In reading Eve, I was given much to ponder and consider, and a great deal to lie awake thinking about when I should be sleeping. Cat Bohannon considers and researches a multitude of subjects in Eve, many of which are promised by the subtitle of Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution. This is a heady and heavy topic for any book. When I looked up Bohannon, I expected to find an author/researcher with a Doctorate in a hard science discipline, such as biology or biological anthropology. Instead, I discovered a writer, who understands the importance of research, regardless of academic discipline.

Readers choose which books to read for many different reasons. For me, Eve is the reason. I look for women authors, women protagonists, women villains, women survivors. But I am always looking for Eve. She was the subject of my own dissertation, although my focus was on religion and Renaissance culture. At the heart was Eve as representing every woman, which of course, is why and how I chose to read Bohannon's Eve. Bohannon's Eve is the kind of nonfiction that is easily accessible to all readers. Eve is a book that all women should read, if for no other reason than to grasp the differences in our bodies and how those differences impact women's choices, especially on a biological level.

Ideally, Eve should be read and considered slowly, with whole sections broken down into manageable segments. My undergraduate college biology and anthropology easily came back to me, even though it has been decades since I last thought about those classes. I enjoyed Bohannon's comments about her life and what she learned about herself, but I also learned a lot about my body and the world in which I live. Eve is the best kind of reading--reading to understand.

Thank you to the author, to the publishers, Knopf, Pantheon, Vintage, and Anchor, and to NetGalley for providing me with this ARC to read and review. The above comments are my honest responses and thoughts. I intend to reread whole sections once again. All women should read Eve.

This is a must read for anyone interested in human socio-biological evolution. And also everyone else. I highlighted to many things, so many thought-provoking, anger-inducing, and awe-inspiring things. And the intro wasn't lying - Cat's writing is beautiful and poetic.

Thank you to NetGalley and Knopf, Pantheon, Vintage, and Anchor for the advanced copy of this book. I definitely enjoyed the subject matter, but not necessarily how it was inconsistently written. I agree with another reviewer that in some spots, this is very technically written, but in others, it's very casual. It's incongruous.

This book is a little tough to read, but I might recommend for a book club who likes longer, non-fiction books. I know it would spur discussion and could create lots of questions for a group of women.

Full disclosure: I received an advance copy of this book to read in return for an honest review. I signed up for it because the topic, millions of years of human history and evolution as seen through the lens of a female-specific view, sounded fascinating. Admittedly, I wondered if it might be a bit scholarly or dry, but the first two sentences blew those concerns right out of the water. Eve is packed with information and ideas, but a rollicking ride that made me giggle every couple of pages! You will learn a lot, and have a wonderful time doing it. An absolute delight! 10/10

Fascinating look at the evolution of women.So interesting so well written I enjoyed and learned so many interesting facts.Perfect for book club discussions.#netgalley #eve

An important book on an important subject. As the author eloquently argues in the preface, the female body has been neglected by science and medicine for too long. And while there have been a few popular science books on the subject, this is the first I have read written from an evolutionary biology perspective. It is full of fascinating facts and surprising insights.

That said, I did have some problems with this book. I got the impression that the author couldn't decide who her audience was. On the one hand, there are a lot of complicated details and terms and she really dives deep into the scientific realm; on the other hand, her style can be too conversational, she tries too hard to be accessible and funny - I found giving silly names to our ancestral species or using words like "little darlings" to describe mammalian young to be off putting.

Thanks to the publisher, Knopf, Pantheon, Vintage, and Anchor, and NetGalley for an advanced copy of this book.

I really enjoyed this book. This was a fascinating non-fiction book about the history of women (and by extension, some men too, but it focuses on many parts specific to women). I loved how it jumped through time to different points in our evolutionary past. As an avid reader of non-fiction, I would say this is a little more technical than the average pop-science type of book, and it took me longer to read. I may hesitate to recommend to people who enjoy lighter non-fiction, but I thoroughly enjoyed it.

This is an evolutionary history of the female body. How and why our bodies are the way they are. It is interesting, eye-opening, and mostly accessible to the non-scientists among us. I think it will be interesting to lots of people and is well worth reading.

I will say that reading an e-version of a book with over 300 foot notes is a daunting and annoying experience. Get a print copy if you can.

