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WHAT'S LOVE GOT TO DO WITH IT?

THE EVOLUTION OF HUMAN MATING

The short answer is, ``Not much.'' Small (Anthropology/Cornell) is a student of primate behavior, particularly pertaining to mating and parenting. Her take on the subject, while decidedly female, is by no means doctrinaire feminist. The reason? There's so much variation in the social/sexual behavior of primates, nonhuman as well as human, that it would be folly to say that any proposed rationale for coupling was the answer. Instead, we are treated to quite detailed descriptions of the sexual lives of monkeys and apes and us that provide ample examples of polygyny, long-term pair bonding, ``fission-fusion'' behavior in which groups of females and males forage separately and come together to mate from time to time, and other variations. When it comes to human behavior, Small summarizes the most recent findings with regard to anatomy and physiology, obviously pleased to give the lie to the heritage of Victorian prudery: Women are just as likely as men to turn on to erotica andmore to her pointcan employ a variety of strategies (besides contraception) to encourage or discourage the potential of a given sex act to lead to pregnancy. She regards seriously the latest evidence that homosexuality may in part be genetic, but she asserts that the larger question is why human sexuality is a continuum, not nice neat packages of this or that. As for fantasies of sex via virtual reality or high-tech sex via surrogate motherhood, she sees them as just that: fantasies or high-tech solutions for the rich and famous. For the rest of us, mating is a complex drive that comes with positive reinforcement. We enjoy itplus it enables us to pass on our genes. Small is the first to admit she doesn't have all the answers; what she does point out is how much lore we need to unlearn, and that is the beginning of wisdom. (15 b&w photos, not seen)

Pub Date: Aug. 1, 1995

ISBN: 0-385-47317-6

Page Count: 352

Publisher: Anchor

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1995

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A PEOPLE'S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES

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

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I KNOW WHY THE CAGED BIRD SINGS

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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