A mesmerizing, masterfully written book on the transformative power of human parenting.
A revolutionary look at the "mother" in men.
Hrdy is the visionary anthropologist who, with colleagues, discovered the importance of allomothering (co-parenting by groups other than the mother) to the evolution of big-brained humans. Our brains are so complex that they need years to fully mature, which could have slowed Homo sapiens’ population growth and led to extinction. However, with allomothers—often, menopausal women with time to help raise children—primary mothers could produce more children faster, ensuring survival. The work rocked anthropology, but Hrdy wasn’t done. Recently, watching her son-in-law take exquisite care of his infant, she began to wonder if she needed to redefine the term allomother. She tested her saliva, and that of her husband, for the nurturing hormone oxytocin before and during a period when they cradled their grandchild. Her oxytocin rose significantly. The shocker: Her husband’s oxytocin levels rose slowly at first, but within hours, matched hers. Soon after, the author discovered that tests for nurturing hormones, from estrogen to prolactin, delivered similar results in many men worldwide after prolonged exposure to babies. Are men as endocrinologically transformed and neurologically transformed, in both frontal cortex and evolutionarily ancient brain areas, as women by prolonged close proximity to babies? If so, does this mean men can “mother”—biologically—as well as women? Hrdy plunged into research, taking her from current labs and hunter-gathering groups back to the Pleistocene. She found the answer was, very likely, yes and yes. Together with that earlier work, Hrdy has now gone a long way to persuasively argue that humans, female and male, are more communal than competitive and that this quality, more than any other, has led to our primacy in the animal kingdom.
A mesmerizing, masterfully written book on the transformative power of human parenting.Pub Date: May 14, 2024
ISBN: 9780691238777
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Princeton Univ.
Review Posted Online: June 8, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorkerstaff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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