Customer Reviews

The Female Brain

5 star:		(91)
4 star:		(26)
3 star:		(19)
2 star:		(16)
1 star:		(24)

 

 

I really, really wanted to like this book. I've studied cognitive, perceptual and developmental neuroscience for 25+ years, and I'm also a clinical psychologist. I've been interested in gender differences for just as long. I teach undergrad and grad courses on neuroscience, cognition, emotion, behavior, learning, and sensation and perception. I make a point of covering what is known about sex differences. I think the issues are really important and I've found that it is very important to get facts right because this controversial issue is a lightning rod for anger, frustration, tension and malevolent personal biases. My strong belief, shared by many, is that competent clinical psychologists and other clinicians must work hard to understand and manage their gender biases in order to manage "counter-transference" and help their clients. I know what good science is, including good neuroscience, good cognitive science, and good clinical psychology. There are plenty of women who conduct high-quality research on mind and brain, and make huge contributions. I've witnessed this personally, repeatedly. Over the years, I've worked for and with a large number of women, and I've trained a fair number too. Among first rate scientists and scientific thinkers there are plenty of women. I imagine that they will be just as disappointed in this book as I am.

Some observations:

1) The author begins the book by emphasizing her credentials and her influences in the acknowledgements section. The academic pedigree is impressive: UC Berkeley, UCSF, Harvard Med School, Yale Med School, University College, London. She thanks a long list of great scientists, teachers and students who have influenced her thinking. It is an impressive collection of names and places. By implication, the author would seem to be a rare expert who has learned from the greats. So please note: Many of the great scientists listed here are alive. But how many of these people have endorsed the book? Unless I'm mistaken, none of them have endorsed the book. I read a mostly positive review of the book by Deborah Tannen, but it seemed a bit guarded. I didn't find an endorsement from the renowned gender researcher, Eleanor Maccoby, who reportedly critiqued drafts of the book. It appears that researchers who have dedicated their lives to science and the science of gender have remained silent about this book.

2) The author consistently confuses neural structure (brain) with psychological function (mind, mental performance, emotions, behavior). This is a huge error. The author is extraordinarily fond of citing functional gender differences. She'll talk about differences in verbal output, memory, eye contact, thoughts about sex, emotions, divorce initiation, aggression, chilhood behaviors, etc. She'll say these functional effects are in the brain, repeatedly. Good scientific thinking doesn't confuse these things. Part of the work is to measure sex differences in the brain (e.g., anatomy, physiology, chemistry). A completely separate part of the work is to measure psychological variables (e.g., behaviors, cognitions, emotions, perceptions). The third, most essential part, is to discover true correlations between structure and function. Many of the most egregious and elementary errors of cognitive neuroscience occur when researchers attempt to localize psychological functions inside brain regions or chemicals. All good neuroscientists understand this, but it is a tricky issue. One of my mentors, Davida Teller, spent years contemplating the issues surrounding "linking" hypotheses, while many great neuroscientists have struggled with this third part (Robert Efron, Steve Kosslyn, Georg von Bekesy, Gustav Fechner, and on and on and on). The author's disregard for this elementary issue is an obvious felony in my book.

3) There are PLENTY of good popular and scientific books and articles on gender differences. Take a look at the work of the eminent cognitive psychologist, Carol Tavris. She has written a scientifically-informed classic, "The Mismeasure of Woman", along with numerous other excellent articles and books. Or familiarize yourself with scientist Janet Hyde, who has recently authored a college text on gender differences. Tavris, Hyde and others aren't impressed by data suggesting massive biological differences in most mental functions, especially if the claim is that these differences are innate. Among the people who DO believe in significant gender differences, take a look at authors like Judith Hall and Leslie Brody. Scientists have studied these issues carefully since Maccoby's heyday. Compared to other sources, "The Female Brain" so simplistic and biased that it seems like a step backward. The current treatment seems dumbed-down and distorted to me.

