The Harmless People

New York: Vintage Books [A Division of Random House], 1959. Paperback printing. Mass market paperback. Good. [12], 266, [10] pages. Illustrations. Maps. Inscribed by author on half-title page. Elizabeth Marshall Thomas (born September 13, 1931) is an American author. She has published fiction and non-fiction books and articles on animal behavior, Paleolithic life, and the !Kung Bushmen of the Kalahari Desert. Thomas is the daughter of anthropologist Lorna Marshall and Laurence K. Marshall, co-founder of the Raytheon Corporation, and the sister of ethnographic filmmaker John Marshall. She grew up in Cambridge, Massachusetts and attended Abbot Academy in Andover, Massachusetts. After beginning undergraduate studies at Smith College, Thomas took a break to travel in Africa with her family and later completed a degree in English from Radcliffe College. Between 1950 and 1956, she took part in three expeditions to live with and study the Ju/'hoansi (!Kung Bushmen) of the Kalahari Desert in Namibia and Botswana. During these trips, Thomas kept a journal which she later drew on when writing her first book, The Harmless People. She later drew on this experience in her fiction, depicting the life of paleolithic hunter gatherers in the novels Reindeer Moon and The Animal Wife. A study of primitive people which, for beauty of...style and concept, would be hard to match." -- The New York Times Book Review In the 1950s Elizabeth Marshall Thomas became one of the first Westerners to live with the Bushmen of the Kalahari desert in Botswana and South-West Africa. Her account of these nomadic hunter-gatherers, whose way of life had remained unchanged for thousands of years, is a ground-breaking work of anthropology, remarkable not only for its scholarship but for its novelistic grasp of character. On the basis of field trips in the 1980s, The result is a powerful, elegiac look at an endangered culture as well as a provocative critique of our own. "The charm of this book is that the author can so truly convey the strangeness of the desert life in which we perceive human traits as familiar as our own....The Harmless People is a model of exposition: the style very simple and precise, perfectly suited to the neat, even fastidious activities of a people who must make their world out of next to nothing."