Medicine at the Crossroads, p. 322.

Kirkus Reviews, July 15, 2003, review of Unsettled: An Anthropology of the Jews, p. 953.

Medical Self-Care, March-April, 1989, Tom Ferguson, review of Becoming a Doctor, p. 59; November-December, 1989, Melanie Scheller, review of The Paleolithic Prescription: A Program of Diet and Exercise and a Design for Living, p. 39.

Natural History, June, 2002, Meredith F. Small, review of The Tangled Wing: Biological Constraints on the Human Spirit, p. 76.

New York Times Book Review, December 14, 2003, Jonathan Rosen, review of Unsettled, p. 26.

Publishers Weekly, June 1, 1990, review of Why the Reckless Survive: And Other Secrets of Human Nature, p. 52; September 1, 2003, review of Unsettled, p. 80.

U.S. News and World Report, January 14, 1991, Alvin P. Sanoff, interview with Konner, p. 53.

Washington Post, October 26, 2003, Stuart Schoffman, review of Unsettled, p. T7.

ONLINE

Emory University Web ite, http://www.emory.edu/ (July 3, 2005), Konner profile.