Eve: 1

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There’s a huge amount of every “ology” you can think of – except maybe Scientology - with diagrams and drawings along the way. This is an extremely interesting book on human evolution, looking at various traits of modern humans and exploring how they -and we- came to be. Depending on what happens to be in baby's spit that day, the mother's breasts will change the particular composition of her milk. When she meets William at Howard University, with his inky black eyes and broad shoulders, it’s love at first sight. To read Eve as a factual record of the deep past would be misleading and, frankly, misses the point of Bohannon’s achievement.

Why do women live long after they are no longer reproduce and live longer and more healthfully than men? And this is her first book, though she has apparently written a lot of articles for a variety of publications.

In the introduction, Cat Bohannon came across as quite angry with Ridley Scott until I read the accompanying footnote. Things like live birth, lacatation, and big brains were added to the body plan at different times separated by millions of years. She is bold when speaking against abortion restrictions, the gender wage gap, sex essentialism…and chastity laws.

I was intrigued when |I first saw this book and I was so glad I saw it as it was an amazing book to read. A smart, funny, scientific deep-dive into the power of a woman's body, Eve surprises, educates, and emboldens. 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.

The only time I could not fully follow her arguments was in her discussion of how we changed from a matrilineal species to a patriarchy.

My only niggle is that in the Audible version, the reader repeatedly refers to "polygeny" rather than "polygamy". This profound misunderstanding of how natural selection works then structures the second half of the book, which comprises the evolutionary psychology chapters.

Her milk will actually change to include an agent to fight a specific pathogen or to include hormones to soothe a stressed baby. Longlisted for the Not the Booker Prize and described by Waterstones as "an exciting new voice in crime fiction", Eve’s debut novel The Waiting Rooms, set in the aftermath of an antibiotic resistance crisis, was shortlisted for the Bridport Prize First Novel Award and was selected as a Book of the Month by Eric Brown in The Guardian who compared her writing to Michael Crichton’s. It is a dense read but accessible and packed with interesting questions, analysis and factual information. Her essays and poems have appeared in Scientific American, Mind, Science Magazine, The Best American Nonrequired Reading, The Georgia Review, The Story Collider and Poets Against the War.