Eve : : how the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution

Location & Checkout Length	Call Number	Checkout Length	Item Status
Malletts Adult Books 4-week checkout	Adult Book / Nonfiction / Science & Nature / Biology / Bohannon, Cat	4-week checkout	On Hold Shelf
Downtown 2nd Floor 4-week checkout	613.042 Bo	4-week checkout	Due 05-01-2024
Pittsfield Adult Books 4-week checkout	Adult Book / Nonfiction / Science & Nature / Biology / Bohannon, Cat	4-week checkout	Due 05-09-2024
Traverwood Adult Books 4-week checkout	Adult Book / Nonfiction / Science & Nature / Biology / Bohannon, Cat	4-week checkout	Due 05-21-2024
Westgate Adult Books 4-week checkout	Adult Book / Nonfiction / Science & Nature / Biology / Bohannon, Cat	4-week checkout	Due 04-13-2024

Milk -- Womb -- Perception -- Legs -- Tools -- Brain -- Voice -- Menopause -- Love.
"In Eve, Cat Bohannon answers questions scientists should have been addressing for decades. With boundless curiosity and sharp wit, Bohannon covers the past 200 million years to explain the specific science behind the development of the female sex. Eve is not just a sweeping revision of human history, it's an urgent and necessary corrective for a world that has focused primarily on the male body for far too long. Bohannon's findings, including everything from the way C-sections in the industrialized world are rejiggering women's pelvic shape to the surprising similarities between pus and breast milk, will completely change what you think you know about evolution . . . and women. A 21st-century update of Our Bodies, Ourselves, Eve offers a paradigm shift in our thinking about what the female body is and why it matters"-- Provided by publisher.

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Readable, Interesting, Lacking Depth submitted by chayesq on April 15, 2024, 10:58am This is a fairly quick read: Bohannon's writing is easy to digest and enjoyable, and her topic is certainly interesting. Ultimately, though, her ability to explore the topic is limited by her framing device. She selects an "Eve" as the origin point for each of the sexed characteristics she profiles, and uses that particular species or moment in time to launch an exploration of that characteristic. However, many of the traits she explores do not actually map neatly onto an "Eve", a problem that gets progressively worse over the course of the book. Indeed, Bohannon abandons her framing device entirely by the last chapter. The weakness in structure means that when reading, you are often frustrated by a question posed and never returned to, or by a digression that goes nowhere. The book is at its best when it tells a well-researched, focused story. Unfortunately, it often does the opposite. You get the sense that Bohannon has researched broadly, rather than deeply. It is also troubling that she does not differentiate for the reader between ideas that have greater scientific consensus behind them and ideas that really go out on a limb. She freely applies concepts from evolutionary biology to the evolution of culture itself without ever flagging that at some point she has stopped talking about DNA and started talking about social Darwinism. Her ultimate conclusion -- that misogyny is evolutionarily selected for (what) but women should nonetheless take inspiration from our evolutionary past because our ancestral species were more matriarchal (okay?) -- feels unsatisfying and unearned.