Sex at Dawn - Christopher Ryan

"Since Darwin's day, we've been told that sexual monogamy comes
naturally to our species. Mainstream science--as well as religious and cultural institutions--has maintained that men and women evolved in families in which a man's possessions and protection were exchanged for a woman's fertility and fidelity. But this narrative is collapsing. Fewer and fewer couples are getting married, and divorce rates keep climbing as adultery and flagging libido drag down even seemingly solid marriages.

How can reality be reconciled with the accepted narrative? It can't be, according to renegade thinkers Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jethá. While debunking almost everything we "know" about sex, they offer a bold alternative explanation in this provocative and brilliant book.

With intelligence, humor, and wonder, Ryan and Jethá show how our promiscuous past haunts our struggles over monogamy, sexual orientation, and family dynamics. They explore why long-term fidelity can be so difficult for so many; why sexual passion tends to fade even as love deepens; why many middle-aged men risk everything for transient affairs with younger women; why homosexuality persists in the face of standard evolutionary logic; and what the human body reveals about the prehistoric origins of modern sexuality."

I loved this book, but to be honest I have nowhere near the education to be able to evaluate the validity of the arguments presented in this book. I have seen grumblings here and there around the book about the validity of some of the arguments that are put forward, and I will certainly doing more reading on this fascinating subject. 

Despite being academic and approaching a variety of very weighty subjects the tone of the book is conversational, even jocular. I found the tone endearing. It reminded me of that brilliant, but cool professor whose lectures are both fun and educational at the same time. 

The author's do not advocate any change in lifestyle for anyone, which I appreciated, only to be open minded about what they believe to be the biological drives which people have. There are too many fascinating arguments about too many related subjects to do the book justice in this space however it is sufficient to say that the arguments blew my mind, hugely increased my knowledge, left me with a lot to contemplate and an interest to find out more on this subject.

There were, however, a few points that irritated me. A few examples: they conflate testosterone with happiness, they mainly write about the needs of men and forgo discussing women and their complexity, and they ignore the multifaceted cultural,  societal and emotional factors that relate to mating. I would also write more about their heteronormative perspectives, with homosexuality only coming up a handful of times in one-liners.

Overall an enlightening book that I would recommend however I will certainly being doing more of my own further reading. 

Age Rating 16+. A scientific look at human sexuality. However there is adult content and a few wink wink moments. 

Sapiens: A Breif History of Humankind - Yuval Noah Harari

"100,000 years ago, at least six human species inhabited the earth. Today there is just one. Us. Homo sapiens.



How did our species succeed in the battle for dominance? Why did our foraging ancestors come together to create cities and kingdoms? How did we come to believe in gods, nations and human rights; to trust money, books and laws; and to be enslaved by bureaucracy, timetables and consumerism? And what will our world be like in the millennia to come?



In Sapiens, Dr Yuval Noah Harari spans the whole of human history, from the very first humans to walk the earth to the radical – and sometimes devastating – breakthroughs of the Cognitive, Agricultural and Scientific Revolutions. Drawing on insights from biology, anthropology, palaeontology and economics, he explores how the currents of history have shaped our human societies, the animals and plants around us, and even our personalities. Have we become happier as history has unfolded? Can we ever free our behaviour from the heritage of our ancestors? And what, if anything, can we do to influence the course of the centuries to come?"



Okay so I loved this book.



I like how easy to digest the author makes all of the vast quantities of information. Something he does equally well in Homo Deus.  I have a lot of respect for authors who can present something complex in simple terms. I've always liked the quote attributed to Einstein “If You Can’t Explain it to a Six Year Old, You Don’t Understand it Yourself”. Anyone with a thesaurus can make something seem more dense and complicated than it is; it's much harder to explain something long and complicated in a way that everyone can enjoy.



The book does read like a really exciting and fascinating novel. Harari takes us through the history of human development and migration, through the Cognitive Revolution and Agricultural Revolution. He looks at how currency and coinage developed, the creation of religions, the arrival of imperialism and capitalism, and the history of inequalities and injustices.



