cover image Y: The Descent of Men

Y: The Descent of Men

Steve Jones. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (HMH), $25 (272pp) ISBN 978-0-618-13930-9

Shriveled, decrepit and of little use except for sex, the Y chromosome is an apt metaphor for post-modern manhood in this eye-opening exploration of the biology of maleness. Jones, a geneticist and author of Darwin's Ghost, traces the development of maleness from its origins as a parasitic stratagem by which certain microbes forced others to replicate their genes for them, to the dawning age of cloning, which could, in theory, allow women to dispense with men's reproductive services altogether. Along the way he investigates the essentials of maleness, including baldness, the perverse, multi-faceted and never-ending competition for the favor of choosy females, and the many surgical, chemical and mechanical reinforcements men call on to stand firm in battle. Writing in a snappy, erudite style replete with droll euphemisms, Jones takes readers on an engaging tour of the Darwinian view of sex as the ultimately absurd outcome of natural selection and clashing reproductive strategies. But he is no essentialist defender of patriarchy. Indeed, in his treatment males emerge as the weaker sex--a complex and fragile variation on the sturdy female model, whose extra testosterone makes them shorter-lived, more prone to disease and suicide, less able than females to cope in contemporary society and doomed to descent in the coming""age of women."" Men may find this book demoralizing, and Jones's case overstated, but women may take a certain grim satisfaction from it--and readers of both sexes will find it very educational. Books in brief