4) The book felt like an advertisement for certain drug treatments, including controversial hormone therapies and the anti-depressant drug Zoloft. There's no doubt that the author has expertise in these areas, and most of her scholarly work is in these areas. And she spells out clinical issues and controversies in informative ways. One gets the impression that she's worked with many women clinically, and added value and comfort to their lives. I can believe these things. But I'm also aware of the rewards for towing the drug company line. Scientists and clinicians get perks for doing this. Beatrice Golomb, one of the most brilliant and courageous scientists on the planet, has discussed how these conflicts of interest compromise the quality of medical care and research. My radar went up when I kept reading about Zoloft. Zoloft is a popular antidepressant but just one brand out of many SSRIs (e.g., Prozac, Celexa, Paxil, Lexapro). Why emphasize Zoloft?

5) The book indulges in male bashing. That becomes immediately evident on the book flap: "Women will come away from this book knowing that they have a lean, mean communicating machine. Men will develop a serious case of brain envy." Oh really? The negative comments toward men are especially evident in the first third of the book. It seems like the author wants to take men down a few notches to make women feel good, if I'm not mistaken. I felt especially sad as the author discussed infants' facial gazing. She cited and over-interpreted research on facial gazing, projecting her issues onto her own son, who didn't gaze much at her face. I can say, having spent many years observing infants' looking behaviors, that infant boys are generally intrigued by faces, especially mothers' faces. If there are sex differences, they do not jump out. And if there are measurable differences, how does the author know that these things are innate? (on to the next felony).

6) The author is happy to attribute gender differences to inherent, inborn brain differences. Making that leap so quickly is another "felony." This is big, complicated issue that has attracted much attention from philosophers, psychologists, and neuroscientists. There's a whole field of behavioral genetics that struggles with the nature-nurture issue in sophisticated ways. The author claims to be aware of these things, but doesn't communicate this in a convincing way. She seems to have missed key points regarding environment and socialization. In doing so, she also seems to miss the enormous pioneering contributions of neuroscientist Marian Diamond. Diamond did much to demonstrate the relationship between brain and environment.

7) The author says a minimum amount about the large individual differences that characterize people. She acknowleges within-group variability, but always "finds ways around" these things. She prefers to focus on average differences, and this adds to the dangerous reinforcement of stereotypes. Many human abilities are distributed along a continuum, independent of gender, but the author emphasizes dichotomies. It is dangerous to pidgeonhole people into "the" female mind and "the" male mind.

8) Why is this book called "The Female Brain"? Just 2 years ago, Darlington published a book with the same title. And it really did cover structural and functional brain issues.

So that's my less than positive take on this book. The value of the book comes from its discussion of some specific clinical issues. But in a nutshell, it offended too many of my sensibilities regarding cognition, neuroscience, and the psychology of women.

I have created an award, named for the 1986 Newsweek story that told a generation of smart women that they were more likely to be killed by a terrorist than marry after thirty, which Newsweek retracted this year after all the damage had been done."The Female Brain" by Louann Brizendine is the first winner of the award.

Here's why:
In The Female Brain, Brizendine, a San Francisco Bay area psychiatrist, who runs a clinic she started to help women who think their mental problems are caused by their hormones, describes the life cycle of a contemporary American educated, neurotic, urban, privileged professional in a culture in which science is just another option, as if she had discovered Lucy, the mother of all mankind. Behavior familiar to many of us only from the wonderful bad Heather literature is presented as hard-"wired" into the female brain. Brizendine's description of the hard-"wired" cervix and brain-softening, uncontrollable urge to mate with one's newborn baby, which makes wholesale desertion of the work place is as irresistible as the law of gravity, is the closest thing to soft porn I've seen emerging from the San Francisco Medical Center in a long time. For the many women who would find Brizendine's transparently autobiographical description of the stages of a woman's life almost entirely unfamiliar, the possibility that the book is false seems immediately obvious. If it were true, The Female Brain would be a scary book indeed. But of course it's not.

