Go beyond the headlines and the hype to get the newest findings in the burgeoning field of gender studies. Drawing on disciplines that include evolutionary science, anthropology, animal behavior, neuroscience, psychology, and endocrinology, Deborah Blum explores matters ranging from the link between immunology and sex to male/female gossip styles. The results are intriguing, startling, and often very amusing. For instance, did you know that. . . • Male testosterone levels drop in happy marriages; scientists speculate that women may use monogamy to control male behavior • Young female children who are in day-care are apt to be more secure than those kept at home; young male children less so • Anthropologists classify Western societies as "mildly polygamous" The Los Angeles Times has called Sex on the Brain "superbly crafted science writing, graced by unusual compassion, wit, and intelligence, that forms an important addition to the literature of gender studies."

Sex on the Brain: The Biological Differences Between Men and Women

Health, Fitness & Dieting

BLUM, Deborah

Psychology & Counseling

Penguin Publishing Group

The Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Poision Squad and The Poisoner's Handbook tells the amazing story of William James's quest for empirical evidence of the spirit world What if a world-renowned philosopher and professor of psychiatry at Harvard suddenly announced he believed in ghosts? At the close of the nineteenth century, the illustrious William James led a determined scientific investigation into "unexplainable" incidences of clairvoyance and ghostly visitations. James and a small group of eminent scientists staked their reputations, their careers, even their sanity on one of the most extraordinary quests ever undertaken: to empirically prove the existence of ghosts, spirits, and psychic phenomena. What they pursued—and what they found—raises questions as fascinating today as they were then.

Ghost Hunters: William James and the Search for Scientific Proof of Life After Death

History

A New York Times Notable Book The inspiration for PBS's AMERICAN EXPERIENCE film The Poison Squad. From Pulitzer Prize winner and New York Times-bestselling author Deborah Blum, the dramatic true story of how food was made safe in the United States and the heroes, led by the inimitable Dr. Harvey Washington Wiley, who fought for change By the end of nineteenth century, food was dangerous. Lethal, even. "Milk" might contain formaldehyde, most often used to embalm corpses. Decaying meat was preserved with both salicylic acid, a pharmaceutical chemical, and borax, a compound first identified as a cleaning product. This was not by accident; food manufacturers had rushed to embrace the rise of industrial chemistry, and were knowingly selling harmful products. Unchecked by government regulation, basic safety, or even labelling requirements, they put profit before the health of their customers. By some estimates, in New York City alone, thousands of children were killed by "embalmed milk" every year. Citizens--activists, journalists, scientists, and women's groups--began agitating for change. But even as protective measures were enacted in Europe, American corporations blocked even modest regulations. Then, in 1883, Dr. Harvey Washington Wiley, a chemistry professor from Purdue University, was named chief chemist of the agriculture department, and the agency began methodically investigating food and drink fraud, even conducting shocking human tests on groups of young men who came to be known as, "The Poison Squad." Over the next thirty years, a titanic struggle took place, with the courageous and fascinating Dr. Wiley campaigning indefatigably for food safety and consumer protection. Together with a gallant cast, including the muckraking reporter Upton Sinclair, whose fiction revealed the horrific truth about the Chicago stockyards; Fannie Farmer, then the most famous cookbook author in the country; and Henry J. Heinz, one of the few food producers who actively advocated for pure food, Dr. Wiley changed history. When the landmark 1906 Food and Drug Act was finally passed, it was known across the land, as "Dr. Wiley's Law." Blum brings to life this timeless and hugely satisfying "David and Goliath" tale with righteous verve and style, driving home the moral imperative of confronting corporate greed and government corruption with a bracing clarity, which speaks resoundingly to the enormous social and political challenges we face today.

The Poison Squad: One Chemist's Single-Minded Crusade for Food Safety at the Turn of the Twentieth Century

Biographies & Memoirs

Historical

Penguin??Books

Equal parts true crime, twentieth-century history, and science thriller, The Poisoner's Handbook is "a vicious, page-turning story that reads more like Raymond Chandler than Madame Curie"—The New York Observer A fascinating Jazz Age tale of chemistry and detection, poison and murder, The Poisoner's Handbook is a page-turning account of a forgotten era. In early twentieth-century New York, poisons offered an easy path to the perfect crime. Science had no place in the Tammany Hall-controlled coroner's office, and corruption ran rampant. However, with the appointment of chief medical examiner Charles Norris in 1918, the poison game changed forever. Together with toxicologist Alexander Gettler, the duo set the justice system on fire with their trailblazing scientific detective work, triumphing over seemingly unbeatable odds to become the pioneers of forensic chemistry and the gatekeepers of justice. In 2014, PBS's AMERICAN EXPERIENCE released a film based on The Poisoner's Handbook.

