Vagina Obscura

Shortlisted for the 2023 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction and the PEN/E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award One of Five Books Best Literary Science Writing titles in 2023 A New York Times Editors' Choice A Science Friday Best Science Book to Read This Summer A myth-busting voyage into the female body. A camera obscura reflects the world back but dimmer and inverted. Similarly, science has long viewed woman through a warped lens, one focused narrowly on her capacity for reproduction. As a result, there exists a vast knowledge gap when it comes to what we know about half of the bodies on the planet. That is finally changing. Today, a new generation of researchers is turning its gaze to the organs traditionally bound up in baby-making—the uterus, ovaries, and vagina—and illuminating them as part of a dynamic, resilient, and ever-changing whole. Welcome to Vagina Obscura, an odyssey into a woman’s body from a fresh perspective, ushering in a whole new cast of characters. In Boston, a pair of biologists are growing artificial ovaries to counter the cascading health effects of menopause. In Melbourne, a urologist remaps the clitoris to fill in crucial gaps in female sexual anatomy. Given unparalleled access to labs and the latest research, journalist Rachel E. Gross takes readers on a scientific journey to the center of a wonderous world where the uterus regrows itself, ovaries pump out fresh eggs, and the clitoris pulses beneath the surface like a shimmering pyramid of nerves. This paradigm shift is made possible by the growing understanding that sex and gender are not binary; we all share the same universal body plan and origin in the womb. That’s why insights into the vaginal microbiome, ovarian stem cells, and the biology of menstruation don’t mean only a better understanding of female bodies, but a better understanding of male, non-binary, transgender, and intersex bodies—in other words, all bodies. By turns funny, lyrical, incisive, and shocking, Vagina Obscura is a powerful testament to how the landscape of human knowledge can be rewritten to better serve everyone.

A frank, feminist examination of the hidden crisis of rage facing American mothers—and how we can fix it Mothers aren’t supposed to be angry. Still, Minna Dubin was an angry mom: exhausted by the grueling, thankless work of full-time parenting and feeling her career slip away, she would find herself screaming at her child or exploding at her husband. When Dubin pushed past her shame and talked with other mothers about how she was feeling, she realized that she was far from alone. Mom Rage is Dubin’s groundbreaking work of reportage about an unspoken crisis of anger sweeping the country—and the world. She finds that while a specific instance of rage might be triggered by something as simple as a child who won’t tie her shoes, the roots of the anger go far deeper, from the unequal burden of childcare shouldered by moms to the flattening of women’s identities once they have kids. Drawing on insights from moms across the spectrum of race, sexual orientation, and class, she offers practical tools to help readers disarm their rage in the moment, while never losing sight of the broader social change we need to stop raging for good.

"Supported by ample data and suffused with anger,” an award-winning journalist “convincingly recasts this country’s maternal health care system as needlessly dehumanizing” (New York Times Book Review). Modern medicine should make pregnancy and childbirth safer for all. But in Birth Control, award-winning journalist Allison Yarrow reveals how women are controlled, traumatized, injured, and even killed because of the traditionalist practices of medical professionals and hospitals. Ever since doctors stole control of birth from midwives in the 19th century, women have been steamrolled by a male-dominated medical establishment that has everyone convinced that birthing bodies are inherently flawed and that every pregnancy is a crisis that it alone can “solve.” Common medical practices and procedures violate human rights and the law, yet take place daily. Misogyny and racism, not scientific evidence and support, shape the overwhelming majority of America’s four million annual births. Drawing on extensive reporting, expert interviews, an original survey of 1,300 mothers, and her own personal experiences, Yarrow documents how modern maternal health care is insidiously, purposefully designed to take power from women to the detriment of their physical and mental health—not just during labor, but for years after. She then shows a better way, exploring solutions both cutting-edge and ancient to—finally—return power and control to birthing people. Full of urgent insights and heartfelt emotion, Birth Control is an explosive call to action.

Female Arousal and Orgasm: Anatomy, Physiology, Behaviour and Evolution is the first comprehensive and accessible work on all aspects of human female sexual desire, arousal and orgasm. The book attempts to answer basic questions about the female orgasm and questions contradictory information on the topic. The book starts with a summary of important early research on human sex before providing detailed descriptions of female sexual anatomy, histology and neuromuscular biology. It concludes with a discussion of the high heritability of female orgasmicity and evidence for and against female orgasm providing an evolutionary advantage. The author has attempted to gather as much information on the subject as possible, including medical images, anonymized survey data and previously unreported trends. The groundbreaking book gives a scientific perspective on sexual arousal in women, and helps to uncover information gaps about this fascinating yet complex phenomenon. Readership Biologists, general readers, psychologists

A sweeping account of male nurturing, explaining how and why men are biologically transformed when they care for babies It has long seemed self-evident that women care for babies and men do other things. Hasn’t it always been so? When evolutionary science came along, it rubber-stamped this venerable division of labor: mammalian males evolved to compete for status and mates, while females were purpose-built to gestate, suckle, and otherwise nurture the victors’ offspring. But come the twenty-first century, increasing numbers of men are tending babies, sometimes right from birth. How can this be happening? Puzzled and dazzled by the tender expertise of new fathers around the world—several in her own family—celebrated evolutionary anthropologist and primatologist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy set out to trace the deep history of male nurturing and explain a surprising departure from everything she had assumed to be “normal.” In Father Time, Hrdy draws on a wealth of research to argue that this ongoing transformation in men is not only cultural, but profoundly biological. Men in prolonged intimate contact with babies exhibit responses nearly identical to those in the bodies and brains of mothers. They develop caring potential few realized men possessed. In her quest to explain how men came to nurture babies, Hrdy travels back through millions of years of human, primate, and mammalian evolution, then back further still to the earliest vertebrates—all while taking into account recent economic and social trends and technological innovations and incorporating new findings from neuroscience, genetics, endocrinology, and more. The result is a masterful synthesis of evolutionary and historical perspectives that expands our understanding of what it means to be a man—and what the implications might be for society and our species.

A wide-ranging and thought-provoking exploration of the importance of long-term thinking. Humans are unique in our ability to understand time, able to comprehend the past and future like no other species. Yet modern-day technology and capitalism have supercharged our short-termist tendencies and trapped us in the present, at the mercy of reactive politics, quarterly business targets and 24-hour news cycles. It wasn't always so. In medieval times, craftsmen worked on cathedrals that would be unfinished in their lifetime. Indigenous leaders fostered intergenerational reciprocity. And in the early twentieth century, writers dreamed of worlds thousands of years hence. Now, as we face long-term challenges on an unprecedented scale, how do we recapture that far-sighted vision? Richard Fisher takes us from the boardrooms of Japan - home to some of the world's oldest businesses - to European laboratories where scientists work as custodians on centuries-long experiments. He examines the psychological biases that discourage the long view, and talks to the growing number of people from the worlds of philosophy, technology, science and the arts who are exploring smart ways to overcome them. How can we learn to widen our perception of time and honour our obligations to the lives of those not yet born?