Eve is an endless source of dinner-party trivia, much of it inappropriate for actual dinner parties…. I read Meg Clothier's The Book of Eve in a quick burst, enchanted by the plot, the mysterious manuscript, and the unfolding relationships between characters. Modern medicine, neurobiology, paleoanthropology, even evolutionary biology all take a hit when we ignore the fact that half of us have breasts. Cat Bohannon] is revolutionising our understanding of the human body with her female-centric history of the species. It is a tremendous piece of writing that I don't always agree with but I'm so glad that I have read.

In a quirky bit of formatting, Bohannon starts each chapter with a glimpse at the “Eve” of a new development — the Eve of lactation is a Morganucodon sweating beads of milk through her fur in an underground den during the Jurassic Period; the Eve of menopause is a grandmother using her experience to serve as an emergency midwife in early Jericho — and I found the format charming. After all, the book’s mixture of science and speculation is more accurate than the illusion of a sex-neutral body that medicine has been peddling for centuries. If this tableau is newly familiar, it may be because Greta Gerwig restaged it in “Barbie,” imagining the moment with a doll instead of a weapon. Our bipedal legs, our tool use, our fatty brains and chatty mouths and menopausal grandmothers — all of these traits that make us “human” came about at different times in our evolutionary past.Similarly, one popular theory of language development holds that men evolved to shout at one another while hunting.

Cat Bohannon takes a stylish scalpel to innumerable examples of the dysfunctional ways in which medicine and technology have been limping along according to an assumed “male norm”, and investigates the evolution of female anatomy all the way back to mammals that scurried around under the feet of the dinosaurs.There’s also a grungy lushness to her prose that celebrates saliva, cervical and laryngeal mucus, buttocks, the “metal tang of old menstrual blood”, and fat.

Mammals are defined by motherhood: every species using sexual reproduction has male and female, but mammalian mothers feed their young, protect and train them, and develop strong, personal bonds of love. Cat Bohannon awards women their rightful place in evolutionary history and argues that gynaecology is the reason we are all alive today .

God was really pleased with himself and all he'd accomplished in just 24 hours, so he went back to Heaven and poured himself a beer. Understanding the nature of humanity REQUIRES (not just wants) a much deeper understanding of the role of women. But Bohannon’s main thesis seems to be that, despite nearly dying off a couple of times, our species has been able to thrive and populate the entire planet primarily because we mastered gynecology; learning to have the right number of babies, raised at the right time, according to the resources of their mothers’ community. Eve ] is a gripping, lyrical tale of female suffering, of remarkable resilience, of the lengths we will go to to survive and to protect our young. Then, one carnival night, two women, bleeding and stricken, are abandoned outside the convent's walls.

Eve is not only 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.I think this is probably something I’ll dip into every so often as my brain couldn’t take it all in at once.