The Poisoner's Handbook: Murder and the Birth of Forensic Medicine in Jazz Age New York

Americas

The Monkey Wars

The controversy over the use of primates in research admits of no easy answers. We have all benefited from the medical discoveries of primate research--vaccines for polio, rubella, and hepatitis B are just a few. But we have also learned more in recent years about how intelligent apes and monkeys really are: they can speak to us with sign language, they can even play video games (and are as obsessed with the games as any human teenager). And activists have also uncovered widespread and unnecessarily callous treatment of animals by researchers (in 1982, a Silver Spring lab was charged with 17 counts of animal cruelty). It is a complex issue, made more difficult by the combative stance of both researchers and animal activists. In The Monkey Wars, Deborah Blum gives a human face to this often caustic debate--and an all-but-human face to the subjects of the struggle, the chimpanzees and monkeys themselves. Blum criss-crosses America to show us first hand the issues and personalities involved. She offers a wide-ranging, informative look at animal rights activists, now numbering some twelve million, from the moderate Animal Welfare Institute to the highly radical Animal Liberation Front (a group destructive enough to be placed on the FBI's terrorist list). And she interviews a wide variety of researchers, many forced to conduct their work protected by barbed wire and alarm systems, men and women for whom death threats and hate mail are common. She takes us to Roger Fouts's research center in Ellensburg, Washington, where we meet five chimpanzees trained in human sign language--Loulis, Tatu, Mojha, Dar, and the most famous, Washoe--and watch the flicker of their fingers as they talk to each other, to themselves, and to stuffed animals (which Fouts sees as a clear sign of intelligence and even more--imagination). Blum introduces us to Alex Pacheco, a founder of People for Ethical Treatment of Animals, and to his bitter enemy, Peter Gerone, head of the federal primate center at Tulane and an outspoken critic of animal rights activists, who wants people to think about the trade-off at its most fundamental level--human life versus animal life. And we visit LEMSIP, a research facility in New York State that has no barbed wire, no alarms--and no protesters chanting outside--because its director, Jan Moor-Jankowski, listens to activists with respect and treats his animals humanely. Along the way, Blum offers us insights into the many side-issues involved: scientists (like Roger Fouts) who lose funding because they support animal rights, the intense battle to win over school kids fought by both sides, and the danger of transplanting animal organs into humans (it could possibly unleash a deadly, highly infectious disease). "As it stands now," Blum concludes, "the research community and its activist critics are like two different nations, nations locked in a long, bitter, seemingly intractable political standoff.... But if you listen hard, there really are people on both sides willing to accept and work within the complex middle. When they can be freely heard, then we will have progressed to another place, beyond this time of hostilities." In The Monkey Wars, Deborah Blum gives these people their voice.

Politics & Social Sciences

Philosophy

Oxford University Press

The controversy over the use of primates in research admits of no easy answers. We have all benefited from the medical discoveries of primate research--vaccines for polio, rubella, and hepatitis B are just a few. But we have also learned more in recent years about how intelligent apes and monkeys really are: they can speak to us with sign language, they can even play video games (and are as obsessed with the games as any human teenager). And activists have also uncovered widespread and unnecessarily callous treatment of animals by researchers (in 1982, a Silver Spring lab was charged with 17 counts of animal cruelty). It is a complex issue, made more difficult by the combative stance of both researchers and animal activists. In The Monkey Wars, Deborah Blum gives a human face to this often caustic debate--and an all-but-human face to the subjects of the struggle, the chimpanzees and monkeys themselves. Blum criss-crosses America to show us first hand the issues and personalities involved. She offers a wide-ranging, informative look at animal rights activists, now numbering some twelve million, from the moderate Animal Welfare Institute to the highly radical Animal Liberation Front (a group destructive enough to be placed on the FBI's terrorist list). And she interviews a wide variety of researchers, many forced to conduct their work protected by barbed wire and alarm systems, men and women for whom death threats and hate mail are common. She takes us to Roger Fouts's research center in Ellensburg, Washington, where we meet five chimpanzees trained in human sign language, and we visit LEMSIP, a research facility in New York State that has no barbed wire, no alarms--and no protesters chanting outside--because its director, Jan Moor-Jankowski, listens to activists with respect and treats his animals humanely. And along the way, Blum offers us insights into the many side-issues involved: the intense battle to win over school kids fought by both sides, and the danger of transplanting animal organs into humans. "As it stands now," Blum concludes, "the research community and its activist critics are like two different nations, nations locked in a long, bitter, seemingly intractable political standoff....But if you listen hard, there really are people on both sides willing to accept and work within the complex middle. When they can be freely heard, then we will have progressed to another place, beyond this time of hostilities." In The Monkey Wars, Deborah Blum gives these people their voice.

