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| Skin: A Natural History | 
 enlarge | Author: Nina G. Jablonski
Publisher: University of California Press
Category: Book
List Price: $16.95
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Avg. Customer Rating:  10 reviews
Sales Rank: 103683
Media: Paperback
Edition: 1
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 288
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.5
Dimensions (in): 8.3 x 5.9 x 1
ISBN: 0520256247
Dewey Decimal Number: 301
EAN: 9780520256248
ASIN: 0520256247
Publication Date: May 21, 2008
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Product Description
We expose it, cover it, paint it, tattoo it, scar it, and pierce it. Our intimate connection with the world, skin protects us while advertising our health, our identity, and our individuality. This dazzling synthetic overview, written with a poetic touch and taking many intriguing side excursions, is a complete guidebook to the pliable covering that makes us who we are. Skin: A Natural History celebrates the evolution of three unique attributes of human skin: its naked sweatiness, its distinctive sepia rainbow of colors, and its remarkable range of decorations. Jablonski begins with a look at skin's structure and functions and then tours its three-hundred-million-year evolution, delving into such topics as the importance of touch and how the skin reflects and affects emotions. She examines the modern human obsession with age-related changes in skin, especially wrinkles. She then turns to skin as a canvas for self-expression, exploring our use of cosmetics, body paint, tattooing, and scarification. Skin: A Natural History places the rich cultural canvas of skin within its broader biological context for the first time, and the result is a tremendously engaging look at ourselves.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 5 more reviews...
 An informed and informative addition October 7, 2006
19 out of 19 found this review helpful
Enhanced with the inclusion of 14 color photographs, 2 color maps, 36 black/white photographs, and 13 line drawn illustrations, "Skin: A Natural History" by Nina G. Jablonski (Head of the Department of Anthropology at The California Academy of Sciences) is a thoroughly "reader friendly" and scholarly introduction to the biological and cultural functions of human skin. "Skin" addresses such questions and issues as how and when human skin came to look, fell, and function as we know it today; why we turn pale when anxious but red when we are embarrassed or angry; why touch is one of the fundamentally important senses of the body and relates to every aspect of human life; what is the real purpose of fingerprints; skin as a canvas for self-expression; the effects of aging, environmental stress, insect bites, burns, and diseases upon skin; advancing medical technologies relevant to skin issues, and so much more. Surveying more than 300-million-years of evolutionary development as it relates to the skin of homo sapiens, "Skin" addresses the critical role skin plays in human health (including processing sunlight for Vitamin D), the role of melanin in protecting us from the sun's rays, and the advances toward to the creation of artificial skin, gene therapies, reversing the aging process of skin, and other fascinating issues related to our skin. "Skin: A Natural History" is an informed and informative addition to medical school, academic library, and Anthropological Studies collections, as well as a very highly recommended study for non-specialist general readers with an interest in the biology and sociology of skin issues.
Looking Deeper December 19, 2006
18 out of 18 found this review helpful
"It isn't good to take for granted something as important as skin," writes Nina G. Jablonski in _Skin: A Natural History_ (University of California Press). Whatever risk you have of taking skin for granted, Jablonski isn't likely to do so. She is a professor of anthropology, and her research has been done on different aspects of skin, especially skin color. She describes her new book as "not a systematic treatise or a manual, but more an idiosyncratic guidebook, replete with personal detours into topics about skin that have most engaged me in my work over the years." Engaged is a good word; she clearly loves her subject, and succeeds in communicating her enthusiasm. Skin itself is of undoubted importance. It is the largest of our organs (just because it is your outer covering and not an inner mound of tissue like your liver doesn't keep it from being a unified organ). It is, unlike the skin of most animals, basically naked, with not very much hair and no scales or feathers. Like any of our other organs, it is a product of evolution that has its current properties because it has done a good job: "Our fabric doesn't wear out, our seams don't burst, we don't spontaneously sprout leaks, and we don't expand like water balloons when we sit in the bathtub." Jablonski is right that we take skin too much for granted, and her book is a happy corrective.
