A Denver native, Henderson moved in his late teens to Dubois, a small town in the Wind River Mountains where his parents had purchased a cattle ranch. His first two books, Native and The Rest of the Earth, both take place in Wyoming, and Henderson is hard at work on another novel set in the same locale. The former Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford says the high plains remain a powerful spur to his imagination, adding that he feels a particular affinity with novelist Cormac McCarthy. A winter spent alone on his parents' ranch before he enrolled at Brown was the inspiration for The Rest of the Earth . But living at the end of a long dirt road by yourself tends to stick with you.
Most parents shrug helplessly when confronted with the great nature-nurture debate.
Nature has so dominated this debate in recent years that a kind of biological tyranny threatens to become the conventional wisdom. As scientists map out the human genome, the less cautious among them speculate about a gene for homosexuality or even a gene for morality. Into this debate strides Philip Lieberman, with guns blazing. In his highly readable new book, Eve Spoke , Lieberman, the Fred M. Seed Professor of Linguistics and Cognitive Science at Brown, presents his ideas on what makes us human and how we got that way. Cutting across a number disciplines, from physics to psychology, he argues that the key to our successful evolution has been our ability to speak and think in a complex language.