Europe

A fascinating account of the controversial psychologist who revolutionized the study of love recalls his early experiments with primates to measure "affection" and its influence on a child's development, as well as his later work on the power of human emotion. Reprint. 40,000 first printing.

Love At Goon Park: Harry Harlow and the Science of Affection

Science & Math

Berkley Trade

In the early twentieth century, affection between parents and their children was discouraged—psychologists thought it would create needy kids, and doctors thought it would spread infectious disease. It took a revolution in psychology to overturn these beliefs and prove that touch ensures emotional and intellectual health.
 In Love at Goon Park, Pulitzer Prize winner Deborah Blum charts this profound cultural shift by tracing the story of Harry Harlow—the man who studied neglect and its life-altering consequences on primates in his lab. The biography of both a man and an idea, Love at Goon Park ultimately invites us to examine ourselves and the way we love.

Love at Goon Park: Harry Harlow and the Science of Affection

Professionals & Academics

Basic Books

A biography of this complex and highly controversial psychologist...In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century science and scientists made little if any recognition of the role of human relationships in the general well being of the individual. Far from encouraging human contact medical advice even to mothers with small children was that physical contact with their child was unhygienic, likely to a spoila the child and to be too sexual for the nature of the relationship. Harry Harlow (1906--1981) was an American psychologist who challenged these ideas and shaped our contemporary understanding of human relationships by proving the crucial role of affection in human development through studies of social behaviour of monkeys. His research contributions (in the areas of learning, motivation, and affection) have major relevance for general and child psychology, yet it is one of the many paradoxes and tragedies of his work that the importance of love and humanity was only proved by a series of horrific and inhuman experiments, which subjected young primates either to isolation or to the custody of neglectful or evil surrogate mothers. Perhaps predictably these experiments showed that young animals reared by an attentive and loving parent grow into well--adjusted adults; those reared by neglectful or abusive parents grow into insecure, maladjusted and highly stressed adults who frequently repeat the pattern of abuse. Written by Pulitzer prize--winning author Deborah Blum, this is a biography both of Harry Harlow and of the new concepts that he developed. It recounts his life, discusses the implications of his work and addresses the many ethical issues raised by his scientific legacy. aeo A biography of a complex and highly controversial figure. The author neither condemns nor condones his actions but shows the reasons behind them aeo An exploration of the role of emotions in our well being and how this came to be recognised aeo A balanced discussion of the ethical issues surrounding scientific experiment aeo An exploration of the importance of a loving environment for the development of children.

Perseus Publishing

Bad Karma

A factual account of the unusual, troubled love affair of Indian untouchable Prosenjit, a Berkeley engineering student, and Tanya, product of a disturbed home, which moved from obsession to murder

Social Sciences

Jove

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by BLUM, Deborah. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by BLUM, Deborah

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by BLUM, Deborah. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Sex on the Brain: The Biological Differences Between Men and Women

Ghost Hunters: William James and the Search for Scientific Proof of Life After Death

The Poison Squad: One Chemist's Single-Minded Crusade for Food Safety at the Turn of the Twentieth Century

The Poisoner's Handbook: Murder and the Birth of Forensic Medicine in Jazz Age New York

The Monkey Wars

The Monkey Wars

Love At Goon Park: Harry Harlow and the Science of Affection

Love at Goon Park: Harry Harlow and the Science of Affection

Love at Goon Park: Harry Harlow and the Science of Affection

Bad Karma