Mothers and Others

Reviews / Votes

Sarah Blaffer Hrdy is one of the most original and influential minds in evolutionary anthropology...[Her] gracefully written, expert account of human behavior focuses on the positive, and its most important contribution is to give cooperation its rightful place in child care. Through a lifetime of pathbreaking work, she has repeatedly undermined our complacent, solipsistic, masculine notions of what women were meant 'by nature' to be. Here as elsewhere she urges caution and compassion toward women whose maternal role must be constantly rethought and readjusted to meet the demands of a changing world. -- Melvin Konner * New York Review of Books * An engaging and compelling argument for an evolutionary history of cooperative offspring care that requires us to rethink entrenched views about how we came to be human...Fascinating, readable...Her thought-provoking book will interest students, specialists, and general readers alike and should focus attention on the neglected roles of mothers and others within human evolutionary theory. -- Gillian R. Brown * Science * One of the boldest thinkers in her field...Her book is at once entertaining, full of apt, often colorful anecdotes, sometimes culled from her own experiences, and rich with information and case studies...A sweeping new meta-paradigm. -- Michele Pridmore-Brown * Times Literary Supplement * Hrdy's lucid and comprehensively researched book takes us to the heart of what it means to be human. -- Camilla Power * Times Higher Education * Another mind-expanding, paradigm-shifting, rigorously scientific yet eminently readable treatise...Overflowing with fascinating information and thinking. It's a book you read, pausing regularly to consider the full import of what you just read...Sarah Blaffer Hrdy has added another enormous building block to our thinking about our origins with this new book. Our species is lucky to have her. -- Claudia Casper * Globe and Mail * Understanding the evolution of the human mind has become the holy grail of modern evolutionary anthropology and evolutionary psychology, and those who pursue it feel themselves closing in on something big. Mothers and Others is a heroic contribution to this quest...Once again, Hrdy has woven together strands of material from many sources into an elegant tapestry of insight and logic, emblazoned with her vision of who we are, and why. -- Peter Ellison * Evolutionary Psychology * Our capacity to cooperate in groups, to empathize with others and to wonder what others are thinking and feeling-all these traits, Hrdy argues, probably arose in response to the selective pressures of being in a cooperatively breeding social group, and the need to trust and rely on others and be deemed trustworthy and reliable in turn. -- Natalie Angier * New York Times * For as long as she's been a sociobiologist, Sarah Blaffer Hrdy has been playfully dismantling traditional notions of motherhood and gender relations...Hrdy paints a picture of a cooperative breeding culture in which parenting duties were spread out across a network of friends and relatives. The effect on our development was profound. -- Julia Wallace * Salon * Beginning with her opening conceit of apes on an airplane (you wouldn't want to be on this flight) and continuing through her informed insights into the behavior of other species, Hrdy's reasoning is fascinating to follow. -- Michelle Press * Scientific American * Provocative...The most refreshing aspect of [this] book is the challenge [it] offers to what we thought we already knew. -- John Odling-Smee * Nature * Compelling and wide-ranging...Hrdy sets out to explain the mystery of how humans evolved into cooperative apes. The demands of raising our slow-growing and energetically expensive offspring led to cooperative child-rearing, she argues, which was key to our survival. -- Alison Motluk * New Scientist * One of the essential points of Mothers and Others is that aggression and competition have been given far too central a place in the standard accounts of how our species came into being. From Charles Darwin onward, those accounts are mostly the work of men, and Hrdy points out in meticulous detail how partial and biased was their understanding of the remote past...Mothers and Others offers enormous rewards. It is not only revolutionary; it is also wise and humane. -- Mark Abley * Calgary Herald * As was the case for her earlier classic, Mother Nature, Sarah Hrdy's Mothers and Others is a brilliant work on a profoundly important subject. The leading scientific authority on motherhood has come through again. -- E. O. Wilson In the study of mothering, Sarah Hrdy has no peer. In Mothers and Others, we are treated to Hrdy's infectious writing, taking the reader on a tour of our evolved history as a cooperatively parenting species. The ideas are big, bold, and brain-bending. -- Marc Hauser, author of <i>Moral Minds: How Nature Designed Our Universal Sense of Right and Wrong</i> Boldly conceived and beautifully written, Mothers and Others makes a strong case that we humans are (or should be) cooperative breeders. It is an indispensable contribution to the debate about how and why we came to be the most successful primate of them all. -- Melvin Konner, author of <i>The Tangled Wing: Biological Constraints on the Human Spirit</i>