Satisfactory proof that the prehistoric war of the sexes was a standoff.
A jauntily written reevaluation of women’s roles in human evolution.
Adovasio (The First Americans, 2002), Soffer (Anthropology/Univ. of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana) and science writer Page (In the Hands of the Great Spirit, 2003, etc.) reject the traditional view that men hunted the mammoth and women were passive consumers. Women made important contributions to the fiber arts and the invention of language and agriculture, they point out; it was bias in the days when men dominated the field of archaeology that led experts to ascribe the use of stone tools and weapons exclusively to men. Until recently, archaeologists weren’t even trained to look for evidence of women’s use of more perishable artifacts such as string and netting. The authors begin with Darwin’s theory of natural selection and the timeline leading to hominid evolution. Erect posture allowed hominids to walk long distances and carry things, such as babies, while the larger human brain evolved from changes in diet and reduction in size of “bite muscles,” allowing more room for thought. However, in the authors’ view, the notion that brain size was “the definitive key to humanness . . . played into the hands of male chauvinists.” Women’s brains are smaller than men’s, but they have the same number of neurons, organized differently. Moreover, the divergence in male and female brains may have resulted in part from the development of protospeech used by mothers to communicate with infants. The authors pursue all kinds of interesting theories, such as Bryan Sykes’s postulation that there are seven descendants of protowoman Eve. They argue for the central importance of the String Revolution, otherwise known as the Fiber Revolution, which began some 26,000 years ago in Eurasia. The impact of fiber, for making tools like nets and baskets, had “profound effects on human destiny—probably more profound than any advance in the technique of making spear points, knives, scrapers and other tools of stone.”
Satisfactory proof that the prehistoric war of the sexes was a standoff.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2007
ISBN: 0-06-117091-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Smithsonian/Collins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2006
BOOK REVIEW
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.
Maya Angelou is a natural writer with an inordinate sense of life and she has written an exceptional autobiographical narrative which retrieves her first sixteen years from "the general darkness just beyond the great blinkers of childhood."
Her story is told in scenes, ineluctably moving scenes, from the time when she and her brother were sent by her fancy living parents to Stamps, Arkansas, and a grandmother who had the local Store. Displaced they were and "If growing up is painful for the Southern Black girl, being aware of her displacement is the rust on the razor that threatens the throat." But alternating with all the pain and terror (her rape at the age of eight when in St. Louis With her mother) and humiliation (a brief spell in the kitchen of a white woman who refused to remember her name) and fear (of a lynching—and the time they buried afflicted Uncle Willie under a blanket of vegetables) as well as all the unanswered and unanswerable questions, there are affirmative memories and moments: her charming brother Bailey; her own "unshakable God"; a revival meeting in a tent; her 8th grade graduation; and at the end, when she's sixteen, the birth of a baby. Times When as she says "It seemed that the peace of a day's ending was an assurance that the covenant God made with children, Negroes and the crippled was still in effect."
However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1969
ISBN: 0375507892
Page Count: 235
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 14, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1969
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