Insecure readers might coubt their own sanity when reading the thing, because the short book is supplemented by mind-numbing pages of citations to scientific journals. But happily as far as I know the articles Brizendine cites bear essentially no relationship to the propositions in the text of the book. As the only real academic to look at it reveals, she might as well have cited to passages in "Mastering the Art of French Cooking." The methodology is the all-too-familiar incredible assertions supported by a Million Little Pieces of unrelated footnotes.

"Science" books with faux citations are a problem. But perhaps a worse problem is that not a single book reviewer in the country took the time to go to the local university library and see whether Brizendine's "sources" actually said what she said they said. Even Robin Marantz Henig, of the staggeringly self-justifying, endlessly publicly edited and allegedly tansparency-seeking New York Times, was content to whimper that the closed sourcing of the scientific journals Brizendine's cites made it impossible for her to check their truthiness. The insurmountable barrier of a (no transfer) subway ride from the Times offices in Times Square to the Columbia University library was apparently too much for this dauntless investigative reporter from the Newspaper of Record.

Blessedly, Mark Liberman, the Trustee Professor of Phonetics, Department of Linguistics and Professor, Department of Computer and Information Science, at the University of Pennsylvania, was intrigued enough by Brizendine's unlikely assertion that "A woman uses about 20,000 words per day while a man uses about 7,000" to try to run down that one building block of her Mars/Venus "neuropsychiatry." He reports on his blog first, that there was absolutely no legitimate source whatsoever for the factoid and speculating that some marriage counselor must have made it up, then, that metasurveys revealed no such thing, and finally, doing his own test found that men use more words than women do!

Alerted to the possibility that Brizendine might have made it all up, and his appetite whetted by the confessed public failure of the avatar of all the news that's fit to print, Liberman rummaged among his books and fired up his online university library system and investigated the citations for Brizendine's assertion that "studies indicate that girls are motivated -- on a molecular and a neurological level -- to ease and even prevent social conflict."

Here's what he found:

"My summaries of these articles, in the context of Brizendine's claims [that studies indicate girls are motivated on a molecular and neurologicallevel to ease and even prevent social conflict]:

1. Jasnow 2006: Nothing here about social conflict avoidance or preserving relationships or humans of any sex.
2. Bertolino 2005: Nothing here about social conflict or preserving relationships or teenagers of any sex.
3. Hamann 2005: Nothing here about social conflict avoidance or preserving relationships or teenagers.
4. Huber 2005: Nothing here about sex differences, about social conflict avoidance, about preserving relationships, or about humans of any age or sex.
5. Pezawas 2005: Nothing here about sex differences, about social conflict avoidance, about preserving relationships, or about teenage girls.
6. Sabatinelli 2005: Nothing here about sex differences or social conflict avoidance or preserving relationships.
7. Viau 2005: Nothing here about social conflict avoidance or about preserving relationships.
8. Wilson 2005: Because Penn lacks a subscription to this journal, and I was unwilling to pay $30 for a 7-page article, I'm not sure about the details. Unlike the other articles cited, it does have something to do with social interaction, but there's apparently no direct relevance to social conflict avoidance or preserving relationships.
9. Phelps 2004: Nothing here about social conflict avoidance or preserving relationships."


Inspired by Liberman, I did a little snooping into the vita of the self-proclaimed UCSF Professor and found that she is in fact not an academic professor, but a clinical professor, running a clinic she herself founded treating women's psychiatric problems from a hormonal standpoint, at $180 a session.

Now clinical professors do good and important work in many institutions, but this does mean that she has not had to undertake and meet the rigorous competition for an academic position at a leading medical school. Just as well. During her fourteen years as a "Professor," prior to the 2006 Terrorist Retraction Prize winning "Female Brain," Brizendine was an author on exactly seven papers, the most recent one published four years ago in 2002. According to PubMed, a service of the National Library of Medicine and National Institutes of Health, which is cited on Brizendine's own academic bio webpage, she was not even the first named researcher on any of the seven. Just to put her accomplishments in context, her colleague in the psychiatry department at UCSF, Associate Professor Steven P. Hamilton, has published twenty-four papers since 1994, first listed author on eleven.
I guess it depends on what "pioneering neuropsychiatrist" is . . . is.

