AHA!

About the Book

The gist of AHA! is to show that what 21st century humans like doing most is tribal in nature and still based on getting one's DNA into the next generation. We love our car and get great satisfaction from the cell-phone, make McDonald's or Home Depot a roaring success, adore Oprah and tolerate elevator music because not enough generations have gone by to shake off ancient survival behaviour. Eleven chapters take an amusing look at some pretty basic impulses evolved for life in the savannah and how we indulge them today: we love to chew and drink while watching TV; we buy magazines stuffed with illustrated gossip about celebrities; we can't resist adding that pea-green blouse at 70% off regular price to our crammed closet. In the last chapter AHA! concludes that the print culture (though not print) is waning because focussing in solitude on black marks in a line is not the heritage of our still in-control past.

About the Author

Barbara Parker comes to Canada from her native Germany at the age of 23. She learns to speak English while working as a house-maid. Since she knows how to type, office jobs provide the next "immersion" lessons. Seven years go by. Barbara attends Simon Fraser University and earns her MA in English Literature. She teaches at Vancouver City College. She has a second child. This and that happens. She returns to office work, then retires in the early 1990s. She lives in Victoria, British Columbia. To observe and contemplate human behaviour seems her default setting, lately upgraded to handle scanning of neo-Darwinian and sociobiological texts. Having pondered, she now thinks that she has found out what makes our species enthusiastic rubber-band collectors, pet owners, cell-phone users, channel switchers, or attendees at 3-tenor concerts. AHA! is the result.