I especially like how he presents a relatively unbiased view of events. He focuses on what we know, and is quick to say when something remains a mystery to biologists and anthropologists. When there are conflicting theories, he outlines all the main ones. The only agenda Harari seems driven by is a desire to present the most accurate view of humanity's history.



This book filled me with a sense of wonder. Wonder at how far we've come in just a few millennia; wonder at all the twisting roads of history; wonder at where we could possibly end up. Very informative and easily accessible to many.



Age Rating 15+.

Feed - M.T Anderson

"Identity crises, consumerism, and star-crossed teenage love in a futuristic society where people connect to the Internet via feeds implanted in their brains.

For Titus and his friends, it started out like any ordinary trip to the moon - a chance to party during spring break and play with some stupid low-grav at the Ricochet Lounge. But that was before the crazy hacker caused all their feeds to malfunction, sending them to the hospital to lie around with nothing inside their heads for days. And it was before Titus met Violet, a beautiful, brainy teenage girl who has decided to fight the feed and its omnipresent ability to categorize human thoughts and desires."

I think this book's main function is to make you uncomfortable. To present you with your own reality, the one you are trying to avoid, with an unswerving amount of brutality. 

And, boy, did it make me uncomfortable. It's everything obnoxious about our media-frenzied, frantic-paced, impulse-driven, uneducated-praising society exemplified to the max. In Anderson's worryingly plausible world people are hardwired into corporate feeds that advertise to them according to what they're thinking, feeling, saying, looking at, etc. They chat with each other, watch shows, check the internet, invade each other's privacy, all within their bodies. Schools have quit teaching them facts because all that's accessible at the push of a button-no simpler than that, with nothing more than a thought. All their interactions are interrupted by this internal conversation/shopping/distraction. Through a combination of advertising and ignorance these shallow people don't care that the feeds are destroying them, causing lesions and their skin to litrally fall off, after they've already destroyed the world where they continue to live in vertically stacked suburbs with fake air and fake sun and fake food. They all (adults included) speak in that valley-girl like/dude hollowness, only their words are mega and unit and still plenty of like and f words. 

The writing did take awhile to get used to. The excessive use of slang and the word like, already my worst enemy, was an interesting stylistic choice. I was worried that it would frustrate me, and bring me out of the story but it surprisingly didn't. It really added to the sense of the world and the character. 

I really disliked the main character, Titus. While reading it, I was often disappointed with his choices, but I think he was the perfect embodiment of this shallow world. He doesn't want to deal with the reality of his girlfriend's slow death. It disturbs his perfect life, it distracts him for his shopping. He is so unbelievably self involved that he doesn't think that maybe she needs him there. I loved that Anderson offers no judgment or solution, just shows us this world with all its many flaws and lets it creep under your skin and make you uncomfortable with where the world is headed. 

I do have one gripe. I do wish that Anderson went a little deeper into the world and the horrors of it. But again maybe that was a choice, to show the horror that is so blatently on the surface on the society. 


Age rating 15 +. Some explicit content. A few minor foreplay scenes, mal which is the dystopian version of drugs and some f bombs. 

The Quest of A Moral Compass - Kenan Malik

"In this remarkable and ground-breaking book, Kenan Malik explores the history of moral thought as it has developed over three millennia, from Homer's Greece to Mao's China, from ancient India to modern America. It tells the stories of the great philosophers, and breathes life into their ideas, while also challenging many of our most cherished moral beliefs. Engaging and provocative, The Quest for a Moral Compass confronts some of humanity's deepest questions. Where do values come from? Is God necessary for moral guidance? Are there absolute moral truths? It also brings morality down to earth, showing how, throughout history, social needs and political desires have shaped moral thinking. It is a history of the world told through the history of moral thought, and a history of moral thought that casts new light on global history."

This is a finely crafted history of ethical and moral philosophy that nicely describes the great philosophers but with a welcome eye to the philosophies of civilizations other than the Western. I would have, however, liked to have read more about the morals from Africa and South American traditions, especially on the more ancient side of things.

