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A handful of book reviews
Finished three different books recently (yay! A small reduction in the stack!):
Mother Nature: A History of Mothers, Infants, and Natural Selection, by Sarah Blaffer Hrdy
A long time ago, a very strongly cultural-feminist friend of mine, frustrated by my viewpoints on a couple of issues, demanded to know "Why do you think biology is destiny?" I replied, at the time, that I didn't. But I did think biology was, well, biology, and no more ignorable than, say, physics. This book seems to support my opinion, there. Hrdy, one of the few people working in evolutionary biology who has a female-positive perspective, here looks at the complex ways that mothers, fathers, infants, older children, and "alloparents" - other caretakers of children, who may or may not be direct kin to the mother and/or her child - interact, compete for resources, and make choices about who to invest in, as seen through the lens of those same behaviors in our primate cousins.
I always enjoy Hrdy's writing, despite finding anything that smacks of sociobiology disturbing and despite her obvious personal preference for monogamy as a human social norm. Very few people have the courage to look closely at the various choices animal mothers make in the wild, and the same choices every human mother or potential mother also makes - just more consciously than they do. Ditto the costs - metabolic, physical, and mental - of childbearing, and the competition between mothers and embryos, fetuses, and finally infants for scarce resources. Anyone who has a romantic idea of motherhood, or childhood for that matter, needs to read this; it's a refreshing dose of bitter reality.
Rogue Nation: American Unilateralism and the Failure of Good Intentions, by Clyde Prestowitz
This is an analysis of U.S. foreign policy from the end of WWII on, with a particular focus on the last ten years or so. In essence, Prestowitz points out every choice we have made, as a nation, that has made us less safe, or has destabilized the world, and why we made that choice. For the most part, it has to do with our assuming simultaneously that (a) other nations are just like us, and (b) they are so much less than us that we need to fix them. Our intentions, as he points out, have always been good, but our data has been skewed by ideology and religious, messianic ideals, and we tend to ignore data that does not support our heroic view of ourself as a nation.
Unlike most books like this that I would pick up and read, Prestowitz is not against global corporatism; in fact, he's a conservative, a former functionary under Reagan. However, he's what I've been calling a paleoconservative, a true commie-hating big-government-busting deficit-crushing history-preserving member of the reality-based community. And the entire book is a very, very good description of why people who are truly conservatives, not rabid America-Borg neocons or Radical-Right theocrats, should be very, very worried about our current foreign policy, just as worried as the rest of us - if not more so. After all, it's not our party that's suddenly been possessed . . .
Queen Bees and Wannabes: Helping Your Daughter Survive Cliques, Gossip, Boyfriends, and Other Realities of Adolescence, by Rosalind Wiseman
Okay, I'll admit up front that I read this because of Mean Girls. I should have wanted to read it in order to better understand the ordinary daily lives of my female students, I know. But really, I remember what it was like well enough to think I might be able to grok. But I wanted to see what inspired the movie. To be honest, I think my expectations were too high. I was hoping for more about the "non-normal" girls - the ones like Janis in the movie - and about the Queen Bees themselves, their motivations and the like. It's mostly about the "normal" girls, the wannabes and the other roles that revolve around the Queens.
I appreciate the viewpoint of the author greatly, but there are a number of small things about the book that bug me. While Hrdy was monogamocentric, she made it clear that that was not the only way she thought human women could or should be; Wiseman clearly assumes that all girls are monogamous and that non-monogamy on a guy's part in inherently abusive. This strikes me as especially strange, given how much time and concern she gives to homophobia and what to do if your daughter is gay. Similarly, she makes assumptions about what most girls do with respect to parties and other social gatherings that I think are serious overgeneralizations.
Having said that, it is an incredible insight into the life of a "normal" girl - one that I never had any real access to. In particular, her observations on the emotional attachments girls make to each other in early adolescence are very interesting to me, partly because I utterly failed to make any such attachments then - my few friends were all male. (It's really astonishing, in retrospect, that I never picked up a "slut" reputation.) It's worth reading just for the sake of understanding why some of my students do really stupid things.