A quick web search for other Brizendine contributions to medical science turned up report that she told the audience at a fund-raiser that "the World Health Organization has projected that by 2003, depression will be the number one disease in the world, surpassing diabetes, heart disease and others." I guess it depends on what "number one disease" is, but I would be surprised if the WHO thought depression was a worse threat to human well-being than, say, malaria or AIDS.

The book stores are full of loony books that look at first glance like science, so it is probably too much to ask that the publisher withdraw its endorsement of The Female Brain, as publishers did in the cases of the fake memoir "A Thousand Little Pieces" and the plagiarized "How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild and Got a Life." But I venture to guess that if a book about anything except why women should behave in old-fashioned and traditional ways contained this staggering percentage of misrepresentation and error, someone beside a blogging linguistics professor would have picked it up long ago.

And so, to Louann Brizendine, that self-described pioneering neuropsychiatrist of no apparently significant academic publications and false or unrelated data points, the First, Annual "More Likely To Be Killed By a Terrorist Retraction Award" for 2006.

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I bet you didn't know these facts:

(1) "Men use about seven thousand words per day. Women use about twenty-thousand."
(2) "Girls arrive already wired as girls, and boys arrive already wired as boys."
(3) "Men are on average twenty times more aggressive than women."
(4) "Girls are motivated--on a molecular and neurological level--to ease and prevent social conflict."
(5) "85% of twenty- to thirty-year-old males think about sex every fifty-two seconds and women think about it once a day--up to three or four times on fertile days."
(6) "Men pick up the subtle signs of sadness in a female face only 40 percent of the time, whereas women can pick up these signs 90 percent of the time."
(7) "65 percent of divorces after the age of fifty are initiated by women."

These seven facts are some of the interesting information that you'll learn in this book by Louann Brizendine M.D., a neuropsychiatrist at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) and founder of the Women's and Teen Girls' Mood and Hormone Clinic.

The thesis of this book is that the female brain sees the world differently and reacts differently than the male brain in every stage of life from newborn to old age. A women's behavior is radically different from that of a man due to mainly hormonal differences. This book is quite easy to read and, in fact, reads like a novel.

However, I found the book to have minimal neuroscience (as suggested by the book's title). It was comprised mainly of anecdotes (some autobiographical) that exaggerate the differences between women and men thus reinforcing gender stereotypes. As well, I found many contradictions throughout. In places of her book, Brizendine is also surprisingly naïve.

When I was reading this book, what struck me was the exactness of some of the facts the author presents (such as the seven presented above). So I decided to search on the Internet for other reviews of this book from mainly scholarly sources. The avalanche of negative information I found was astounding!!

A major problem concerned her extensive endnotes.

From reading this mass of negative information, it seems to me that Brizendine is attempting to present an authoritative voice to impress despite what the authors say in her numerous endnotes. That is, her supporting citations don't support her claims. If you couple this with Brizendine's impressive academic credentials (highlighted especially in the book's acknowledgements section and inside back flap), then most people, unfortunately, accept everything she says at face value. (By the way, the seven "facts" above are not supported by Brizendine's citations.)

I was intrigued by this so I checked out Brizendine's brief biography on the book's inside back flap. A piece of information that intrigued me states that "She has written in professional texts and journals." What I wanted to know was how many professional research papers she has written in. Again from searching on the Internet I found she had written exactly 7 research papers in collaboration with others and she's not the first named author in any of the seven. (To put this in context, her colleague in the Psychiatry Department at UCSF, Associate Professor Steven P. Hamilton has published 24 papers since 1994 and is first listed author on 11.)

For a "pioneering neuropsychiatrist," (honest, this is what it says on the book's inside front flap) she has a poor research paper publication rate.