Yet despite the necessary brevity he manages to both summarise and analyse the views of history's most renowned thinkers on the subject with clarity and insight. Malik also does a wonderful job of making the basic tenants of the major philosophers understandable through stories and examples.I shall be reading this book again, several times probably.

In the end, he concludes there is no escape from the Euthyphro Dilemma, as formulated by Socrates and recorded by Plato. The dilemma is that good is either good because it is determined as such by some external judge, like a god or a society, in which case it is arbitrary; or it is intrinsically good, in which case it stands on its own objective merits, which we cannot define.

Malik himself thinks that morality is constructed by humans and that our belief in our capacities to carry out that task has been severely undermined by the horrors of the twentieth century and a decline in engagement in collective thinking and discourse. 

I highly recommend this, particularly if you haven't read much western philosophy, because it's accessible in a way that so much philosophy isn't, and it's broad in its scope, in a way that other histories of philosophy that I have read are not. A brilliant spring board into the world of philosophy and into further, more in depth reading. 

Age Rating 15+. An intellectual book with lots of academic jargon. 

The Female Eunuch - Germaine Greer

"The clarion call to change that galvanized a generation.
When Germaine Greer's The Female Eunuch was first published it created a shock wave of recognition in women, one that could be felt around the world. It went on to become an international bestseller, translated into more than twelve languages, and a landmark in the history of the women's movement. Positing that sexual liberation is the key to women's liberation, Greer looks at the inherent and unalterable biological differences between men and women as well as at the profound psychological differences that result from social conditioning. Drawing on history, literature, biology, and popular culture, Greer's searing examination of women's oppression is a vital, passionately argued social commentary that is both an important historical record of where we've been and a shockingly relevant treatise on what still remains to be achieved."

Sorry about the extended absence, was in South Africa on urgent family matters and didnt have anytime to read or update. 

It's a classic, which is why it should still be required reading for any feminist trying to educate themselves, but it's very, very much of its time. Very much the work of a second waver with all the problematic attitudes towards sexuality, homosexuality and race that that implies. Worth reading as an historical record, but not something that I base my own thought on.

Many of the things she talks about are outdated or becoming so, which is touching in a way as it means we're making progress but many of them are still cuttingly relevant today. Young girls still grow up dreaming of romance and magical kisses while boys are taught to fuck. Women are still penalised in marriage and children are still forced inwards in a nuclear family. This is a powerful book with some poignant insights.

However, Greer, at times, inadvertently makes me laugh by criticising academic feminism in a highly academic book and criticising the classism in feminism while dealing mainly with white middle class issues. 

In the course of The Female Eunuch, Greer manages to emphasise the fact that women—from the moment of their birth—are conditioned by society to act, dress, speak, work, etc in a certain way, and that that way is designed to subjugate women. She quotes people across the ages on women (and the majority of those quotes show just how terribly women have been regarded and treated). She urges revolution, she pokes fun, she is ruthless in her attack but she dilutes that attack by being swayed by her own righteous indignation at the wrongs women suffer. What I found most annoying about the book were the many sweeping generalisations Greer makes and her near - misogynistic view of non-radical women. 

She wants to upturn society, rewriting economics, marriage laws, and the very concept of love and affection (which she seems to either disbelieve in or disapprove of). She doesn't just hate the way women are treated in society; she hates society and the entire structure of humanity, and would, it seems, throw out every law and tradition in a second if she could.  This, along with her tendency towards Freudian-style psychobabble (even though she criticizes Freud, the language is of Freud) and the pretentious language of the intellectual makes her increasingly annoying. 

Overall a book to read from a historical stand point coming to it with your own well rounded views already formed. 

Age Rating 16+. Adult content and topics and academic language needing previous knowledge and reading to be able to disect. 

The God Delusion - Richard Dawkins

"With rigor and wit, Dawkins examines God in all his forms, from the sex-obsessed tyrant of the Old Testament, to the more benign (but still illogical) Celestial Watchmaker favoured by some Enlightenment thinkers. He eviscerates the major arguments for religion, and demonstrates the supreme improbability of a supreme being. He shows how religion fuels war, foments bigotry, and abuses children, buttressing his points with historical and contemporary evidence.

