I enjoyed this more at age eighteen than at age fifty eight. I’m afraid forty years have made me more analytical, more critical, more rational, and more cynical.

When Burroughs published this in 1918 Piltdown Man had not yet been exposed as a hoax and terms like “negroid” and “Jap” were not yet intuitively racist and offensive. While, taken in the context of their time, such perceived transgressions are perfectly understandable, they nevertheless indelibly stamp the material as dated and the science, albeit fictional, as flawed.

I guess there are some touchstones of my youth that are best left to the fog of memory.