The Male Brain by Louann Brizendine

(Broadway, 271 pages, $24.99)

The gender gap may be wider than any of us imagined, said Holly Brubach in The New York Times. Following up on her 2006 best-seller, The Female Brain, neuropsychiatrist Louann Brizendine has assembled a user’s guide to the male brain that makes clear we aren’t all working with the same hardware. “The epic bouts of road rage, the narcolepsy after sex, the fanatical fixation on the Big East standings—finally we get it.” Guys’ gray matter starts out distinctive and grows more so as it’s molded throughout life by a gender-specific cocktail of testosterone, vasopressin, and other hormones. Does your man ogle waitresses’ breasts? Does your teenager seem bored if he’s not performing life-risking stunts? “This book is full of surprises,” the biggest being that much of men’s stereotypical behavior apparently can’t be helped.

Don’t be so sure, said Emily Bazelon, also in the Times. Brizendine actually had to revise her last book, when experts questioned its headline-grabbing claim that women utter nearly four times more words each day than men, and her science here is just as “incautious.” She’s on solid ground when describing the profound differences in boys’ and girls’ toy preferences, but she’s equally capable of constructing theories about newborns atop the results of an experiment that no one has been able to reproduce. “Beneath the sea she blithely sails are depths that researchers have only just begun to chart.”

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That’s being too kind, said Mary Elizabeth Williams in Salon.com. Brizendine’s ultimate message is that wives and girlfriends should “make peace” with their mates’ roving eyes, since the so-called sexual pursuit area of the brain is “two and a half times larger” in men than in women. If such an area even exists, how has it “escaped the attention of all neurologists but her?” Brizendine’s desire for celebrity has transformed her from an avowed feminist into a friendly witness for tail-chasers like Tiger Woods. With this unreliable work, she’s just handed every man in America “a nice, big, free pass for Neanderthal behavior.”