Dr. Melvin Konner

Residence : Atlanta, GA

Biographical information
Dr. Konner is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and a trustee of the Russell Sage Foundation. He has testified twice at United States Senate Committee hearings, on health care reform and on the care of the dying. He has published seven columns on The New York Times Op-Ed page, was a regular contributor to the "Body and Mind" column of The New York Times Magazine, and wrote the regular column "On Human Nature" for The Sciences, the prizewinning magazine of the New York Academy of Sciences. He has written for Newsweek, Psychology Today, Ms., M.D., and other magazines, and has reviewed books for Science, Nature, Scientific American, and The New York Times Book Review and has been a fellow of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, and the Foundations' Fund for Research in Psychiatry. He holds Ph.D. and M.D. degrees from Harvard University, and is Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of Anthropology and Jewish Studies at Emory University. He spent two years among the !Kung San (Bushmen), and has taught at Harvard and then at Emory, for 30 years. He teaches courses on human biology, human nature, medicine and society, and the anthropology of the Jews.

Melvin Konner is the author of Unsettled: An Anthropology of the Jews (Viking/Penguin, October 2003). His other books include The Tangled Wing: Biological Constraints on the Human Spirit, (nominated for the American Book Award), Becoming a Doctor: A Journey of Initiation in Medical School (front page review, New York Times Book Review; Georgia Author of the Year, Nonfiction, 1988), Why the Reckless Survive, And Other Secrets of Human Nature, and Dear America: A Concerned Doctor Wants You to Know the Truth About Health Reform. His book, Childhood, tied in to a nine-hour public television series on which he appeared and Medicine at the Crossroads: The Crisis in Health Care, tied in to a seven-hour WNET/BBC series. Konner wrote The Paleolithic Prescription: A Guide to Diet and Exercise and a Design for Living (Harper and Row, 1988) with S. Boyd Eaton and Marjorie Shostak. He is also the author of many articles in professional journals and book chapters in edited volumes.

He is widowed (Marjorie Shostak, d. 1996) and the single father of three, aged 24, 21, and 16. His wife's eight-year battle with cancer stimulated an interest in that disease and in the psychology of terminal illness. He likes opera, poetry, and basic sailing and skiing.

Konner has spoken at many universities, colleges and medical centers, three U.S. Senate Hearings, synagogues and dinner clubs, several professional conventions and student lectures (about 100 each year).

Discussion topics

• Anthropology of the Jews: Jewish Cultures in Time and Space - Gives a sweeping overview of Jewish life throughout history. Few groups in history have suffered so much and yet created so rich and varied a cultural legacy. How did this come about? Dr. Konner answers these questions with a tour of Jewish cultures, beginning with a collection of rough-and-ready desert tribes, building a kingdom, facing exile, creating a great religion that gave rise to two others, and adapting their culture to every conceivable challenge in every corner of the earth. Babylonia, Egypt, Morocco, Spain, Turkey, Germany, Poland, India, China, and Ethiopia are just of few of the places Jews have thrived over the centuries--not to mention America and Israel. Despite persecutions, Jews have built great cultures in these places, even though temporary, and they have known great joy and done great things. Visiting these varied cultures through words and pictures, Konner tells us about Jewish adaptability, but also about those things that are the essence of Jewishness and the core of Jewish experience: People, Torah, and God.

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