23. The Breastfeeding Mother's Guide to Making More Milk, Diana West and Lisa Marasco

Diana West is a rockstar in the BFAR world, it was pretty weird to read this book and realize I was more familiar with her from the forums than anywhere else. We've emailed back and forth once or twice about stuff, etc. But hey! A book is so much more useful than a forum, duh, and here's why! Once I got over the trauma of being reminded of how poorly things went with Penny last time, this book was a wealth of information, didn't make me feel overloaded, and is very well organized. With clean and concise prose, it separates out low supply issues by focusing on root causes, and then provides solutions that are very targeted. There's great advice on what is normal nursling behavior, and how to differentiate between normal issues and low-supply issues. While within the BFAR forums, there's kind of a "throw everything at the wall and see what sticks" approach to adding galactagogues to your regimen, with the sole goal of making more milk, this book separates them into specific effects. What is the actual cause of your issue? Are you trying to balance your hormones? Develop tissue? Stimulate the milk ejection reflex? Or simply ramp up your prolactin levels? It includes a super handy chart of all the herbs and their effects (with all the safety ratings neatly alongside) that I will be photocopying before I return this to the library. Sometimes the herbs you take don't effect your quantity, but affect your ability breastfeed in other significant ways. Lesson learned. This is the book I wish I had read before I had Penny. Highly recommended to any parents who are facing known low supply issues or supply questions: I would recommend this book over and above #24 for that reason.

24. The Womanly Art of Breastfeeding, 8th edition, La Leche League International

This book is fantastic and I wish I'd known about it during my last pregnancy, but for different reasons. It acts as a guide to making decisions about birthing that are guided with breastfeeding in mind, and so I wish I had known about it when I was in my maybe-homebirth phase. Coming from LLL, this book focuses heavily on the concept of building a community, which I found myself wanting to dismiss (I realized in hindsight) because I didn't do that last time. But it's important! Minor quibble: with my amateur anthropologist hat on, some of the language in this book focuses too heavily on the concept of love, falling in love with your baby, love is natural etc, which I would qualify with a tonic dose of Hrdy: it is not simply "medicalized birth" that can cause distance or lack of love feeling. I felt very othered by the whole LOVE message, that was not my experience (though my experience also included not feeding at the breast, and also tremendous amounts of poorly managed back pain). As I think I've written here before, it is enough to simply be interested in your baby, and that's what most of the mother/baby stuff does. You don't have to love your baby to breastfeed, or to save them from being trampled on by the megasloths. Anyway...this book is handy for the sections that focus on different eras of baby development, but I skimmed a lot of it, because at the end of the day this book is meant to be a catch-all reference and guide, hence its heft at 493 pages. Highly recommended for new moms without a lot of exposure to breastfeeding culture; less helpful for everyone else probably. I did like the tear-sheet guides in the back, which include handy references on solving common problems like plugs and mastitis, oversupply, a pumping schedule, a diaper tracker, etc.

20. Shades of Milk and Honey, Mary Robinette Kowal


Thanks, mordicai! Fantastic recommendation. This is YA set in an alternative Regency setting where, without being precious about it, people can manipulate glamour to produce fantastic optical and sound illusions. There is love and conflict and oh, I don't want to say too much because I liked it and I want you to go read it unspoiled. I'll just quote the Powells.com review, which aptly notes, "Like wandering onto a secret picnic attended by Pride and Prejudice and Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell." It's awesome even if you're not a big Austen fan (I'm certainly not), and you should check out the author's super awesome period-appropriate spellcheck wizardry which makes the text itself a delight. First in a series! Highly recommended.

18. Up and Down Stairs: The country house servant, Jeremy Musson


After a terribly disappointing book on a similar subject earlier this year, I was determined to find some real scholarship, real history, on the lives of servants in the UK. This is an obsession of mine, and now I feel I've read perhaps the most definitive book on it, and can lay the obsession to rest somewhat! Musson begins with the 1400s, and each chapter moves forward to a distinct period of time, cataloging the changes in architecture, the family (in its oldest definition, meaning everyone linked to an estate, including servants), jobs, needs, entertaining, uniforms, social expectations, etc. It is very thorough and very satisfying, with lots of primary source material. He takes as his premise and conclusion that no matter what form it took, these relationships between rich people and poor people relied on a great deal of trust and their lives were, of course, deeply intertwined. But this is just the underlying premise, the majority of the book is concerned with the more meaty details of how jobs were performed, how the belowstairs hierarchy was managed, how they interacted abovestairs, how servants lived, how they weathered change, what they thought of their jobs in terms of prestige or duty or simply a wage. If this area of history is at all interesting to you, I highly recommend this book. It's readable, not dry, and I trusted the author throughout, he never came off as sloppy, making too many assumptions, as some writers of history do.

