Vanessa Woods doesn’t just study bonobos, she’d like to be one, said Mark Schultz in the Durham, N.C., News. The 32-year-old Australian native has a new book out whose cheeky title, Bonobo Handshake, refers to the promiscuous sex lives of these diminutive and endangered primates. But it’s not the uninhibited, round-the-clock, gender-blind sex play that makes Woods want to switch species. It’s the remarkable side benefit that seems to come with it. “Bonobos hold the key to a world without war,” she writes. Sex, she says, “is not the most important thing about them at all”; rather, it’s merely the “mechanism” that these close cousins of ours use to diffuse tension and live peacefully. “Our mechanism,” she says, “obviously won’t be sex.”
Bonobo Handshake is about much more than Woods’ scientific research, said Kate Vander Wiede in The Christian Science Monitor. Woods recounts how she stumbled into bonobo studies by following a man to war-torn Congo, the only place bonobos can still be found in the wild. “Tucked between chapters on experiments, lovemaking, and delightful bonobo quirks” are harrowing scenes from the Congo war. Yet the juxtaposition is hardly accidental. “We need to use our gigantic brains” to find a way to be more like our bonobo cousins, she says. “Right now, there are seven conflicts going on that kill a thousand people a day all over the world. And bonobos, they just don’t have that. I mean, so you tell me, who’s smarter?”
Subscribe to The Week
Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.
Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
Create an account with the same email registered to your subscription to unlock access.
-
Also of interest...in picture books for grown-upsfeature How About Never—Is Never Good for You?; The Undertaking of Lily Chen; Meanwhile, in San Francisco; The Portlandia Activity Book
-
Author of the week: Karen Russell
feature Karen Russell could use a rest.
-
The Double Life of Paul de Man by Evelyn Barish
feature Evelyn Barish “has an amazing tale to tell” about the Belgian-born intellectual who enthralled a generation of students and academic colleagues.
-
Book of the week: Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt by Michael Lewis
feature Michael Lewis's description of how high-frequency traders use lightning-fast computers to their advantage is “guaranteed to make blood boil.”
-
Also of interest...in creative rebellion
feature A Man Called Destruction; Rebel Music; American Fun; The Scarlet Sisters
-
Author of the week: Susanna Kaysen
feature For a famous memoirist, Susanna Kaysen is highly ambivalent about sharing details about her life.
-
You Must Remember This: Life and Style in Hollywood’s Golden Age by Robert Wagner
feature Robert Wagner “seems to have known anybody who was anybody in Hollywood.”
-
Book of the week: Astoria: John Jacob Astor and Thomas Jefferson’s Lost Pacific Empire by Peter Stark
feature The tale of Astoria’s rise and fall turns out to be “as exciting as anything in American history.”