In Eve Cat Bohannon takes us on the evolutionary journey that led to modern humans, viewed through the lens of the female body. It’s a fascinating and engaging tour. Eve is well researched and thoroughly scientific while written with the non-scientist in mind.

Bohannon herself was pursuing her PhD while writing this book. She is a researcher with a Master’s in Creative Nonfiction and a PhD in Narrative and Cognition. She is also an author. Her essays and poems have appeared in Scientific American, Mind, Science Magazine, and other periodicals. She has taught literary science writing at the Johns Hopkins Center for Talented Youth.

In the introduction to her book Bohannon talks about the absence of females from modern medical research (which omits women from most studies), from evolutionary theory and from modern popular cultural representation. What Eve does is places females smack dab in the middle of the story and introduces us to research supporting a more complete view of how our evolution might have happened.

The Eve of the title is actually several Eves - those first females of our evolutionary ancestors to have some aspect of our biology or some behavioral adaptation that has led to us modern humans. “Morgie” the Morganucodon - from the late Triassic period some 200 million years ago - is the first Eve that Bohannon discusses. Morgie was a small, mousey mammal and the Eve of mammalian milk. From there we move through various Eves right up to today’s “Sapiens” (Homo Sapiens) the Eve of language, menopause and modern human love and sexism.

I found Bohannan’s chapter on Tools one of the most fascinating. Perhaps the most well-known and often discussed movie intro is that of 2001: A Space Odessey, Stanley Kubrick’s adaptation of the Arthur C Clarke novel. In that opening sequence a group of our male forefathers, likely Homo Habilis, are depicted as the first toolmakers. That first tool is a bone which one of the males picks up. In his hands the bone becomes a weapon, and the weapon is used as an instrument of war. This is, obviously, a very male-centered depiction of the possible origin of tools, something Bohannon calls “Tool Triumphalism” - the male using his tools to hunt, to murder, and to dominate the Earth.

Bohannon takes that starting point and dives into biology and the study of some of our closest relatives among the primates to arrive at a different idea. Biology shows us that birthing humans, with our large baby heads, is uniquely difficult. Human babies are uniquely vulnerable and require care for far longer than other species. Yet Having babies grow to adulthood and be able to reproduce themselves is required for a species to survive.

Today there are 8 billion members of the Homo Sapiens species. How did we get here? Why are we so successful? Bohannon argues that the first human “tool”, and the basis for our success as a species is gynecology. Gynecology, which she defines as the many types of birth control, abortion and other fertility interventions, including midwifery, that allowed human reproduction to beat the odds our difficult childbearing. She finishes the chapter with a reimagined opening sequence for 2001 placing childbearing at the heart of the story.

RATING: Five Stars ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

Rating Comment: Cat Bohannon’s Eve will have you rethinking your understanding of what it means to have evolved to be human. The author takes you on an evolutionary journey that led to modern humans, viewed through the lens of the female body. It’s a brilliant book and the best book I’ve read so are this year. Highly recommended - Whether you were born with a female body or not.

NOTE: I read an advanced review copy courtesy of NetGalley and the publisher Alfred A. Knopf.

The book was released on October 3rd in North America in hardcover, ebook and audiobook. The paperback release is November 7th. The book will be available in the UK in hardcover, ebook and audiobook on December 10, 2023. The UK paperback releases May 5, 2024

This book is about some of the evolutionary possibilities as to why women's bodies are the way they are. Bohannon has a way of explaining things that made so much sense to me. One example: "... that's the major reason eggs are about four thousand times larger than sperm: they're not just half a set of blueprints; they're half a set of blueprints plus an entire factory." Really - have you ever heard that explained better?
There are chapters on wombs, brains, menopause (especially interesting to me), and more. Bohannon presents a compelling theory about why human women go through menopause. (The only other species we know of that does? Orcas - I'll bet you weren't going to guess that.) And it isn't the theory I've heard before - that humans are so difficult to raise and take so long to raise that mothers needed "grandmothers," or other older women, to help them. I'll let you read the book to find it (it has to do with what scientists have observed in said orcas), but I loved it.
I need to say that many of Bohannon's ideas are, of necessity, speculative theories, but she does admit that. And she does use this platform to present her social views, which don't always agree with mine, but that's ok. I think it's good for us to read people we might not agree with politically, religiously, or socially. Some of our modern problems come from people refusing to do that.