At the beginning of her endnotes and references section, she states in a preamble the following:

"I have gathered the work of many scientists in various disciplines in order to arrive at this understanding of the female brain."

From my understanding of this quotation, she used only the work of only scientists to establish her claims. However, in her references are works authored by Allen Pease and Allan Garner. These people are not scientists!!

Also, in this preamble she calls everything she has written in her book a "theory" (a collection of general principles that is put forward as an explanation for a set of known facts and empirical findings). I found her theory to be quite rigid since she doesn't allow for or explain any exceptions (there are many) and this undermines her entire theory. Yes, men and woman's brains are different but within each gender, you'll find a wide range of behavior. To ignore this fact as Brizendine does is to present a very narrow view of human experience.

I have to agree with an October 2006 article in the publication "Nature" that was entitled "Psychoneuroindoctrinology" (a pun on the word pyschoneuroendrocrinology) which states that this book "fails to meet even the most basic standards of accuracy and balance," "is riddled with scientific errors," and "is misleading about the processes of brain development, the neuroendocrine system, and the nature of sex differences in general."

Finally, I should explain my rating for this book. The majority of those who are not critical thinkers will probably give this book 5 stars. The majority of those who ARE critical thinkers will probably give this book 1 star. My rating is the average of these two extremes.

In conclusion, those readers who are not critical thinkers will probably thoroughly enjoy this book. Critical thinking readers will probably have the opposite response!!


{first published 2006; acknowledgements; the female brain (a human brain diagram with captions); cast of neuro-hormone characters (list of hormones with descriptions that affect a woman's brain); phases of a female's life (chart); introduction; seven chapters; epilogue; main narrative 165 pages; 3 appendices; notes; references; index}

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... please read Dr. Mark Liberman's critique of its scholarship, which recently appeared in the Boston Globe. I also work in academia, and am galled by Dr. Brizendine's sloppy research and dismayed that the publisher did not do more fact-checking before agreeing to publish her book.

"The Female Brain" does have a nice, breezy style common in many pop-science works; Dr. Brizendine writes well. This makes it all the more unfortunate, however, that she bases many of her arguments on "facts" and statistics that are not backed up by scientific literature.

Sadly, this is yet another in a long line of books that trumpet the neurological basis of gender differences with little attention to the complexity of the issues. Yes, innate gender differences almost certainly exist, but the truth is that we don't yet know enough about how the brain works to really tease out such differences. I am always disappointed when authors, especially scientists, gloss over these difficulties in an attempt to draw more attention to their work. I realize that it's more exciting to claim "I know how the female brain works! Women think this way!" rather than to admit that one has some preliminary findings and hypotheses about male vs. female tendencies, and that individual differences are often greater than male vs. female differences. But it's also disheartening to think that many people will believe Dr. Brizendine's claims without realizing that they are principally overgeneralizations, peppered with outright inaccuracies.

The problem with this book is that Brizendine actively misrepresents research and uses numbers that are basically made-up. Her "science" doesn't stand up to scrutiny.

For instance, on differences between male and female speech patterns she claims that women speak three times more words than men in a day, and speak almost twice as fast. In fact, no reliable studies had been done when the book came out. Prompted by the book, somebody actually bothered to measure, and it turned out that men and women speak about the same number of words, and men speak (very slightly) faster. You can get details about the studies from the excellent blog LanguageLog, which reports on real linguistic science. Google for the post titled "Gabby guys: the effect size".

In sum: This book should be filed in the Fiction section, not the Science section.

When I first picked up this book I was a bit put off because there were some comments that weren't particularly complimentary to men that seemed unfair and biased. However, the overall tone of the book was good and I was able to overlook the occasional comment that seemed a bit "off" with respect to holding a balanced position on the genders. Other reviewers have also commented on this from their perspectives, so I won't elaborate any further. You can read these reviews for yourself.

