Woman: An Intimate Geography
   Natalie Angier
  1999 A Peter Davison Book/Houghton Mifflin Co. Boston USA
   ISBN: 0395691303


This Pulitzer Prize-winning author lifts the veil of studied ignorance from that most enigmatic of evolutionary masterpieces, the female body. With clarity, insight & exuberant language she explores the essence of what makes women women.

This is one lusty & eminently readable illumination. I kept getting an image of Susan Sarandon with a slew Ph.Ds. in one of her delectable roles, vivaciously expounding on what makes us women. Lovely stuff!

Woman will change the course of your history! It is written as if spoken & canters from clitoris to hormones & points beyond, casting a bright & erudite light on all the authoress surveys. Some chapter headings are: Unscrambling The Egg; The Well-Tempered Clavier; Mass Hysteria; Holy Water; Venus In Furs; Of Hoggamus and Hogwash & A Skeptic in Paradise. I thoroughly enjoyed this romp through biology, anthropology & anatomy.

Natalie Angier thinks & writes about our familiar topography in an engaging, ribald, learned way, frequently punning with impunity & gently teasing us from our staid & shy ignorance.

As a student at an inner city college in California, my graduating thesis in Women's Studies was titled Period Pieces. It was a theatrical presentation with red & white kimono, candles, moons & melons(references to global menarche folklore); of handmade platters akin to Judy Chicago's evocative collection & a plenitude of menstruation paraphernalia.

The mistress piece was a spoken poem made up of the many, many names for menarche, menstruation & menopause from around the world of women. My finale was to pose the insight on how our reproductive system changed once we began to stand up. I remember my male professor's face was red although he gamely asked the right questions as my fellow students had fallen into mouth-gaping silence.

Natalie Angier brought that all back - the hunger to know, to name, to be seen in our own right/rite. Woman is a long & winding discourse on what makes the female gender of a person, a fun if wordy read, a serious & hilarious tome about sex, society & rock'n'roll. Magnificent!

Also by Natalie Angier: Natural Obsessions: Striving to Unlock the Deepest Secrets of the Cancer Cell; The Beauty of the Beastly: New Views of the Nature of Life.
(11/21/99)

Rebecca