Marshall Sahlins is the Charles F. Grey Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus at the University of Chicago. A member of the British Academy, he is the author of many books, including Culture and Practical Reason, How "Natives" Think, Islands of History, and What Kinship Is-And Is Not, all published by the University of Chicago Press.

"This book is a paradigm of how history and anthropology might be brought together, to the mutual enrichment of both disciplines." (American Historical Review) "Marshall Sahlins's complex book... [addresses] questions of historical causation and agency using a wide variety of examples-including, at one point, Elian Gonzales and the 1951 New York Giants. The complete ramifications of Sahlins's argument will be appreciated best by anthropologists and historians. Even for the general reader, however, Apologies to Thucydides has much to offer, as an introduction to an unfamiliar culture and as a new perspective on our own." (New York Sun)"