by Jared Diamond
30 Aug. 2007
From it’s purile title to its rambling, boring arguments and hopeless lack of any kind of conclusion this book is a real shocker. If you can get past the title – which I imagine was just a cynical prank by the publishers – the questions raised in the opening chapter are indeed fascinating (what a pity they had to be posed by his dog). Why exactly, in evolutionery terms, has human sexuality evolved as it has? Unfortunately having read the book – or at least as much of it as I could possibly stand – I still don’t know or at least am none the wiser from some of the conclusions I could have drawn anyway from a rudimentary knowledge of evolution.
Diamond’s tendency to spend over 3/4 of each chapter developing arguments that he doesn’t necessarily agree with is just one of a number of irritating literary techniques which left me desperately trying to understand just what point he was making. My suspicions should have been aroused when, early on, he uses that well-known iron age text the Bible as an authority for his arguments.
The Phoenix paperback I bought is set in an unusually large point size and double spaced to fill out 192pp of drivel and make £7.99 look as though it was good value. It’s not.
This book reminds me of the old joke about the guy who bought How to Hug only to discover it was volume 6 of the Encyclopedia Britannica – but least, in spite of his mistake, he would have had something interesting to read and might have learned something!
Martin Roberts
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