Woman: An Intimate Geography

"I've read a few of Natalie Angier's books and have always been impressed by the clarity of her thought and her ability to craft a well-turned phrase. This book has oodles of both. It gives the reader a bells-and-whistles tour of the female anatomy and body functions, with entertaining digressions. It's fascinating, and not just because I happen to live in a female body; if she'd written about any being's body like this, I'd find it equally compelling. She wears her learning lightly and communicates her enthusiasm for her subject with real passion. It's her infectious zest and joy that makes this book such a gem - a real rarity in popular science. Fabulous, female and very sassy!"
~ Written on 2007-06-19

"I've read a few of Natalie Angier's books and have always been impressed by the clarity of her thought and her ability to craft a well-turned phrase. This book has oodles of both. It gives the reader a bells-and-whistles tour of the female anatomy and body functions, with entertaining digressions. It's fascinating, and not just because I happen to live in a female body; if she'd written about any being's body like this, I'd find it equally compelling. She wears her learning lightly and communicates her enthusiasm for her subject with real passion. It's her infectious zest and joy that makes this book such a gem - a real rarity in popular science. Fabulous, female and very sassy!"
~ Written on 2007-06-18

"Angier uses her strong journalist's skills to guide us on an encyclopaedic journey. The excursion examines nearly every aspect of women's bodies, with many mysteries unveiled and hidden facets exposed. She mixes clinical findings with emotional responses in a rich set of information, and no little opinion on meanings. There are countless insights here, and her talent with words makes the reading an easy task. It's a pity her introduction pays only condescending consideration to the value this book might have for male readers. There's treasure here for anyone who wishes to understand the poorly dealt with aspects of what it means to be a woman.

While her narrtive 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 about 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, symptoms identified and treated without women being told of 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 women's physiognomy compared to that of men's, 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. [stephen a. haines - Ottawa, Canada]"
~ Written on 2003-10-15

"In the past few years, it has been virtually impossible to open a newspaper or magazine without coming across badly-researched articles "proving" that men are "innately" differnt from women. Naturally enough, all this mind-blowing new evidence has served only to reinforce tired old stereotypes: about how men are "naturally" more promiscous than women; how men seek a series of nubile dolly-birds while women seek one solid, dependable "provider (it's biological, you see); how men are inevitable attracted to younger women while women tend to go for older men; how looks are important to men but now to women - and so on ... Natalie Angier's book is an essential rebuttal of all these beliefs, popular only because they seem to confirm what people - especially male newspaper ediotrs - want to believe is true. Read this book, and you will never again listen to nonsense about how the function of a woman is to attract the male, nor will you buy the ever-more popular concept that the female body is essentially "sick". If any book has the power to change attitudes and therefore lives, this is it."
~ Written on 2001-03-22

"A great book! Angier provides a subtle and informed insight into the experience of androgen-insensitive women (in the form of Jane Carden's story, in Chapter 2 - The Mosaic Imagination). This is in huge contrast to the complete garbage printed on the same subject by Germaine Greer in her recent book on women. Don't buy Greer's rant, buy this excellent book instead."
~ Written on 2000-05-11