Woman: An Intimate Geography
by Natalie Angier

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Book Reviews of Woman: An Intimate Geography

Book Review: Mixing metaphor and mystique
Summary: 4 Stars

While her exposition covers an extensive array of topics, perhaps the chapter on hormones is of greatest value. Spending much of her time dispensing with what she deems mythology, she underpins her opinions with a hefty dose of information on which hormones are important to a woman's well-being. It's a comprehensive view of the human body's operations reaching well beyond either pure biology or medicine. Still, the information applies to all human bodies, depending on the hormone, reaching well beyond her expressed, if confined, audience. We all need to better understand what is going on in our bodies.

Angier threads personal experiences into the narrative with practiced ease. Her prose is witty and inventive, fertile with metaphor. She's present on almost every page, although there is nothing obtrusive in learning she suffers a thyroid condition, nor in standing with her in an operating theatre. Instead, her personal occurrences bring us closer to the humanity she imparts with these examples. They are situations many women experience, yet occuring without women being told of their cause and likely impact. She uses many of these examples in her attempts to dispel the mythology surrounding many women's physical conditions.

Angier's eloquence may dazzle the unwary, but the careful reader will discern a wealth of inconsistencies. She's at pains to demonstrate her knowledge of the Darwinian paradigm. Unfortunately, her feminist rhetoric trips up her ambition for scientific detachment. Glorying in the massive nerve network of the clitoris compared to the penis, she exults: "Who would want a shotgun when you can have a semi-automatic?" This invidious contrast ignores that it was evolution that granted these gender differences. Neither sex has had a conscious choice in their physiognomy. She ranges over many scientific achievements in revealing the body's features, ignoring that men performed the significant amount of the research available to make this book. Learning the biology and considering our evolutionary roots is rewarding, but the aim of elevating women is undercut by disparaging men.

The book, therefore, is only a qualified success. For a book based on scientific research, her failure to provide references is startling. She calls her bibliography "References" but it takes a serious student to pursue her sources. After building her credibility with a wide-ranging and vivid narrative, in the final chapters she nearly throws it all away. From her crusade to inform us about what's important to and about women, she suddenly elevates her soapbox with a vituperative assault on evolutionary psychology. This is a strange departure, since she's spent much of her text reassuring us of her Darwinian credentials. In this onslaught, she's suddenly given to misquotes, out of context citations and very selective research results. With so much complex information presented in the remainder of the book, she suddenly disturbingly simplifies here. Her celebration of the woman's body and psyche is badly marred by her insistence that as "a free and fiery primate" knowledgeable women will attain supremacy over the world's problems. Dismissing a wealth of work done in recent years on primate behaviour alone is not the way to increase the knowledge store.

Summary of Woman: An Intimate Geography

The mysteries of evolution are not a new subject for Angier, a Pulitzer Prize-winning biology writer for the New York Times whose previous books include The Beauty of the Beastly and Natural Obsessions. The strengths of Woman begin with Angier's witty and evocative prose style, but its real contribution is the way it expands the definition of female "geography" beyond womb, breasts, and estrogen, down as far as the bimolecular substructure of DNA and up as high as the transcendent infrastructure of the human brain. --Patrizia DiLucchio

Women's Health Books

• Subjects > Health, Fitness & Dieting > Personal Health > Women's Health
• Science & Math > Biological Sciences > Anatomy
• Women's Studies