3 Green Fish

Wait, you say, don’t you mean Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus, the infamous book of the early 1990’s that tried to catalogue the differences between the sexes according to the archetypes of the classical gods of war and love, respectively? To that question I have only one answer: no, of course not, as I haven’t read it, and neither have you. This book actually uses science to bolster its argument, and it moves beyond pop psychology into the realm of biology.

Admittedly, Quirk’s credentials are slim. Make that, technically, none, as he himself points out in his book. He’s the author of a single novel, a San Francisco-based thriller by the title of The Ultimate Rush. Not exactly an authority, sure, but he has done his research, and his lack of a PhD in Evolutionary Biology means that he writes at the level of the common reader, not the uncommon doctoral candidate.

It’s an interesting book, and it places all those odd behaviors of the opposite sex you might have noticed into the context of genes, natural selection, and various strategies for procreating. It’s entertaining and enlightening, and a worthy read if you’re looking to understand why men or women are the way they are. My only major complaint is that the author seems to repeat himself a bit too much, as there were times where I thought “haven’t I read that assertion twelve times already?”

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