In Eve, Cat Bohannon sets herself an ambitious task as evidenced by the sub-title — How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution — and I’m happy to report she’s more than up to the job, turnout out a work that impresses across the board: in information and organization, in scholarship and research, in voice and wit, in breadth and depth. As such, I’m guessing it will be on my top ten of non-fiction works for 2023.

In explaining the evolution of the female body (and since one can’t separate the two, the evolution of human culture), Bohannon moves generally chronologically via sections organized by a particular body part or trait, such as milk/breastfeeding, the womb, legs, tool use, the brain, and love. The first section starts roughly 200 million years ago, and each successive segment jumps to the time scientists believe that trait first appeared in our evolutionary calendar, Bohannon offering up at the start of each chapter what she calls an “Eve”, a hypothesized (or more speculative) representative species who may first have exhibited that trait. Since each section also brings us up to modern humans, Bohannon moves back and forth in time, but the reader is always solidly, clearly grounded in “when” they are at any given moment.

As noted, the book is heavily researched, filled with supporting details via a host of studies nicely balanced out with Bohannon’s own experiences, which pepper the work in just the right amount. One of my tests for how much I enjoyed a non-fiction work is how many notes I took or passages I highlighted and believe me, there are a slew of them in this text. I’ve read a lot of popular science works that overlap with areas Bohannon discusses here: biology, paleobiology, social and political history, anthropology and paleoanthropology, archaeology, as well some titles that connect more specifically, such as Rachel E. Gross’ Vagina Obscura: An Anatomical Voyage. And even with that prior knowledge, Bohannon threw one previously unknown and utterly fascinating fact after another at me. That mother’s milk (specifically the colostrum part) acts as a “reliable laxative.” That a baby spit gets sucked back into a woman’s nipple (backwash) and that the components of breastmilk will change based on an analysis of that spit. That orcas are the only other species that have menopause. Just how bad humans are at reproducing ourselves compared to other animals (really, really bad; it’s amazing we’re still around).

Even when I knew some of what Bohannon was talking about, she offers up more details, more context, more explanation. For instance, I knew women were more likely be tetrachromats — people who can see the world in four color dimensions rather than three. But I didn’t know that while they can potentially see millions more colors, more subtle shadings, than most humans, they almost never do because “the brain determines the need, and the eye adapts according . . . If you need to see a certain color . . . you’ll probably see it … But if there’s no need? Then you probably won’t.”

And just to break things up, I also learned somewhat less useful but generally entertaining facts such as Bohannon once carried a jug around to save her pee in, that the apes in 2001 were British mimes, that she was asked at a job interview at a call center if she wouldn’t rather be “one of the girls” (unbeknownst to her when she applied it was for an escort service), and that her boyfriend at the time who told her he’d break with her if she said yes didn’t ever offer to help with rent or to have her move into his own apartment, which he had filled with 12 guitars and a poster of Tori Amos.

Those latter details give you a sense of how Bohannon keeps things playful, uses her wit and own personal experiences to give the reader a break from the book’s informational density (and it is dense — 600 pages, roughly a third of that in the form of notes). She’s also quite careful, as she conveys all that information, to make it clear to the reader just how confident the reader can be in her claims/explanations, pointing out when something is a consensus belief or is contested within the discipline, whether a study is strongly supported thanks to a significant population or a winnowing of variables or if some studies might be questioned thanks to their small sample size or the difficulty of teasing out those variables. Some of this happens in the text proper, some of it in the footnotes, and some of it in the endnotes, but it almost always happens.

Which is good, since as the book progresses and Bohannon moves farther afield from anatomy into behavior and culture, the text by nature becomes more speculative (it also becomes even more fascinating). But even when I wasn’t fully on board with Bohannon’s points, I never felt she was trying to slide something past me.

As for why read this book rather than one of the many others on humanity’s evolutionary history? Well, one reason is this acts as a much-need correction. One has to live in an impermeable bubble to not know how much women have been erased throughout history from history. And not just history. They’ve also been literally erased from science and medicine, first being simply deprioritized (out of mind out of study) and then being purposely ignored with their too-complicated bodies filled with all those pesky hormones and following those annoying fertility cycles all of which threatens to make life too difficult for scientists and doctors performing studies and clinical trials. Far easier to just assume they’re “just like” the “easier” bodies of men.

