Rating: 
Summary: A Mother's Day Book for Thinking Moms
Review: This is a wonderfully written book about the nature of the maternal investment in offspring (in humans). Hrdy extends the concept of sexual selection into the realm of parenting and that is an extremely powerful and brilliant insight. Most books about mate choice end with pregnancy. This book doesn't because that is not the end for females. This particular insight is one that I think only a woman could have--let's have more women working in this field!. Any evolutionary psychology or biology that proceeds from here will have to consider Hrdy's contribution!This book is also a bit of a shock--it explores how moms ruthlessly cut their losses and why--not a pretty story at all. I was especially undone by Hrdy's account of all the "Espositos" in Italy. The number of children left in foundling hospitals throughout is staggering. It's even worse than the 46K plus in Florida's foster care system in 2002 (with 1000+ missing!). Hrdy also explores connections between the erotic and the maternal, something that will no doubt freak some people out. But she does this with a cool scientists gaze and a warm human voice. She seems very generous toward readers and their potential discomfort with the more startling phemomena she wants to account for. Hrdy is a primalogist and a mom. The book is not entirely distrubing--it also accounts for intense feelings of love moms have for their children. I was also excited to read in her book about Darwin's French translator, Clemance Royer! This book will delight anyone interested in women's intellectual history, parenting, evolutionary biology, or primatology.
Thank You Dr.Hrdy!
Rating:
Summary: This book blew my mind!
Review: This is not a easy book to read. My husband gave it to me as a Mother's Day gift, and I thought it'd be a sweet sentimental book about motherhood from across the ages and species. It was not! This book shocked and disturbed be often, yet had me gripped to every word. Eloquently written, this author courageously discusses the most difficult aspect of motherhood: neglect, abandonment, and infanticide. Yet she does so with such heart-felt reverence for these tiny creatures, their strength and perseverence, and uses science to show us that although sometimes horrible things occur, Nature has a way of correcting things over time.
Rating: 
Summary: A book length naturalistic fallacy
Review: To enjoy this book, you have to be comfortable with stuff like this: First, primate mother's milk, including human milk, is comparatively unnutritious. Consequently, primate infants tend to suckle frequently, perhaps several times per hour, including while the mother is sleeping. This frequent breast feeding maintains hormonal responses which have the effect of suppressing ovulation and pregnancy. Second, by hominoid standards, women are poor mothers: reluctant to bond with their infants and likely to abandon them, particularly if the infant seems "defective." (In one culture, "defective" means having too much hair on its head.) Indeed, human infants' comparative plumpness may have evolved to advertise that the child is "worth rearing." However, Hrdy never provides a coherent explanation about why human mothers have evolved this way. Third, before infant formula and sterilized water, weaning an infant prematurely was likely to kill it. Nevertheless, some cultures, particularly 17th through 19th century Italy and France, decided that breast-feeding one's own child just wasn't the thing for middle and upper-class women to do. One effect was that these women became pregnant much more frequently and infant mortality rates skyrocketed. Fourth, more often than not, sons are preferred over daughters. This seems to be related to the economic contribution that children made to their parents, with sons contributing more, particularly in cultures where a dowry was required to marry off a daughter. Where having a daughter meant receiving a "bride price" as payment for her reproductive potential, the preference is more ambiguous. Fifth, because women are much less likely to "marry down" than men, sons have often been preferred in the higher social classes and daughters preferred in the lower classes. (See also Ellis' article in "The Adapted Mind" by Barkow, Cosmides and Tooby.) Hrdy unwittingly personal evidence; she is a PhD anthropologist married to an MD medical researcher. Sixth, fathers and mothers are equally likely to come to the aid of their offspring if its cry indicates severe distress but the mothers are more likely to respond to cries indicating mere discomfort. I actually like reading this sort of thing. So why only three stars? First, there is Hrdy's writing style. This is a long book, and it's only partly because of its enormous breadth of material. Hrdy likes to play with the language, which I find annoying. Then there is Hrdy's description of a 30-year old incident, where she was angered in a anthropology class where women were described as being essentially bought and sold like property. She said that she felt like a black in a KKK meeting. Since I just finished "The War against Boys" by Christina Hoff Sommors, my sympathy was limited. As I said, this book is a "naturalistic fallacy," defined as confusing "what is" with "what should be." As others have noted, the book reads like a justification for maternal infanticide and abortion. This is probably largely due to how people determine that an action is "moral," which they are more likely to do if (1) people have been doing it for a long time; (2) a lot of people do it; and (3) it benefits the people making decisions about morality. Large chunks of the book are dedicated to documenting how long and how widely maternal neglect and infanticide has been practiced. (To see the extreme in avoiding the fallacy, read "A Natural History of Rape" by Thornhill & Palmer.) As Hrdy points out, others have contended that H. sapiens is a basically polygynous species and that polygyny benefits the female, since it's better to be the second wife of a rich man than the only wife of a poor man. She doesn't mention others' proposals that monogamy is essentially an agreement among men, to reduce the level of male-male violence in stratified cultures Instead, Hrdy promotes monogamy as "a compromise that children win," with men doing exactly what women want them to do. Hrdy also points out that, across species, paternal investment in the offspring is proportional to the probability of the male actually being the father. A particularly vicious wifely attack against her husband is to tell him that her children are not his; in some cultures, this will certainly get the woman beaten and possibly even killed. Thanks to DNA testing, paternity can now be accurately determined. Hrdy never cites cuckoldry rates for humans, but other's have. Depending on who you read, 10 or 28.3% of American children are fathered by men other than the man publicly identified by the mother (See "The Dangerous Passion" by Buss and Robyn Blumner's column, St. Petersburg (FL) Times, 06/18/2000). If the probability distribution is uniform across the population, these figures mean that, for example, there is a 27 or 63% likelihood that at least 1 of Hrdy's 3 children was fathered by a man other than her husband. Even more perversely, an American man who is stupid enough to be married to a woman having a child will find that his protection against this threat is reduced, not enhanced. The same DNA testing which can help a woman in extracting money from the child's father, is deemed irrelevant when it proves that the woman's husband isn't her child's father. Indeed, it says something about the American "patriarchy" that legal discussions in this matter revolve around whether a trusting husband should continue to be forced to subsidize his wife's treachery against him, and not around the length of the wife's jail term.
Rating: 
Summary: Mother Nature: A History of Mothers, Infants,andNatural Sel
Review: While the writing style and many parts of this book are indeed entertaining and informative, I found the obvious pro-abortion slant inappropriate for a book about "motherhood". As a mother of six, I had hoped for more from this, judging by the title. I won't be looking for more books by this author in the future.
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