SINGAPORE – In this week’s Book Box, The Straits Times taps non-fiction and introduces four books that may change the way you look at the world. Buy the books at Amazon. These articles include affiliate links. When you buy through them, we may earn a small commission.
Book review: Cat Bohannon’s Eve a seminal work that argues for female-led evolution
It should come as no surprise that women’s bodies have been simultaneously overscrutinised and understudied.
The male body has been seen as the norm for so long that it has become intuitive to think of female bodies as just “a minor tweak on a Platonic form”, a body with “extra stuff” – fat, breasts, uteri.
But just how much this matters might not have been argued so persuasively and engagingly until now, with this book by author Cat Bohannon, who surveys 200 million years to make her case.
Hers is an evolutionary and philosophical argument. The development of core tenets of what makes humans – upright posture, brains, the ability to problem-solve and the capacity for love – has been driven over millions of years by changes in the female body, not the male one.
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Book review: Young Queens a vibrant retelling of three Renaissance women’s herstories
Young Queens is the latest book to challenge traditionally male-centric historical narratives.
Historian Leah Redmond Chang’s deeply researched and snappily told narrative is more than mere woke tokenism. It revisits the lives of three royal women, tied by blood and politics in 16th-century Europe, and in retelling their stories from a female-centric perspective, reveals new nuances to herstories.
The longest reigning royal woman in this narrative is Catherine de’ Medici, a pawn in the Italian Medici family’s social climbing schemes, who comes into her own after the shocking and unexpected death of her husband, Henry II, King of France.
Her eldest daughter Elisabeth de Valois is born into the preset role of royal consort and married off to King Philip II to seal an uneasy peace between France and Spain.
Last but not least is Mary Stuart, Queen of Scotland, who inherited the throne at the tender age of six days and was raised in the French court as a queen consort to Francis, the French Dauphin (heir apparent).
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Thomas Erikson accepts being called a pop psychology writer
Swedish author Thomas Erikson is a best-selling writer, but he admits that his wife Christina is the more successful crime-fiction novelist.
Erikson, best known for Surrounded By Idiots (2014), began writing crime fiction in 2011 while working as a management consultant.
“It is more Agatha Christie-style, I don’t like blood and gore,” he says via a Zoom call from his home in Svarta (Black River), Sweden.
September was a busy month for Erikson, who not only celebrated his 58th birthday, but also released his non-fiction title Surrounded By Vampires and his newest crime novel, The Billionaire.
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Book review: Jonathan Kennedy’s Pathogenesis a lively history of how microbes changed the world
Microbes – not mankind – make history.
This is the ambitious argument that Pathogenesis mounts as it takes the reader through a whirlwind tour from infectious diseases of the Palaeolithic age to Covid-19.
The way to treat a book of such aspiration is, first and foremost, to marvel at the bold, eye-opening conclusions that its author, Jonathan Kennedy, synthesises from scientific research; and secondly, to inject a healthy dose of scepticism to the construction of a grand narrative that it is simply a bacteria’s world.
Thankfully, Kennedy – who teaches politics and global health at Queen Mary University of London – is a chatty but serious and completely likeable tour guide who has a knack for simplifying jargon while making social analyses of, and literary allusions to, historical plagues.
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The Straits Times’ Weekly Bestsellers Nov 25
Mitch Albom’s newest book debuts in sixth place on the fiction list.
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Get a Black Friday promo code for your book buys on Amazon.sg
Jumpstart your gift shopping for the Christmas season.
If you like the books The Straits Times has reviewed, we have a promotion code with Amazon.sg that will snag you additional discounts for your book buys. From Nov 24 to 27, get $10 off with $80 minimum spend.
Go to amzn.to/3QVSLd4 for this exclusive Black Friday deal. Limited redemptions are available every day, so fastest fingers first.
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