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
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
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
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