16. The Orphanmaster, Jean Zimmerman


This book succeeded the most when I wasn't putting on my critical Early Colonialist Lifeways hat*, but it's a passable historical fiction cum mystery novel some of the time, set in New Amsterdam back when there was a wall and a canal instead of Wall Street and Canal Street and other fun stuff like that. Our heroine, Blandine, is an independent trader living in the relatively liberated atmosphere of the early Dutch colony, and Zimmerman is best when tackling some of the interesting social dilemmas that come with the period: characters struggle with faith (how can there be a god if the wilderness is so harsh and "empty" which is really more about a crisis of separation from social structures of control) and with freedom and with race (that last one just enough to be more than passably readable, but not quite enough to pass muster). Along the way our Blandine gets caught up in the justice system, deals with suitors, falls in love in the least implausible sex scene I've ever read in my life, and oh yeah, solves a mystery of the Algonquian's cannibalistic witika (a.k.a. the wendigo) that has been murthering lots of sad orphans, etc etc. The plot moves nice and fast, and there are some interesting side characters, and lots of really fun Dutch vocabulary (groot kamer! stadt huys!) and references to current places (the hills of Breukelen! The farms of the Bouweries!). There was also not quite enough character development, however, for me to go beyond a "meh, passable beach read" review. There you have it.




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* Zimmerman's book is #16 and all I'll say about #15 is that it is a pretty fucking racist book that I thought had been written in 1957 but was actually republished in 1957, originally published in 1898. That will teach me to be a lazy critical reader and skip the introductions! #15 is also technically a re-read but I think I must have only read some of it when I bought it years ago, most of it was pretty unfamiliar. I found out the real publishing date when I was only two or three chapters from the end, and with slow dawning horror realized I'd read the book all wrong. The author kept writing about "50 years ago" or "in our grandparents' time" and I thought she meant like, the 1920s, nope, she meant like the 1700s and the Civil War etc. I thought she was kind of charmingly old fashioned, but nope, she was just living in the 19th century. As one does. Anyway as a period piece it is a good reference for things like antiquated regional dialect vocabulary about weaving and making linen and other time-consuming things people used to do every day. Because I have read a bunch of books like #15, it makes a book like #16 look a little bit flimsy, I didn't buy that the protagonist would walk away from her house in New Amsterdam for a couple months and then return and just kind of...waltz in. Wouldn't there be ten thousand chores needing to be done? There was a certain social fabric of life in New Amsterdam that didn't ring true, thanks to #15. Anyway. End rant, please at least skim the intros in your nonfiction, don't make my mistake.

13. Life Below Stairs: True Lives of Edwardian Servants, Alison Maloney

Blah. I was excited about this and it turned into a hate-read. It is short and not detailed enough for me, I felt I learned more from reading several memoirs last year of cooks and ladies' maids, many of which were quoted or referenced in this book. Probably pretty handy if you want generic detail and a light read, perhaps better if you use it just to find names of additional memoirs to read.

14. Mayakovsky's Revolver, Matthew Dickman

I've had the twin Portland poets Matthew and Michael Dickman on my radar since reading a profile of them in an old New Yorker. Not only are they the Poet Twins of Lents (aka Felony Flats), published to heck and back, they portrayed the twin pre-cogs in Minority Report. What a strange world.

Anyway! Mayakovsky's Revolver was interesting, but not ultimately a volume of poetry that made me go YES, not in the way, for example, I did earlier this year with Brenda Shaughnessy, or even with Anne Carson. I frequently finished Dickman's poems feeling like I had exited a poem without really getting anything, or maybe there wasn't much to get. But not always. The section of poems about his (other) dead brother were good, and I loved Heaven (just us standing here together, asking each other/if we remember anything, what we loved, what loved us, who/yelled our names first?), I loved Birds of Paradise, and some of the poems in the Elegy to a Goldfish section were lovely. There are lots of references to the Hawthorne Bridge and other bits of Portland, which was fun, but there are also lots of scenes that make me think this guy and his brother might actually be kind of...dicks? Yikes. They kill a goldfish and torture their sister with it, they torture some poor kid behind the 7-11, a meditation on making a sick joke about a pedophile, other random crap that just made me think, why am I getting these painful insights into your life and why do I not particularly like you afterwards? Plenty of poets write about sick painful stuff and don't make it pretty; am I expecting this poet to make it pretty? I guess I'm expecting it to make sense, and not just act as off-color background, which is the impression I got here. The final longer poem On Earth was a nice bookend to the opening poem Heaven, and together those two were perhaps my favorites. On earth/survival is built out of luck and treatment centers he writes, the entire poem a meditation about how survival depends on a kind of vast chain of things surviving, his family, his mother taking the same exit to Lloyd Center to work, the woman he loves has to be there, his twin has to survive cancer because he can never be sick,/not if I want to stay on earth. Last week I was a bit obsessed with the idea of trying to write a poem that wasn't a poem, that rejected parallels and imagery and metaphor, something that cannot be recited in a portentious pretentious poetry reciting voice. There were times when I thought Dickman achieved that, his poems can be read in a normal voice and still achieve beauty, and not in that old-fashioned William Stafford way. Sometimes that was enough, but overall I think he is just an okay poet, with occasional brilliance.

