112th: Cat Bohannon on Eve with Claudia Dreifus
Join us Tuesday, October 3rd at 7pm for a the launch of Eve with Cat Bohannon. Claudia Dreifus will join in conversation.
In order to facilitate this in-person author event, we will be partially closing the second floor starting at 6:45pm. Please review our Safety guidelines and register for the event using the link below.
or register using the following link: https://forms.gle/KzXzdA2SWunLRFgs9
“Bohannon’s book might be brimming with science, but it’s written with a lay audience in mind….The book is engaging, playful, erudite, discursive and rich with detail.”
-- Sarah Lyall for the New York Times
How did the female body drive 200 million years of human evolution? • Why do women live longer than men? • Why are women more likely to get Alzheimer’s? • Why do girls score better at every academic subject than boys until puberty, when suddenly their scores plummet? • Is sexism useful for evolution? • And why, seriously why, do women have to sweat through our sheets every night when we hit menopause?
These questions are producing some truly exciting science – and in Eve, with boundless curiosity and sharp wit, Cat Bohannon covers the past 200 million years to explain the specific science behind the development of the female sex: “We need a kind of user’s manual for the female mammal. A no-nonsense, hard-hitting, seriously researched (but readable) account of what we are. How female bodies evolved, how they work, what it really means to biologically be a woman. Something that would rewrite the story of womanhood. This book is that story. We have to put the female body in the picture. If we don’t, it’s not just feminism that’s compromised. Modern medicine, neurobiology, paleoanthropology, even evolutionary biology all take a hit when we ignore the fact that half of us have breasts. So it’s time we talk about breasts. Breasts, and blood, and fat, and vaginas, and wombs—all of it. How they came to be and how we live with them now, no matter how weird or hilarious the truth is.”
Eve is not only a sweeping revision of human history, it’s an urgent and necessary corrective for a world that has focused primarily on the male body for far too long. Picking up where Sapiens left off, Eve will completely change what you think you know about evolution and why Homo sapiens has become such a successful and dominant species.
Cat Bohannon is a researcher and author with a Ph.D. from Columbia University in the evolution of narrative and cognition. Her essays and poems have appeared in Scientific American, Mind, Science Magazine, The Best American Nonrequired Reading, The Georgia Review, The Story Collider, and Poets Against the War. She lives with her family in Seattle.
Science journalist Claudia Dreifus contributes to the New York Times, Quanta, Ms. Magazine and CNN. For twenty years, she wrote and produced the “Conversation with…” column in the Tuesday Science Section of the New York Times. At Columbia, she teaches two courses, “Writing About Global Science for the International Media,” and “Writing Op-Eds and Small Personal Essays. Last Spring, she won the “Dean’s Prize for Excellence in Teaching.” She is also an honorary member of Sigma Xi, the scientific honorary society and is the winner of American Society of Journalists and Authors Lifetime Achievement Award. Professor Dreifus is also the author of six books, including Higher Education?, which she wrote with her husband, the political scientist, Andrew Hacker.
