Interesting. Argues cooked food drove man's physical and social evolution. My favorite parts of the book were the random facts about Inuit cuisine and the early days of nutrition science. ( )

Interesting, well written with lots of evidence. Men get married to have a woman cooking the evening meal, women get married to have peace while cooking, cooking is one of the factors creating sex roles, combines well with E. W. Barber's book about woman's role in textiles. ( )

Intuitively Wrangham's thesis makes a lot of sense, and he does a decent job laying out research that supports his thesis. I suspect that it's not quite that simple, but I found persuasive his account of the nutritional benefits of cooking. His relation of this to evolutionary time is a bit sketchy, but seems plausible.

A lot of male blurbers extolled this as utterly fresh; I daresay that had it been written by a woman it would have been outright ignored rather than so fulsomely praised. See, e.g., Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, whose similar re-conceptions of 'what makes us human' continue to get relatively short shrift in the usual evolutionary psych circles. Given the primacy of gendered labor divisions in Wrangham's thinking, I have to wonder what an explicitly feminist scholar might make of it. One can't help but think, for instance, that since (in Wrangham's thinking) cooking led to these gendered labor divisions, is sexism what 'makes us human'? I think the root causes of gendered labor divisions are probably more complex than that, as are the things that 'make us human'.

Recommended for an interesting, quick read and a fresh take on human evolution. ( )

Wrangham's premise is fascinating: he believes that cooking food is not merely a side-effect of human evolution, but a necessary condition for it -- only when our ancestors learned to cook, were they able to process enough calories to support our energy-hungry brains. Further, he says, the domestication of fire allowed early pre-humans to safely descend from the trees, and encouraged social behavior.

Wrangham's writing is highly accessible, and he uses evidence from a wide range of fields to support his thesis: nutrition, anthropology, archeology, etc. He doesn't over-labor his ideas, either -- it takes only around 200 pages from the first page to the endnotes. ( )