Mother Nature: A History of Mothers, Infants, and Natural Selection, by Sarah Blaffer Hrdy
A long time ago, a very strongly cultural-feminist friend of mine, frustrated by my viewpoints on a couple of issues, demanded to know "Why do you think biology is destiny?" I replied, at the time, that I didn't. But I did think biology was, well, biology, and no more ignorable than, say, physics. This book seems to support my opinion, there. Hrdy, one of the few people working in evolutionary biology who has a female-positive perspective, here looks at the complex ways that mothers, fathers, infants, older children, and "alloparents" - other caretakers of children, who may or may not be direct kin to the mother and/or her child - interact, compete for resources, and make choices about who to invest in, as seen through the lens of those same behaviors in our primate cousins.
I always enjoy Hrdy's writing, despite finding anything that smacks of sociobiology disturbing and despite her obvious personal preference for monogamy as a human social norm. Very few people have the courage to look closely at the various choices animal mothers make in the wild, and the same choices every human mother or potential mother also makes - just more consciously than they do. Ditto the costs - metabolic, physical, and mental - of childbearing, and the competition between mothers and embryos, fetuses, and finally infants for scarce resources. Anyone who has a romantic idea of motherhood, or childhood for that matter, needs to read this; it's a refreshing dose of bitter reality.
Rogue Nation: American Unilateralism and the Failure of Good Intentions, by Clyde Prestowitz
This is an analysis of U.S. foreign policy from the end of WWII on, with a particular focus on the last ten years or so. In essence, Prestowitz points out every choice we have made, as a nation, that has made us less safe, or has destabilized the world, and why we made that choice. For the most part, it has to do with our assuming simultaneously that (a) other nations are just like us, and (b) they are so much less than us that we need to fix them. Our intentions, as he points out, have always been good, but our data has been skewed by ideology and religious, messianic ideals, and we tend to ignore data that does not support our heroic view of ourself as a nation.
Unlike most books like this that I would pick up and read, Prestowitz is not against global corporatism; in fact, he's a conservative, a former functionary under Reagan. However, he's what I've been calling a paleoconservative, a true commie-hating big-government-busting deficit-crushing history-preserving member of the reality-based community. And the entire book is a very, very good description of why people who are truly conservatives, not rabid America-Borg neocons or Radical-Right theocrats, should be very, very worried about our current foreign policy, just as worried as the rest of us - if not more so. After all, it's not our party that's suddenly been possessed . . .
Queen Bees and Wannabes: Helping Your Daughter Survive Cliques, Gossip, Boyfriends, and Other Realities of Adolescence, by Rosalind Wiseman
Okay, I'll admit up front that I read this because of Mean Girls. I should have wanted to read it in order to better understand the ordinary daily lives of my female students, I know. But really, I remember what it was like well enough to think I might be able to grok. But I wanted to see what inspired the movie. To be honest, I think my expectations were too high. I was hoping for more about the "non-normal" girls - the ones like Janis in the movie - and about the Queen Bees themselves, their motivations and the like. It's mostly about the "normal" girls, the wannabes and the other roles that revolve around the Queens.
I appreciate the viewpoint of the author greatly, but there are a number of small things about the book that bug me. While Hrdy was monogamocentric, she made it clear that that was not the only way she thought human women could or should be; Wiseman clearly assumes that all girls are monogamous and that non-monogamy on a guy's part in inherently abusive. This strikes me as especially strange, given how much time and concern she gives to homophobia and what to do if your daughter is gay. Similarly, she makes assumptions about what most girls do with respect to parties and other social gatherings that I think are serious overgeneralizations.
Having said that, it is an incredible insight into the life of a "normal" girl - one that I never had any real access to. In particular, her observations on the emotional attachments girls make to each other in early adolescence are very interesting to me, partly because I utterly failed to make any such attachments then - my few friends were all male. (It's really astonishing, in retrospect, that I never picked up a "slut" reputation.) It's worth reading just for the sake of understanding why some of my students do really stupid things.