Page M12 April 18, 1990; This Week BOOK REVIEW Are women smarter than men? | omen have lar- ger brains than men; are they smarter, too? Is it possible that all humans may have had brown skin as recently as 5,000 to 8,000 years ago? Do adolescent American males really think ~ of sex at least once every five minutes while awake? Are humans genetically flawed? Are we the only species on earth to experience orgasm? Did the brain evolve to give humans greater thinking power — or greater insula- tion? How often have we heard (or perhaps ourselves voiced) the belief that the world would be a better place if women were in charge instead of men? But would it — or are women every bit as capable of institutionalized bru- tality as men? Is the “gentler sex” nothing more than a myth promoted by myopic males and feminists with a hidden agenda? Strange but true. Almost daily beatings of their wives with everything from fists to machetes would seem to qualify men of the Yanomami people of Brazil and Venezuela as the planet’s top male chauvinists — were it not for the highland tribes of Papua, New Guinea. Males in the latter society, once initi- ated into adulthood, are given a bride whom they promptly shoot “to demonstrate un- yielding power over her.” Is the human mother gene- tically programmed to protect her children? This too may be a myth: new evidence points to the wide-spread practice of infanticide as a regulatory de- vice and alternative to abor- tion in all cultures — includ- ing Western ones. These are but fractured glimpses randomly selected from life’s ultimate soap op- era, a sprawling, brawling sa- ga featuring a cast of billions. It is the tale of a perplexing and yet amazing species that —=-books-West= By MIKE STEELE got its first break in the pri- mordial slime of a newly- minted planet, traded-in its float bladders for lungs, its fins for legs and never looked back. It’s the story of you, me, the folks next door and the folks so far back in time that they had no concept of ‘door’ let alone ‘next’. Regardless of age, sex, language, religion, class or race, this is our story, the story of humankind: Our Kind. And, as Darwin is my wit- ness, author/ anthropologist Marvin Harris knows how to tell it. Our Kind (Harper & Col- lins; 548 pp.; $29.95 in hard Hi \ hate — Trt FROM THE VICTORIA VOLUNTEER BUREAU A MEMBER OF THE UNITED WAY AIDS Vancouver Island Better Business Bureau Big Brothers and Big Sisters Boys and Girls Clubs of Victoria CRD Preventative Programs and Health Promotion Canadian Cancer Society : Canadian Diabetes Association Canadian National Institute for the Blind Canadian Paraplegic Association Canadian Red Cross Society Capital Families Association Capital Mental Health Association Central Care Home Citizen Advocacy G.R. Pearkes Centre for Children Garth Homer Cenire Glendale Lodge Society Greater Victoria Public Library Greater Victoria Victim Services Intercultural Association James Bay Community Project Juan De Fuca Hospitals Junior Service League of Victoria — ~~~. 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Women’s Sexual Assault Centre Women’s Transition House iy ney del: Gambit eS e aM, VOLUNTEER RECOGNITION WEEK IN CANADA—APRIL 22-28 cover) is Harris’ 15th book and the topic his most ambi- tious yet: an overview of the evolution of human life and culture, “who we are, where we came from and where we are going.” Now that may sound like the kind of subject matter which, in the wrong hands, could chap lips at forty paces and end world insomnia in our time but Our Kind is the product of a nimble, enquiring mind with a rare gift: the ability to simultaneously in- form and entertain. How Harris accomplishes this is almost as marvellous as Our Kind’s content. By dividing the book isto just ov- er 100 chapters, _ the author keeps each segment short (as little as two pages in some cases) and elegantly clear. The information gain is progres- Sive, enabling the reader with little or no know- ledge of anthropology to learn a bit more with successive chapters until, by book’s end, he or she has painlessly ab- sorbed an entire course on what it means to be human. This is achieved at a fast clip that amounts to a whirl- wind tour of homo sapiens’ evolutionary itinerary. While Harris deliberately idles dur- ing the first few chapters to provide readers with the background necessary for such an extended journey, thereafter the pace is un- checked. There is an undisguised joy of shared discovery in Our Kind as tour-guide Harris eagerly pulls the reader by the hand to fleefully reveal first the roots of humankind and then the dazzling array of cultural variations that vir- tually exploded across the face of the planet. And it is here that Harris excels. He peers into every nook and cranny of human culture, recognizing no limita- tion imposed by social conven- tion. He peers under the sacred tenets of tribal taboos and mass religions with equal abandon and objectivity. Hu- man sexual practices are ana- lyzed as dispassionately as those of the pygmy chimpan-- zee. Yuppies and primitive hunter-gatherer groups are regarded with the same im- partial gaze. And then there are the questions: constant, unsated, unbridled curiosity ignited by every facet of humanity’s seemingly limitless affinity for variety. Do men and women have identical I.Q.’s or have tests of in- telligence been deliberately skewed to “prove” them equal? Is any one race brighter than another? Why are wom- en making great- er life expectancy gains than men? Are male sperm counts in a tailspin and why? Why do human females have perenni- ally enlarged breasts when females of other species do not? Is the repug- nance for incest found in most societies an acquired belief or a genetic trait? What advan- tages do gay males have over gay females? What current societies insist on homosexual behaviour as part of a ‘nor- mal’ life? How violent are women — really? Harris strips away the myths, prejudices, religious dogma and other supersti- tions that cloak so much of human behaviour in igno- rance. He deserves nothing but praise for this factual and frequently amusing biogra- phy of a biological oddity that may have originally drifted on the sluggish currents of an ancient sea but that would one dav rule the world. :