Animal, history and science lovers will find plenty to enjoy in our latest Editor's Choice pick: Lucy Cooke's Bitch provides fascinating overlooked details about the females of many different species. The accompanying Beyond the Book article considers Charles Darwin's The Descent of Man in the context of the social values of its time.

We also invite you to explore our category of books set in New York State, which is open to all visitors for free over the next two weeks.

Plus, we have books for members to request, an exciting variety of upcoming discussions opening from August through October, and a new Wordplay!

With best wishes,

Davina Morgan-Witts

BookBrowse Publisher

Review by Rose Rankin

In middle school biology class, many of us were told that men hunt and women nest, that testosterone-driven males dominate in the animal kingdom, and that females are naturally disposed to motherhood and nurturing their helpless offspring. The problem is that these shibboleths aren't backed up by unwavering scientific evidence, as Lucy Cooke eloquently and enjoyably explains in Bitch: On the Female of the Species.

The nod in the title to Darwin's On the Origin of Species (1859) is very apt. Cooke demonstrates, chapter by chapter and species by species, that while the great man's theory of natural selection was truly groundbreaking, his related theory of sexual selection — which explains, for example, why peacocks have a huge tail that attracts a mate but doesn't otherwise help with survival — reflected Victorian gender stereotypes as much as observational science.

Cooke's contribution is to correct the record via robust evidence, building upon the fundamentals of how animals pass on their genes, and showing the astonishing ingenuity and variety found in female animals that have so often been overlooked by zoologists. ... continued

Charles Darwin's The Descent of Man

In his seminal work, On the Origin of Species (1859), Charles Darwin elucidated the theory of evolution by natural selection, explaining how organisms better adapted to their environment are more likely to survive and pass on their genes. What he didn't explain, however, was human evolution — that was addressed in his second but much less famous book, The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex (1871).

The Descent of Man sought to answer a question that plagued his initial theory of natural selection: Why do traits like a peacock's tail or stag's horns exist when they have no obvious benefit and may even be a hindrance to avoiding predators? Darwin theorized that these characteristics helped in landing a mate — that they impacted "sexual selection" as he called it. Like his previous work, this theory was incredibly innovative, but because of its mix of observational science and Victorian social belief, The Descent of Man has managed to be both controversially progressive and conservatively restrictive in the century and a half since its publication. ... continued

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Members! This month's First Impressions and Book Club books are now available. Request at bookbrowse.com/arc before end of Saturday, August 13.

Books are provided to U.S. resident members free of charge with the understanding that they'll do their best to either write a short review or take part in an online discussion forum (depending on whether the book is assigned for First Impressions or the Book Club).

Join BookBrowse, or renew a lapsed membership by the end of this Saturday (the 13th), and you'll have the opportunity to request the book of your choice from these six titles--if you request just one title you have a very good chance of receiving it; if you request two or more titles, you will definitely receive one of them.

Books are only available to BookBrowse members resident in the U.S. This is in part due to the cost and logistics of shipping, but also because the U.S. publishers who provide books for these offers usually do not hold rights to markets outside the U.S. and thus are prohibited from actively marketing to other regions, which includes providing books for review.

All visitors to BookBrowse can browse by genre, but most of our 100+ themed categories are only for members.

Our New York State category includes hundreds of featured fiction and nonfiction books and encompasses a variety of genres.

For the next week, all visitors can browse this category for free.

Discussions are open to all, so please join us! If you would like to receive a message when a particular discussion opens, you can sign up for a one-time notification. You can also find inspiration for your book club among our almost 200 past discussions.

Solve our Wordplay puzzle to reveal a well-known expression, and be entered to win the book of your choice or a 6-month membership to BookBrowse!

The answer to the last Wordplay: N I, ands, O B

The most comprehensive explanation for this expression we found is in the grammarphobia.com blog, which traces the use of "ifs and ands" to 16th century Britain, explaining that at the time "and" was often used in a conditional sense meaning "provided that" - a usage that dates back to at least the 13th century. So, whereas today one might occasionally find oneself needing to say, "if it please your grace," back in the 16th century one could have said "and it please your grace" - which would have meant "provided that it please your grace." ... continued