The God Delusion makes a compelling case that belief in God is not just wrong, but potentially deadly. It also offers exhilarating insight into the advantages of atheism to the individual and society, not the least of which is a clearer, truer appreciation of the universe's wonders than any faith could ever muster."

This book was a dramatic disappointment that did not live up to the "finally someone has proven religion is poppycock" hype it received. Dawkins fails utterly to tear down any meaningful experience of religion, instead he merely reinforces the petty grudges that some atheists have against religion.

I agree with Dawkins' conclusions, yet I don't find him convincing.His books have threads of argument, but I rarely feel that the metaphors and examples he uses are ultimately useful. He never goes quite far enough, and so I think he falls short of his stated goal of a reader starting this book as a believer, and finishing it as an atheist. It feels more like a book to help confirm atheists. If you're already familiar with these arguments and their implications, then the book will make sense to you--if you aren't, then it's going to feel a bit incomplete.

For example, at one point he talks about the idea of the 'sacred', that there are some things in religion which are not allowed to be discussed, and asks why this should be the case. We are scrupulous about discussing every detail of the rest of our lives, so why does this specific subset get its own special rules?

Unfortunately, Dawkins doesn't provide us with the obvious answer: that every controlling political structure has set certain topics as 'off limits' in order to protect its power. As Orwell explores in 1984, controlling language, controlling what people are allowed to talk about is the hallmark of any tyranny. And lest we forget, various churches have exerted this kind of political power throughout history, and some continue to hold that power today. So, it would be in their best interest to forbid discussion of dangerous ideas that might threaten their power.

Yet Dawkins is certainly familiar with cultural Darwinism, with the way that ideas grow and change within a culture, the importance of 'infectious ideas' that take advantage of the natural fears, hopes, and habits of human beings--this should be all too obvious to the man who coined the word 'meme'. And yet, he isn't working here to make obvious and deconstruct these infectious ideas, to reveal their origins and purpose, and to show why we might hold such beliefs. The psychological element is also almost completely dismissed, focusing solely on the scientific explanation. 

But if his arguments are fundamentally dismissive and incomplete, it seems obvious to me why this would be, looking at the trajectory of his career: Dawkins has put himself in the unenviable position of being a public philosopher. He is a man of ideas which he constantly presents and defends against people who are uninformed, emotionally unstable, and self-assured. Often people miss your point, responding only with the same tired antagonism, the more flippant and distant you can become. You start off reasonable and patient, which is time-consuming, draining, and rarely achieves anything. 

I did not like how he said that inflicting belief in hell on children is as abusive as sexual abuse. I do believe that inflicting the concept of hell on kids is terrifying, and it is abusive to terrify kids, however, does it rise to the level of actual paedophilia? He trots out a letter from a woman who wrote to him to tell him that she was both sexually abused by a priest and tormented by fear of hell, and she claimed that the religious torment was worse. It may well be in some cases, but overall, I don't buy it. Rape of a child is worse, and his case is not strengthened by the comparison.

Overall worth a read as an atheist as it is kind of must - read on the atheist book list. But definitely has to be subsidised by much more further reading. 

Age rating 15+. Complex - ish science and mentions of the gang rape of Lot's daughters. 

With rigor and wit, Dawkins examines God in all his forms, from the sex-obsessed tyrant of the Old Testament, to the more benign (but still illogical) Celestial Watchmaker favored by some Enlightenment thinkers. He eviscerates the major arguments for religion, and demonstrates the supreme improbability of a supreme being. He shows how religion fuels war, foments bigotry, and abuses children, buttressing his points with historical and contemporary evidence.

The God Delusion makes a compelling case that belief in God is not just wrong, but potentially deadly. It also offers exhilarating insight into the advantages of atheism to the individual and society, not the least of which is a clearer, truer appreciation of the universe's wonders than any faith could ever muster.With rigor and wit, Dawkins examines God in all his forms, from the sex-obsessed tyrant of the Old Testament, to the more benign (but still illogical) Celestial Watchmaker favored by some Enlightenment thinkers. He eviscerates the major arguments for religion, and demonstrates the supreme improbability of a supreme being. He shows how religion fuels war, foments bigotry, and abuses children, buttressing his points with historical and contemporary evidence.

