A top-notch book of natural science that busts myths as it entertains.
A cheerful and knowledgeable popular science review of female animals.
For decades, writes British science writer Cooke, “studies of intrasexual competition focused on male competition for mates, and the combative potential of females was largely ignored by science. The resulting data gap on females then masqueraded as knowledge. It’s assumed females aren’t competitive, and theories are based upon that understanding—when the truth is we just haven’t been paying attention.” The author emphasizes that it was only at the end of the 20th century that women began to enter biology in large numbers. Many turned their attention to female animals, heretofore considered too boring to bother to study, and discovered that “true till-death-do-us-part sexual monogamy…proved to be extremely rare, found in less than 7 percent of known species.” A skilled journalist, Cooke has traveled the world to interview experts, most of them women, who have performed groundbreaking research and are unafraid to confront skeptical male colleagues. Despite deploring his Victorian sensibilities, Cooke remains a Darwin enthusiast, but she maintains that his later (and lesser known) theory of sexual selection deserves equal status with natural selection. Readers will receive a superb education in the evolution and mechanics of animal sex as well as countless colorful anecdotes describing bizarre reproductive behavior. Readers will find the familiar account of female spiders eating males as they try to mate, but there is much more to discover in Cooke’s fascinating pages: Almost all birds are monogamous, but it’s a social monogamy; 90% of female birds sneak away from the nest to copulate with multiple males, so a single clutch of eggs can have many fathers. Permanently attached to a rock, a barnacle possesses the longest penis for its size in the animal kingdom, but this is purely functional, enabling it to search for neighboring females. If there are no females within reach, as a last resort, the hermaphroditic creature fertilizes itself.
A top-notch book of natural science that busts myths as it entertains.Pub Date: June 14, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-5416-7489-9
Page Count: 384
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: April 26, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2022
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Perhaps not magic but appealing nonetheless.
Want to get ahead in business? Consult a dictionary.
By Wharton School professor Berger’s account, much of the art of persuasion lies in the art of choosing the right word. Want to jump ahead of others waiting in line to use a photocopy machine, even if they’re grizzled New Yorkers? Throw a because into the equation (“Excuse me, I have five pages. May I use the Xerox machine, because I’m in a rush?”), and you’re likely to get your way. Want someone to do your copying for you? Then change your verbs to nouns: not “Can you help me?” but “Can you be a helper?” As Berger notes, there’s a subtle psychological shift at play when a person becomes not a mere instrument in helping but instead acquires an identity as a helper. It’s the little things, one supposes, and the author offers some interesting strategies that eager readers will want to try out. Instead of alienating a listener with the omniscient should, as in “You should do this,” try could instead: “Well, you could…” induces all concerned “to recognize that there might be other possibilities.” Berger’s counsel that one should use abstractions contradicts his admonition to use concrete language, and it doesn’t help matters to say that each is appropriate to a particular situation, while grammarians will wince at his suggestion that a nerve-calming exercise to “try talking to yourself in the third person (‘You can do it!’)” in fact invokes the second person. Still, there are plenty of useful insights, particularly for students of advertising and public speaking. It’s intriguing to note that appeals to God are less effective in securing a loan than a simple affirmative such as “I pay all bills…on time”), and it’s helpful to keep in mind that “the right words used at the right time can have immense power.”
Perhaps not magic but appealing nonetheless.Pub Date: March 7, 2023
ISBN: 9780063204935
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Harper Business
Review Posted Online: March 23, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2023
Readers unfamiliar with the anecdotal material Greene presents may find interesting avenues to pursue, but they should...
Greene (The 33 Strategies of War, 2007, etc.) believes that genius can be learned if we pay attention and reject social conformity.
The author suggests that our emergence as a species with stereoscopic, frontal vision and sophisticated hand-eye coordination gave us an advantage over earlier humans and primates because it allowed us to contemplate a situation and ponder alternatives for action. This, along with the advantages conferred by mirror neurons, which allow us to intuit what others may be thinking, contributed to our ability to learn, pass on inventions to future generations and improve our problem-solving ability. Throughout most of human history, we were hunter-gatherers, and our brains are engineered accordingly. The author has a jaundiced view of our modern technological society, which, he writes, encourages quick, rash judgments. We fail to spend the time needed to develop thorough mastery of a subject. Greene writes that every human is “born unique,” with specific potential that we can develop if we listen to our inner voice. He offers many interesting but tendentious examples to illustrate his theory, including Einstein, Darwin, Mozart and Temple Grandin. In the case of Darwin, Greene ignores the formative intellectual influences that shaped his thought, including the discovery of geological evolution with which he was familiar before his famous voyage. The author uses Grandin's struggle to overcome autistic social handicaps as a model for the necessity for everyone to create a deceptive social mask.
Readers unfamiliar with the anecdotal material Greene presents may find interesting avenues to pursue, but they should beware of the author's quirky, sometimes misleading brush-stroke characterizations.Pub Date: Nov. 13, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-670-02496-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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