In a phrase that has been made famous by pop anthropology, we are "naked apes," but the reason for our hairlessness (at least compared to our primate cousins) has been disputed. Jablonski discusses the best explanation for our not having hair is that we sweat, sweating, of course, being an important function of our skin. As we developed sweating as our cooling system, we lost fur, because sweating into fur is inefficient; the cooling of a body covered with wet fur would occur at the outermost layer of fur but not at the skin so that the body itself could get cool. Jablonski has splendid chapters on skin color, the superficial characteristic on which so much history and sadness has been based. Melanin has become the governor that mediates between the opposing goals of protection from ultraviolet radiation versus synthesis of vitamin D. Humans have by now turned the "natural" and geographic order of skin color into a relative chaos because of the speedy travel that we have been able to accomplish only in the last few centuries, but the play of skin colors originally evolved on strictly geographic lines because skin molecules were being juggled as key mediators of our ability to be out in the sun. Skin colors represent evolution at work in dermatological molecules, and do not have deeper significance. With our tendency to judge and group based on superficialities, skin colors carry a lot more meaning, but not in any biological sense.
Jablonski winds up her tour with thoughts about the future of skin. Oh, sure, we will always have skin, but perhaps robots will, too; our skin helps us in measuring tasks as delicate as lending an arm for support to another or turning a doorknob, and artificial skin for robots may do such things, and perhaps even help robots start making the me / not me distinction that is essential for consciousness. If that sounds too far fetched, then consider tattoos of the future that will be essentially permanent until the wearer wants to be rid of them, and does so by shining a light of a single wavelength upon them, breaking down the dye. And if that sounds too frivolous, consider the possibility that burn patients might have a spray put on their wounds consisting of cultures of their own cells, all the many types of cells found in the skin; such a preparation would enable new and natural skin rapidly to regenerate. The speculation is fun, but Jablonski's history of the evolution of skin and the many functions it accomplishes for us brings a complicated topic into deep and appealing focus.
 Almost a complete waste of time - very disappointing February 27, 2007
9 out of 20 found this review helpful
I bought this book expecting a thorough overview of the subject for the educated lay person, but I was terribly disappointed. It started off well, giving a pretty good overview of the basic structure of the skin (although I noted a few small errors). Then the meat of the book is covered in a little depth, but the meat of this book consists solely in the author's own specialty, which is the role of melanin.
The rest of the book is a hurried, slapdash job, merely mentioning all the many topics that ought to be covered but aren't. She makes it painfully obvious that she has no interest in going into depth on anything but her beloved melanin/vitamin D topic, and the number of errors I noticed in the second half of the text increased over the first half.
Of course, the book itself is only about half there, with much of it taken up by references, all crammed in the back to make it look like a bigger book, instead of what it is -- basically a monograph on melanin.
I showed the book to my dermatologist, and his response was "pure fluff," which basically summed up my impression. Don't waste your time on this one.
A great overview January 19, 2007
5 out of 8 found this review helpful
This is a great book which tells the lay person everything they may want to know about skin, without the technical jargon of the medical text book. It covers everything from the structure and uses of skin, to how and why skin and skin colors evolved, and on into ways people have ornamented their skin. Very informative, and an enjoyable read.
More than you ever thought you'd want to know, but very interesting. February 25, 2007
4 out of 8 found this review helpful
Skin is one of the more remarkable of our organs, and in may ways. It's certainly the most visible of our organs, and it's very appearance tells us an awful lot about the person we are observing. It's the thing that we see when we see beauty. Its color can insight fear. Its wrinkles indicate age, exposure to harsh sunlight and strong winds.
Beyond that, it's skin that keeps us cool. It's skin that keeps body fluids from escaping and rainwater from coming in. Skin protects our insides from diseases, toxins, and all kinds of other nasty stuff. It even helps control our intake of Vitamin D from sunlight by making people who live in areas with little sun lighter than those who live in the tropics (thereby creating all kinds of other problems).
This book is a welcome addition to the poular science culture by providing both an interesting read and many very interesting little excursions down paths that attracted the authors attention from time to time.
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