PT Bookshelf: The Skim
What we're looking at this summer
By Avigail Gordon published July 1, 2010 - last reviewed on June 9, 2016
Sex at Dawn
The Prehistoric Origins of Modern Sexuality
by Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jetha
The standard evolutionary narrative posits a polygynous (single male, multiple female partners) society, evolving towards monogamy. Sex at Dawn argues that prehistoric societies were open communities in which everything was shared, including childrearing and sex.
The Kitchen Shrink
A Psychiatrist's Reflections on Healing in a Changing World
by Dora Calott Wang, M.D.
Wang's personal experiences offer a window into medicine's shift over the last two decades, from a profession of individual healers to an industry fueled by the drive for ever-expanding profits and diminishing client contact.
Save the Assistants
A Guide to Surviving the Workplace
by Lilit Marcus
A funny and irreverent look at life as an assistant, this book is packed with tips for how to maintain sanity in the face of a bad boss. Marcus includes guides to the characters in your personal episode of The Office.
Delusions of Gender
How Our Minds, Society, and Neurosexism Create Difference
by Cordelia Fine
Fine draws on work from social psychology, neuroscience, and sociology, to demonstrate that the differences between men and women—be they in the brain or in behavior—are strongly influenced by cultural context.
The Evolution of Childhood
Relationships, Emotion, Mind
by Melvin Konner
Konner contends that many contemporary problems—school failures, sexualization of the young, childhood obesity, overstressed parents—result from a clash of evolutionary design with contemporary environments.