This was a difficult book to put down because it used stories to illustrate the different stages of a woman's life and the physical correlations to her behavior. At the same time, it painlessly introduced important information about the brain, hormones and how these are connected to behavioral changes in a woman's life. While this exploration was not comprehensive, it was useful, concise, understandable and well-suited to a non-professional audience.

This title also contained a lot of similar information on men and I found this information to be more than a superficial smattering. I wouldn't say the book is titled incorrectly, but don't be misled that it only includes information about the female brain. It contains lots of good content on the male brain as well.

The chapters that most grabbed by attention were on the teenage years, developing trust and sexual behavior. These sections brought in a lot of good references from a variety of sources including evolutionary biology, anthropology and neurobiology. Since the author was presenting her own unique perspective as a clinician, she did not bring in a lot of other significant research. This is a legitimate criticism. However, this is a very complex area and I found that the information was an excellent introduction to a vast body of research.

For the average layperson, the mixture of science, story and the implications of these facts to everyday life is perfect. For the scientist or other technical audiences, it may not have enough meat from an information standpoint, but the story and interweaving of different threads of research makes the book very engaging for anyone including a professional.

By education, I was trained early in my career as a biologist and biochemist. Later, I went on to study psychology. I had difficulty putting the book down and it flowed like a good novel in terms of the writing. The organization of this book was well thought out, particularly the way that different research findings were presented to support the author's argument without interrupting the flow of the story.

For many people who haven't read David Buss or anthropology, the insights on short and long term mating strategies will be an eye opener. I also liked the cross cultural references to support her arguments that certain behaviors appear to be due to shared neural architecture rather than cultural influences. There is a lot of controversial content here that is good food for thought.

The author tells the story of the human brain concisely with the impact of a good novel. This book is worth owning for anyone who wants to understand women better, how they change over the years and how female psychology correlates to development and physiology. As you go deeper, however, you will find that this book may not be comprehensive enough.

I didn't find this book to be overly reductionistic. It looked at the impact of physiology on behavior, but it didn't reduce behavior to physiology. The only bias that was sometimes annoying is the implication that men were somehow "less than" rather than "complimentary to" women. This bias wasn't usually glaring, but I felt it was often present.

This book has become somewhat controversial, but that doesn't change the fact that it includes a lot of great information and puts it in the hands of the average person. If you are really serious about this area, I would pick up additional books to compliment this author's unique perspective. While I didn't necessarily agree with everything that Dr. Brizendine said, I certainly benefited from engaging with this book and sparked my curiosity to know more about certain areas of interest.

If you are considering buying this book, I think it's important to remember it was written by a clinician and not a research scientist. The value of the material is based on ONE physician's experience over her career. She is presenting a mixture of research material and her own opinion. If you are clear about this, I think you will enjoy it.

This is clearly a book for a GENERAL AUDIENCE. I believe this author wrote from a sincere place and I don't fault her for writing from a first person perspective. Like a good historical novel, this book captures the essence of the subject, but does sacrifice some accuracy in the process. If you are looking for more hard science, you may find something else more to your liking.

Some books on related topics that I enjoyed were the Developing Mind by Daniel Siegel (general book on how the mind develops apart from gender differences), Emotional Intelligence (Goleman) and various gender-related titles by Carol Tavris. (The book by Carol Tavris on Anger is not directly related to this topic, but it is excellent as well.)

I also like the work of Antonio Demasio on the mind-body relationship, role of emotions and the development of consciousness. There is some speculation and a fair amount of first-person perspective in his books too, but they are quite good overall and he is a neurologist with good credentials. THE FEELING OF WHAT HAPPENS is the most dense title and LOOKING FOR SPINOZA is probably the most accessible.

If you want a more controversial and provocative read, PHILOSOPHY IN THE FLESH talks in-depth about the embodied mind from a cognitive perspective. There are also many good books out there on gender differences and they are referred to in other reviews including the spotlight review above. In short, if this is an area of interest, you need to read a broad array of material because I don't think any one author has a monopoly on the truth. The differences between men and women are mysterious and with over a quadrillion synaptic brain connections to consider, I doubt the full picture of brain gender differences will emerge anytime soon.

