Evolution's Witness: How Eyes Evolved

It has been said that during times of war, the Muses fall silent. However, anyone who has read the major figures of mid-20th-century literature - Samuel Beckett, Richard Hillary, Norman Mailer, Albert Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre, and others - can attest it was through writing that people first tried to communicate and process the horrors they saw during one of the darkest times in human history, even as it broke out and raged on around them.

A fascinating analysis of the evolution of religion from the internationally renowned evolutionary psychologist

"This book's real strength is in what it suggests about our desire (and perhaps need) to bear witness to war's horrors."-Booklist

"An examination of the seminal works of World War II, many of which opened eyes to truth by eyewitnesses." -Kirkus

"World War II and its consequences will not leave our consciousness and sense of civilization; the question of the circumstances under which the best writers made their voices heard remains as urgent today as it ever was. John R. Carpenter is to be congratulated on his detailed and courageous refutation of the often heard saw that in wartime, the Muses are silent. His book belongs in all academic as well as public collections." -Emery George, poet and editor of Contemporary East European Poetry

"John Carpenter's Bearing Witness is the story of writing, and the urgency of communication, during World War II. This fascinating and engaging account discusses work from many nations and touches on a wide variety of examples, from sophisticated literature to scrawled notes thrown by prisoners from trains. The pages dealing with the war's role in fostering distrust of rhetoric, euphemism, and abstraction are especially timely in this era of marketing and political newspeak." -Philip Fried, poet and editor of the Manhattan Review