Which is how we end up, as Bohannon informs us early on, with nearly 80% of animal studies in one representative journal from 1996-2006 using only male subjects. Or why, even in 2000, six years after NIH tried to update regulations to force studies to use more women subjects, 20 percent of studies still had none and of the ones that did, 80% didn’t look for sex differences in the results. Which explains why we only found out relatively recently that women require stronger painkiller doses to achieve the same relief of men using lower doses, which not only has consequences for pain relief itself but also for opioid addiction. Or that women under general anesthesia wake up faster than men, “regardless of their age, weight, or the dosage.”

We see another type of mental erasure in our “just-so” stories, our scientific theories explaining evolutionary events: cave art, hunting, tool use, the rise of language, etc. Why do we have tools? To hunt of course. Why are their pictures of animals on cave walls? To depict hunting, of course. Why did we learn language? To communicate so we could hunt. Notice a pattern here? And of course, when we say “hunting,” we mean men doing it (though that comes with far less certainty than is usually presented).

What Bohannon so convincingly does here, and so necessarily, is to put women back into the picture. And not by forcing them into the frame either. She’s not Photoshopping them in. She methodically, carefully, fully explains why it makes sense to place women at the center of language development. Why gynecology should be elevated to one of the top technologies that allowed humans to exist and then to thrive (and when is the last time, in the list of tools like controlled fire and language etc. you saw that word thrown into the mix?) As I said above, even when she is speculating, even when I might not wholly agree with her speculation, she is nothing but thorough and honest in her claims.

Eve is a perfect example of high-level non-fiction, high-level popular science, done right. Thorough, deeply researched, strongly supported, clearly organized, utterly fascinating, cohesive, playful at the right times in the right amount, scholarly to the right degree, accessible but not condescending or overly simplified, curated with an academic eye and conveyed in a personally engaging fashion. I loved all 600 pages, including the notes, which I read in their entirety (and highlighted large portions of). Highly and enthusiastically recommended.

This is 600+ pages and a bit too intense for me in Kindle format. I might revisit it in physical format in the future.

I enjoyed this immensely and it will be one that I have to purchase a hard copy of. I loved the amount of detail within this, and learned so much about my own evolution that I never knew before; but this still always felt accessible and not too scientific. I'm recommending this to all my friends, male or female, to read!

Love this book, original, thoughtful, well researched and thorough. The points she makes about biology and evolutionary history are right on the money. They help to elucidate the differences between biological genders and how important those distinctions are.
I had to rush to finish the book so there are some loose ends but otherwise, I recommend wholeheartedly and hope to finish it.

Book: Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution
Author: Cat Bohannon
Rating: 4 Out of 5 Stars

I want to thank the publisher, Knopf, for sending me an ARC. I honestly did not know how I was going to feel about this one. Scientific books can go either way for me. I must say that I did enjoy this one a lot. It is one of those books that makes you stop and think for a minute.

This one talks about the female body and the role that females have had throughout the course of history. It talks about the impact that females have had and how we have been almost shoved to the side. It looks to explain why certain things happen to females and the how behind it. I found all of this to be very insightful and engaging. I don’t know how else to put it. This is one of those books that the author is very interested and passionate about the topic of females’ impact. There were times when you had to stop and think about what the author was saying.

This book mentions that females are kind of slipping in the world, which I do agree with. Now this does not mean that we are getting stupid or anything like that, but there is this strong desire to control the female body. It stems from the “boys will be boys, but it’s okay for girls” mindset. It is true. Look at the world around us. Women do not have access to the same health care as men. Women have to decide between careers and having babies. Women are the ones who have to pay for the mistakes of men. We are more likely to die from certain things than men. If something bad happens to us, then it’s our fault for what we were wearing. There is this back and forth. Muslim women are brought up. Is making them wear traditional Islamic clothing controlling? Is making them not wear it controlling? I just don’t understand why there is so much debate over what a woman decides to wear or not to wear. You never hear of a man being acted because of what he is wearing. Why are we doing this to half of the population? One thing that stood out to me was how so much in the medical world is unknown for women because it has not been tested on women. Yet, many of these medications and procedures are done on women without any real knowledge as to how they will affect them.

