Bitch

Mr Darwin, your time is up...This is the evolutionary reboot us bitches have been waiting for. -- Sue Perkins Beautifully written, very funny and deeply important - Lucy Cooke blows two centuries of sexist myths right out of biology. -- Professor Alice Roberts This is a vital book that blew me away; kick -ass, informative and astonishing . Discovering how Darwin ingrained and entrenched the patriarchy is hugely illuminating to our present culture. Give her a series immediately! -- Doon McKinnon Fun, informative and revolutionary all at once, Bitch should be required reading in school. This is a joyous, and often hilarious, romp in which Cooke simultaneously does justice to the actual data, gives voice to the substantive contributions of women scientists, and demolishes bias, blindness and ignorance about sex in the academy and in the public. After reading this book one will never look at a clownfish, a barnacle, an orca, an albatross or a human the same way again. And the world will be better for it. -- Augustin Fuentes, professor of anthropology at Princeton University and author of The Creative Spark Lucy Cooke's scientific and brilliant takedown of stereotypes of female submissiveness in the animal kingdom: 'Male animals led swashbuckling lives of thrusting agency ... while females meekly followed'. So went the received wisdom when broadcaster and author Cooke first studied zoology. This revelatory, fabulously entertaining book shows how deluded that thinking is. From the dominant female lemurs of Madagascar, and the murderous meekat mothers of the Kalahari, to female fruit flies that play the field, Cooke introduces dozens of animals whose natural behaviour preferences dismantle the hoary old stereotypes. -- Caroline Sanderson * The Bookseller: EDITOR'S CHOICE *