The God Delusion makes a compelling case that belief in God is not just wrong, but potentially deadly. It also offers exhilarating insight into the advantages of atheism to the individual and society, not the least of which is a clearer, truer appreciation of the universe's wonders than any faith could ever muster.

Homo Deus - Yuval Noah Harari

"Over the past century humankind has managed to do the impossible and rein in famine, plague, and war. This may seem hard to accept, but, as Harari explains in his trademark style—thorough, yet riveting—famine, plague and war have been transformed from incomprehensible and uncontrollable forces of nature into manageable challenges. For the first time ever, more people die from eating too much than from eating too little; more people die from old age than from infectious diseases; and more people commit suicide than are killed by soldiers, terrorists and criminals put together. The average American is a thousand times more likely to die from binging at McDonalds than from being blown up by Al Qaeda.

What then will replace famine, plague, and war at the top of the human agenda? As the self-made gods of planet earth, what destinies will we set ourselves, and which quests will we undertake? Homo Deus explores the projects, dreams and nightmares that will shape the twenty-first century—from overcoming death to creating artificial life. It asks the fundamental questions: Where do we go from here? And how will we protect this fragile world from our own destructive powers? This is the next stage of evolution. This is Homo Deus."

Homo Deus is an attempt to make a sequel to the wildly popular (and actually quite good) "From Animals into Gods" - its main thesis is that in the 21st century, liberal humanism would progress into "techno humanism"; and that humanity's main efforts would be to upgrade humans into godlike cyborg entity. 

In order for transformations to be made, the author argues we need to change our mindset and expectations and maybe even our concept about individualism. While that may be true, I was hoping to hear more about the future, the tomorrow in Harari’s subtitle, than the past. The final quarter of the book did focus on that tomorrow (what the job market might look like, whether man or some people in the job market might end up being completely superfluous, the future role of AIs in our society etc.), but I would have preferred more of that analysis earlier in the book. 

Harari's insights into the uses and future of computer/ human interactions was interesting but not all that original. The insight into some of the current statistics such as suicide and disease was simultaneously uplifting and depressing. The points where well put together and the ideas where shared in a coherent and concise way. 

Age Rating 14+. There is nothing untoward in this book it just has complex technical jargon. If you are younger then the specified age and want to give it a go, go for it. 

Reality is Not What it Seems - Carlo Rovelli

“Do space and time truly exist? What is reality made of? Can we understand its deep texture? Scientist Carlo Rovelli has spent his whole life exploring these questions and pushing the boundaries of what we know. In this mind-expanding book, he shows how our understanding of reality has changed throughout centuries, from Democritus to loop quantum gravity. Taking us on a wondrous journey, he invites us to imagine a whole new world where black holes are waiting to explode, spacetime is made up of grains, and infinity does not exist -- a vast universe still largely undiscovered.”

This book was exceedingly interesting and a great introduction to a subject I knew very little to nothing about. I read a few reviews before I bought it and each one praised his “poetic” writing. I personally didn’t find this book to be very poetic at all. That isn’t precisely a bad thing just something I wanted to make clear.

It is well written, making complex concepts understandable to a layperson and someone of my age.  Metaphors where employed well to bring concepts into real life and I really appreciated the non-mathematical focus. 

Harking back to the ancient Greeks felt at first out of place, but was actually very insightful and made me re-mourn the loss of the Library of Alexandria. 

Over all a brilliant book for anyone that wants to be introduced gently to this subject. Covers enough ground for you too feel like you learn something and leave just enough for you to want to learn more yourself. I found myself furiously YouTubing other concepts during the reading of this book. 

Age Rating 14+. While accessible still is definitely higher grade so avoid this book unless you want to get frustrated, unless of course you are a wunderkind.