Throughout history, women have been almost shoved to the side and we have had to fight for everything that we have. I found that it was interesting that the author brought up that countries in which girls are educated are better off. She looks into the golden age of Islam as an example. During Isalm’s golden age, boys and girls were equally educated and great advances were made. Now, in many parts of the world, girls are expected to give up their education to help the family, get married, or step aside for a brother. Women are expected to eat last or not eat at all even if she is pregnant She is not seen as an equal or someone of value. People say that doesn’t happen in the United States, but let’s pause for a second and think about it. How many times do you see the women cooking and cleaning up the kitchen while the men sit in front of the TV? How many times do you see men eat first, take most of the food, and leave the women with the leftovers? It’s the same concept.

This is a lot in this book and it’s so hard to put into a simple review. If you are looking for a female take on science, then I highly encourage you to give this one a go. It is one of those books that just makes you stop and think.

This book comes out on October 3, 2023.

Youtube: https://youtu.be/OZ1jG8FN1Jw

Thank you to Netgalley and the Publisher for this Advanced Readers Copy of Eve by Cat Bohannon! Looking forward to recommending this to my Book Group!

Fascinating, informative, thought-provoking
In the introduction to Eve, the author says her goal was to provide “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 our bodies evolved, how they work, what it really means to be a woman.” She succeeded impressively, and Eve is one of the most enjoyable and informative books I have read in a long time.
My electronic copy contains a great many notations of my reactions. I gasped “OMG” at surprising bits of information , such as the possible evolutionary value of women’s fatty hips or the fact that orcas go through menopause (Imagine what THEIR hot flashes must be like!) . However, there are also a lot of “Ha Ha”s at Bohannon’s humor. I especially enjoyed her analysis of Hilary Clinton’s voice during her acceptance speech at the 2016 Democratic convention; she says, “Men have bigger lungs than women….That’s one reason the male Clinton found it easier to deliver his acceptance speech. He simply had more hot air to work with.” I was not even finished the first chapter before I was thinking of all the friends ( not just women and not just science nerds) I would recommend it to.
It is a long book and not one to “binge-read”. I would recommend you take it slowly, so that you can muse about some of the interesting ideas and theories Until we get time travel, most of our ideas about how, when, and why many of our characteristic developed will remain speculative. Each of the nine chapters covers a different topic, such as Milk, Legs, Brain, Voice, etc., and they can stand alone.
The breadth of the information in Eve is extremely broad, covering history, biology, paleoanthropology, and more. It is hard to imagine the research that was required. I suspect the author had fun doing it; I certainly had fun reading the result.
I received an advance review copy of this book from NetGalley and Knopf.

An absolute amazing book about the evolution of women! This is my second nonfiction book I decided to pick up and I learned so much! Will definitely be looking for more from this author!

Thanks to NetGalley and Knopf for this advance readers copy, in exchange for an honest review. This book is at its heart and soul, about women— in a historical sense, a biological sense, an evolutionary sense, a social sense, etc. From the beginning of this story, we learn about some of the defining characters of women, like milk production to placental development and how important it is to study these key biological differences, along with biological commonalities in the study of the female species.

This book was a fascinating read and clearly so well researched. It was extremely detailed, with scientific evidence or conjectures based on scientific findings clearly guiding this book. It was very interesting to read where some of the defining characteristics of women that we know today originated from, from an evolutionary perspective, like milk production and the experience of menopause. It also shed a light on how much work is left for the scientific community, in terms of research relating to the female body, which is critical for many reasons like being able to provide the appropriate care of women, the appropriate treatment plans for illnesses, etc. While this book covered some dense topics, I found the writing largely accessible. I’m sure I will find myself referencing some of these passages again and will definitely benefit from rereads in the future.

Overall, I’d recommend this book to anyone interested in learning more about the evolution and history of women, as well as how it ties into women as we know them in modern society. I think fans of Sapiens would love this title!

In Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution, Cat Bohannon writes about human history from the viewpoint of the female body and the impacts of evolution and social change. The women evolved, and no one paid attention. Today, the female’s body is studied as secondary, if considered, when researching. Bohannon shows study after study that the female body is excluded and assumes the outcomes from the male studies would be the same for females.

It was a fascinating look into how the female gender is ignored until it can’t be and how the trials of being female have existed since the beginning of time.

We can get the AC turned in in office buildings, and the high-pitched noises out of refrigerators that the male species do not hear are gone, and females can function better. The story of womanhood is told using facts, studies, and wit.