An extraordinary body of scholarship that is as much a social and psychological history of women as child-bearers—and more—as a review of male and female biology and behavior across many species, particularly kindred primates. Hrdy (anthropology emeritus/UC Davis) creates an encyclopedia of data, interpretation, and speculation on what mothers and babies are all about. Leading with a wonderful remark by George Eliot: “Mother Nature—who by the bye is an old lady with some bad habits—’she notes that the dominant 19th-century patriarchal view saw women as baby-makers, inferior in all other ways to males. Hrdy’s theme, broader and less materialistic than that of The Woman That Never Evolved (1981), is that there has always been great flexibility in the living arrangements among social groups, particularly in mammals, but also in social insects. Evolving features of human biology have helped females improve their offspring’s chance of survival (concealed ovulation, continuous sexual receptivity, the enlisting of “allomothers” who can help in child-rearing). Further, there is no maternal “instinct” as such, but simply a concern that at least some offspring should survive, even it means the sacrifice of others. Indeed one of Hrdy’s more stunning chapters deals with infanticide, whether practiced at birth or by farming infants out to incompetent or inadequate wet nurses or placing them in foundling hospitals with appalling rates of survival. The latter parts of the book deal with survival and selection from the baby’s point of view: a kind of gamesmanship in which plump, pink-cheeked newborns charm their moms. In reviewing all these topics, Hrdy steers a path between extremists of every camp and projects her own, sometimes anxious, experience as wife, mother, and scientist onto the narrative. “Family values” camps will be shocked, ardent feminists irritated, and psychoanalysts dismissive. For the open-minded, however, this is a breathtaking feat of scholarship that will have enduring value as an encyclopedic source of hard data and inspired speculation. (Photos, not seen)
Pub Date: Oct. 6, 1999
ISBN: 0-679-44265-0
Page Count: 752
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1999
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
SEEN & HEARD
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