Amazon.com: Heroes, Rogues, and Lovers: Testosterone and Behavior: James McBride Dabbs, Mary Godwin Dabbs: Books

Amazon.com
To understand how life works, you must understand testosterone. This male hormone--which is present in both men and women--determines who leads society and how it is led; the professions we choose, and in some cases, how well we do in them; and in some cases how long we live--after all, the high-testosterone guy tends to be a risk-taker.

Author James Dabbs, a social psychologist, has been studying testosterone for decades at Georgia State University, and many of the studies coming out of his lab have made headlines. To pick just one of dozens of examples, he and his colleagues found that high-testosterone soldiers were more likely to get in trouble with the law, use drugs and alcohol, and have 10 or more sex partners in a year. The more testosterone one has, the more wild oats one feels compelled to sow.

Of course, testosterone isn't a static thing; it rises with feelings of victory and accomplishment and crashes with feelings of defeat. Dabbs takes us through the world of testosterone--from the basic chemistry to how it affects love, work, and society--and makes it literate, erudite, and outrageously entertaining. Snippets of Shakespeare are used to make a point alongside stories of high-testosterone female prisoners. Men will find Heroes, Rogues, and Lovers a glorious explanation of their hormonal core, while women can use it to understand the men in their lives, and even themselves--after all, testosterone increases libido in geese as well as ganders. --Lou Schuler

From Publishers Weekly
In the past three months, testosterone has become a hot topic on TV magazine and talk shows, online and even in the New York Times Magazine. Dabbs, a former researcher of social psychology at Georgia State University, "move[s] between science and anecdote, example and principle, theory and fact" to explain everything you wanted to know about testosterone but were afraid to ask. Unfortunately, much of what he serves up as science yields many claims that are scientifically unsupportable. Dabbs has drawn many of his conclusions from testosterone studies he and his students conducted that generally did not follow strict scientific testing procedures, on populations including "college students, prison inmates, trial lawyers, athletes... [and] construction workers." Unfortunately, this leads to such hilariously generalized statements as "high-testosterone men, on average, are leaner, balder, more confident... and likely to favor tattoos and gold jewelry." Or, "high-testosterone men are more likely than low-testosterone men to have blue-collar jobs." Explaining that high-testosterone people have "limited verbal ability," Dabbs cites the sports metaphors that former President Bush used in his speeches as showing "an instinct for the simple logic of testosterone." He also claims that women and men with high testosterone "have characteristics in common with James Bond, Night Man, Buffy the Vampire Slayer [and] Indiana Jones"Ahardly a scientific statement. Aside from these fanciful extrapolations from his research, Dabbs does not address critiques of traditional scientific inquiry as articulated by scientific gender specialists such as Anne Fausto-Sterling or Donna Haraway. Although written in an entertaining style, the book ultimately tells us more about the cultural myths surrounding testosterone than about the hormone itself. (Sept.) COMPLICATED WOMEN: Sex and Power in Pre-Code Hollywood Mick LaSalle. St. Martin's, $24.95 (304p) ISBN 0-312-25207-2 ~ Movie quiz: who said, "I'm in an orgy, wallowing. And I love it!" Madonna? Demi Moore? Koo Stark? No, it was Norma Shearer in 1931's Strangers May Kiss. In this breezily written, engaging look at the position of women in pre-Code Hollywood pictures, LaSalle uncovers a host of actors (some, like Ann Dvorak and Glenda Farrell, now almost forgotten) and films that broke social barriers with their frank portrayals of female sexual desire and freedom. Contradicting prevailing film theory that claims the 1940s as the golden age of women in film, LaSalle boldly posits that the best women's movies were made before 1934, when the studios were forced to follow the notorious Production Code. According to the author, pre-Code Hollywood films reveled in nonjudgmental, often quite serious, portraits of women characters exercising enormous sexual, personal and social freedomsAfrom sex outside marriage to having their own careers. "The Production Code," LaSalle notes, "ensured a miserable fate... for any woman who stepped out of line." Drawing upon movies, reviews, social trends such as rising female college admissions and even the writings of feminists such as Charlotte Perkins Gilman, he makes a solid case that the freedom women gained in the 1920s changed America, and that this change was reflected, and reinforced, in films. Along the way, LaSalle offers a variety of revealing insightsAsuch as his observations on the anti-Semitism of Roman Catholic clergy in their war against HollywoodAas he entertainingly traces the careers and early work of such major stars as Barbara Stanwyck, Joan Crawford and the once-famous Ruth Chatterton. Photos not see by PW. (Sept.)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Heroes, Rogues, and Lovers: Testosterone and Behavior (Hardcover)

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