Not necessarily persuasive, but imaginative at least. (b&w illustrations)
Changes in female sexuality were the impetus for the rapid development of Homo sapiens as a species unlike any other, argues the author of The Alphabet Versus the Goddess (1998).
California surgeon Shlain is unafraid to tackle huge topics outside his area of expertise, venturing boldly into the worlds of evolutionary biology and primatology with a grand and unifying theory that explains almost everything. He argues that the ancestral female of the species, dubbed Gyna sapiens to distinguish her from her male counterpart, was confronted by a crisis when large-brained babies began to make childbirth a life-and-death matter. Her evolutionary response was the loss of estrus and concomitant year-round sexual receptivity, which altered the relationship between Gyna and Homo; now she could choose when to have sex and use this power as a bargaining chip for provisions and long-term protection. The regular appearance of menses, coincident with the lunar cycle, endowed Gyna with foresight and the concept of future time, which brought with them an understanding of the link between sexual intercourse and pregnancy. She shared this new knowledge with Homo, making him aware for the first time of his own mortality. Not entirely comforted by the notion that paternity could give him a measure of immortality, Homo invented religious convictions that included belief in an afterlife. The need for women and men to negotiate sex with each other spurred the development of speech, Shlain contends, going on to explain how a limited proportion of homosexual men and women might benefit a tribe (as might male balding, color-blindness, and left-handedness) and how incest came to be taboo. The author links Gyna’s veto power over sex to the rise of patriarchy and misogyny, expressions of men’s drive to control female sexuality and reproduction. The generally stimulating text, however, is marred by an unfortunate and unnecessary decision to call evolutionary processes “Mother Nature” and to depict imaginary scenes between a Gyna named Eve and a Homo named Adam.
Not necessarily persuasive, but imaginative at least. (b&w illustrations)Pub Date: Aug. 11, 2003
ISBN: 0-670-03233-6
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A Churchill-ian view of native history—Ward, that is, not Winston—its facts filtered through a dense screen of ideology.
Custer died for your sins. And so, this book would seem to suggest, did every other native victim of colonialism.
Inducing guilt in non-native readers would seem to be the guiding idea behind Dunbar-Ortiz’s (Emerita, Ethnic Studies/California State Univ., Hayward; Blood on the Border: A Memoir of the Contra War, 2005, etc.) survey, which is hardly a new strategy. Indeed, the author says little that hasn’t been said before, but she packs a trove of ideological assumptions into nearly every page. For one thing, while “Indian” isn’t bad, since “[i]ndigenous individuals and peoples in North America on the whole do not consider ‘Indian’ a slur,” “American” is due to the fact that it’s “blatantly imperialistic.” Just so, indigenous peoples were overwhelmed by a “colonialist settler-state” (the very language broadly applied to Israelis vis-à-vis the Palestinians today) and then “displaced to fragmented reservations and economically decimated”—after, that is, having been forced to live in “concentration camps.” Were he around today, Vine Deloria Jr., the always-indignant champion of bias-puncturing in defense of native history, would disavow such tidily packaged, ready-made, reflexive language. As it is, the readers who are likely to come to this book—undergraduates, mostly, in survey courses—probably won’t question Dunbar-Ortiz’s inaccurate assertion that the military phrase “in country” derives from the military phrase “Indian country” or her insistence that all Spanish people in the New World were “gold-obsessed.” Furthermore, most readers won’t likely know that some Ancestral Pueblo (for whom Dunbar-Ortiz uses the long-abandoned term “Anasazi”) sites show evidence of cannibalism and torture, which in turn points to the inconvenient fact that North America wasn’t entirely an Eden before the arrival of Europe.
A Churchill-ian view of native history—Ward, that is, not Winston—its facts filtered through a dense screen of ideology.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-8070-0040-3
Page Count: 296
Publisher: Beacon Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.
“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.
It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
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