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Amazon.co.uk Review
Since Darwin's day, humans have been displaced from their place just below the angels in the grand scheme of life. And now to further our ignominy and descent, within the human genome, the male Y chromosome is, as Jones puts it, "the most decayed, redundant and parasitic of the lot". Furthermore, man himself may become redundant, for his sperm can be grown in animal testes, and in mice at least an egg can be fertilised with a body cell from another female.
Steve Jones is a brilliant science writer, capable of teasing, cajoling, entertaining and educating the reader without pain. Jones has not only pinched Darwin's title The Descent of Man but learned his technique of persuasion in which the potential critic is disarmed by having the faults, problems and dirt on the subject brought out into the open and given a good public washing. So with men and masculinity, as Jones details with telling detail and great humour, our biological inheritance and its social implications have left an immense wake of problems which will need to be sorted if men and humanity are to get over the crisis of modern manhood.
So come on now chaps, pull yourselves together, dump the techie toys and mags and check out why your organ is so dangerous and what to do about the problem. For a first step, give yourself a treat, read this book and allow yourselves to be entertained and informed, if not necessarily reassured. --Douglas Palmer. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Review
A sure-fire hit (Independent )
Steve Jones's ideas drive me almost mad with wonder (Bob Geldof )
Stacked full of wonderful anecdotes and vignettes (THES )
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Customer Reviews
Having said that Y is a cracking read which takes the author's ruminations on the nature of masculinity way beyond his specialist area of genetics.
Steve Jones has a real talent for rendering fairly difficult scientific concepts both interesting and digestible, even for a science dullard like myself.
The book contains a leg crossing chapter on circumcision (which he contends, rather controversially, is a form of ritualised child abuse) as well as castration and other forms of mutilation. The hard facts about erection are revealed, as well as discussions of new research into sexual behaviour, penis size and sperm donation.
Aside from the welter of sexual statistics from the animal kingdom, eg the Zebra who emits half a gallon of sperm in a single ejaculation, Jones contextualises human sexual behaviour and anatomy by comparing us with our animal cousins and draws some surprising conclusions about the innate sexual nature of humankind.
This book is really the antidote to the kind of woolly 'Men are from...' type pop-psyche nonsense that abounds these days. Jones presents the facts as he sees them based on current research and avoids drawing spurious conclusions. His discussion of the genetic basis of Homosexuality seems to end with a kind of 'but we're still not really certain at the moment'.
Of course Steve Jones is a man and so am I so there is an inevitable bias, but this seems like an exceptionally even handed discussion of masculinity, if Jones isn't certain then he leaves the questions open, and the book is all better for it. Y doesn't contain the kind of radical central thesis that propels a book to the top of the bestseller lists, but for those interested in a readable account of the research as it stands it is indespensible.
But this book missed every task it set itself. It wasn't readable, it didn't explain things well, and didn't work as an "update" of Darwin's book the Descent of Man The Descent of Man: Selection in Relation to Sex (Penguin Classics).
The worst thing is the style. Jones wants to make science "readable". He thinks that that means plastering "non-scientific" language and metaphors all over it, and jumping from subject to subject as quickly as possible, so we don't get bored.
That doesn't make the book readable - it makes it almost completely unreadable.
For instance, on p.23, he jumps from one paragraph about parasites and the leprosy bacillus, and starts the next one as follows: "Australian males are a model of virility, but the average native has a rather small version of what makes him what he is." Huh? The "model of virility" bit refers to a cliche about Australian men, so is he saying Australian men have small penises? Or if he's talking about "natives", does he mean Aborigines?
No, the next sentence starts "Kangaroos split from our own ancestors..." so he's talking about Australian animal species and, it turns out, their Y chromosomes. Why didn't he just say so in the first place?
He over-uses a couple of adjectives designed to jolly us along, particularly "erotic" "genetical" and "genital". He slaps them all over the place, treating us to sentences like: "Perhaps Homo sapiens once danced to the same erotic tune as did his relatives, but it is hard to work out what the melody might have been and whether it has much relevance to the genetical gavottes of today."
There's some sort of random chapter structure with clever-clever titles that don't tell you what they're about. This throws up some decent stuff - mostly when he's outside his home turf of genetics. The chapter on circumcision is actually interesting, and includes castration too.
The genetical chapters are the pits, though. You cannot do genetics in a popular science book without diagrams - even if you ARE Prof Steve Jones.
I came away with the idea that the ageing and changing of DNA was telling scientists all sorts of things, but with very little idea what those things are. The next time my daughter came to me with GCSE work to look at, I should have been armed with facts and insights to push us both onwards - instead I was still anxiously checking the pictures in her crib notes.
The book has a bizarre subtext in which it is supposed to be an "update" of Darwin's Descent of Man. Yet it only mentions the Darwin book a couple of times, quoting some chunk or other that makes the older book seem completely irrelevant.
Other reviewers clearly wanted this to be an accessible book that explains and discusses manhood from a scientific point of view, and counters the overwhelming profusion of New Age bollocks.
I wish it were that book, because we really need it. Instead Jones gives us a few interesting ideas cobbled together and encrusted with the kind of writing that makes it virtually indistinguishable from those other books.
I give it a star for the things it doesn't do too badly, and because Prof Jones' heart is, as always, in exactly the right place. It's a missed opportunity though.
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