I was so looking forward to this book. Finally there was a definitive book on the structural differences between female and male brains - quite true. I wanted a popular book which I could use when giving talks on Brain injury and treatment.

However, Brizendine's book is not that useful, or even that accurate. For instance, on page 33 in the paperback edition, she has a diagram on the estrogen/ progesterone wave. On that same diagram, she has a vertical line signifying ovulation. I cannot conceive, that as a specialist in womens hormones, she has not read the research from Canada (Peterson et al, Fertility and Sterility, July 2003) where the researchers (by mistake) discovered that hormonal levels have little correlation to ovulatory activity, and that some women ovulate multiple times during the month.

The book is filled with similar inaccuracies, plus most of her information is presented in anecdotal form with examples from her client base. Now if you know that she charges, in her clinic, $180 per consult, then you will gather that her clients have a certain amount of disposable income, which means they are likely to be middle-class and presumably well-educated. You cannot make scientific assertions about a whole class of humanity just by looking at members of a particular class.

As a medical professional, when I read a book in my field, I expect to, and need to be able to discover what finding refers to what piece of research. In Brizendine's book, this is impossible. Dr. Brizendine neglected to either footnote or add any sort of tracking system.

In my personal this book does more harm than good - what were the editors thinking of when they passed it?

Dr. Brizendine manages to make a book with fifty-eight pages of references a delight to read. This is a book about the female human brain, but it's also a guide to the male brain. I've insisted that my fifteen-year-old son read this book, because it will help him to make sense of the alien mental landscape of his female peers.

Lazy reviewers are going to accuse the author of biological reductionism, i.e., of making women slaves to their biology. She explains over and over again that understanding one's neurobiology and hormonal climate allows one to make better-informed choices about life.

Some people may not like the way that she tackles the subject of love, but the evidence is clearly on her side. Oxytocin and vasopressin have a whole lot more to do with love than naked winged babies with archery gear.

My one criticism of the book lies in the author's clinical focus. She has spent a lot of time dealing with dysfunctional women, and her book sometimes focuses too much on pathology rather than on the broad normal range of experience. Still, it's a solid book.

Actually, this book has negative value: Not only can I not give it to anyone, for fear of perpetuating the notions therein; but I can't throw it away without wasting a couple pounds of paper.

At first astonished by the amazing differences she cites between male and female brains, I started to track down her references. They were ancient, vague, and wholly unconvincing. Lesson learned: If it sounds unbelievable, it probably is unbelievable.

What a shame, when there is so much fascinating research on the real differences between male and female brain function. The truth would have been much more interesting than this misleading wad of pop-psychology. And much less destructive to the causes of science literacy and the understanding of human behavior.

Brizendine has done readers, and her fellow educators, a stunning disservice.

This book has gotten lots of knocks---some deserved, like her constant use of the unfortunate phrase about the brain being "marinated" in hormones or praising orgasm like a bad Whitman, "O! Climax!". But at its core it is valuable.Its Big Idea: our actions are often dictacted---even compelled---by hormones that get released because of basic human wiring developed over tens of thousands of years. Hard to control teen age daughter? Her brain is flooded with hormones that get released as she bonds with other teen age girls---she gets a high like a drug rush---and when cut off from them by being grounded, she goes into withdrawal and acts sullen and is difficult to control.Can't explain why a female friend goes for the good looking guys and not the nice ones? She is hard wired to pick the handsome man(handsome being a function of symmetry) which her wiring tells her will give her better orgasms and the best orgams are the ones most likely to draw the sperm inside and impregnate her. There is more---discussion of smells in attraction, a possible gene to explain why some males are more faithful than others, how birth actually changes a woman's brain. In short, we are animals. And knowing that is not an excuse for conduct but an explanation for conduct. Sure, some of the ideas are still being developed, some bound for confirmation, others the dust bin. But the book, at its best, is a gift of liberation.