Reviews for Woman

The average rating for Woman based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2012-09-27 00:00:00 Nicole Desch This was a weird one. On the one hand, the actual information contained in the book was fascinating and important. I learned a lot about ovulation, for example, and menopause, and breasts, and enjoyed the learning immensely. But the prose. I suspect lines like, "by Hecate!" and, "the Grand Canyon, the world's grandest vagina," are meant to be a little tongue-in-cheek, but I just found them off-putting. Some of this is I think par for the course with feminists of a certain age (the book is PACKED with mom-jokes, the kind of thing my mom puts in her Facebook status and makes me facepalm--'she yam what she yam' and so forth). But I think underlying problem was that the prose assumes a certain conception of "woman" that I find restrictive. Even when talking about the wide variation in female bodies and minds, it makes broad, sweeping statements about the desires and personalities of both women and men. It assumes that women are straight and cisgendered, for example, when in fact many women are neither. Mind you, the CONTENT of the book is generally inclusive and demonstrates variety, but the prose, the little throw-away lines and jokes, really don't. That concept of "woman" is also philosophical, and leads to incredibly tedious pages and pages about, for example, which sex came first, which one is our 'default' setting? (Who cares! Does biology care?) So much talk about mothers and daughters and grandmothers, like being female-bodied makes you part of this grand sisterhood. I'm a woman and a feminist, and I'm proud of both. I just wish that I'd been able to access the information in this book without having to wade through such a wall of over-lofty ideas and prose.

Review # 2 was written on 2020-01-28 00:00:00 Javier Rodriguez This book needs illustrations! You can't scrutinize and analyze and critique the geography of the vagina (chapter 4) without providing visual aids to those of us who don't possess one or haven't sighted one in... well... a long time. You might as well be talking about the album cover of Sgt. Pepper - yes I vaguely remember the layout, no I don't recall exactly where Ringo was standing. That said, Angier doesn't just explain female physiology, she celebrates it. Loudly. Intelligently. Frankly. This is no college textbook, but maybe it should be. Women 101, freshman syllabus, M-W-F, 9am - noon. And it's not just physiology, it's also biology, psychology, anthropology, sociology, chemistry, and primatology. (I laughed rather loudly at the labeling of the rhesus monkey's capacity for social compromise as "rhesus peaces"). Science geek nirvana. Speaking as a man, I was humbled and sometimes horrified. For all the splendor and beauty of the female body, there is a lot there that can go wrong. Even when it goes right it's still messy and complicated. A nice place to visit, but I would not want to live there.