11. Autobiography of Red: a Novel in Verse, Anne Carson


Carson, you tricksy writer you. This is a novel in verse, but not in the way you'd think -- it reads quite nicely as prose for the most part -- this is also not a complete retelling of the story of Geryon (Geryon the monster was slain by Herakles, who killed also Geryon's red cattle and his dog), despite what the early parts of the (short) book led me to believe. There are red herrings all over the place, for instance in a modernized-but-vaguely-so story about Geryon as a gay male photographer and his sad love (?) story with Herakles, what is up with the two prominent references from Emily Dickinson about "on my volcano grows the grass" and "never have I held a peach so late in the year"? Hello vaginas. Is this Geryon being Anne Carson, gay male as stand-in for lesbian female, Geryon inhabiting the feminine, or another red herring? Unknown. And is Carson the Stesichoros figure? Maybe I'm being too literal here but there are certain meanings that would seem to flicker frustratingly in and out of focus, depending on which interpretation might be true.

I do know that Geryon is one of my favorite new characters. Is he really red like a monster, or does he just see red? I imagine that his vision is red, he sees only in shades of red, which he forgets unless, uh, triggered. He has wings, which he hides under an overcoat, and can fly but does so rarely. He has a kind of strange interface with the world, he doesn't quite interpret things the way others do.

There is a kind of contained sadness and rage in his whole story which made the abrupt ending a little unsatisfying, no catharsis, though not horribly so since there is a sequel which just came out, Red Doc> (yes complete with carat). But I have to wait for Kirk to finish before I can read it.

It's a girl! A very active, climbing, kicking, twisting, waving little girl. I totally cried, just like last time. Penny is very, very excited.

8. Our Andromeda, Brenda Shaughnessy (2012)


I already gushed about Brenda Shaughnessy last week, and here I am again to tell you she's an incredible poet, sometimes funny with her wordplay and then just as suddenly she'll gut you with something. Last week I quoted a good bit of her Liquid Flesh, which really spoke to me about the kind of agony of depletion and confusion with a newborn, tiny self alone with a tiny self. The reviewers are right, there is also a lot of good stuff in here about sisters, lovers gone, her family, but the strongest section to me was the last section, eponymously titled with its final and longest poem that is also the name of the book, Our Andromeda (something about this name within name with name was deeply satisfying in the same way her poetry was). The whole section is about her son, Calvin, from different angles, all about his existence, his traumatic brain injury (a midwife birth in a hospital) that rendered him unable to walk or speak, his early life, and her imagining of alternate worlds for him and for herself as a mother. (You can read a few more details about it in this excellent interview with her and her husband, the poet Craig Morgan Teicher.) In Our Andromeda (the poem itself) she eviscerates herself for naivete, her friends and family for being distant, god for being evil, probability for being cruel, but there's so much more in this poem that I loved, it's not all bitterness, there is excruciating love, too. One of my favorite lines: The truth is you are the truth, / a child born to a liar who is learning / to change. Or how about the long list of what exactly would I be blaming God for, which inserts among mundane administrative missteps the line Setting things in motion so that / this poem would be written? There's a lot more in this collection than just motherhood, that's just the bit that speaks the most to me right now, of course. Highly recommended.

6. This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War, Drew Gilpin Faust


After reading her excellent Mothers of Invention, I dove right into This Republic of Suffering, published in 2008 and slightly more famous, coming as it did on the heels of the beginning of her Harvard presidency. Gratifyingly, there are names of a bunch of Radcliffe people in the acknowledgments who I used to work with, including Amy Paradis, who I credit with inspiring me to go to graduate school. Anyway, this book is completely fascinating, both for the story it tells (I am still getting up to snuff on the Civil War, sorry AP US History class that I largely ignored for the sake of a crush and other distractions, baatasticyou know what I'm talking about!) and for its thought-provoking exploration of killing and death.

As a quick summary, Faust is here to tell you about the massive scale of death, its effects on society, how we attempted to grapple with it on a national scale. She is very, very good at making this story feel real with stories and words from individual soldiers as well as information about larger societal trends and government orders and such. She's good. This book is good. It helped me understand a little better my captivation with wars, too.

If you've followed my book reviews, you might know that this is my second delving into books about wars -- last year I read a lot of books about World War II and the Holocaust; now I'm on a Civil War kick (and also a WWI kick). Sure wars are dramatic and all, but until I read Faust's illuminating chapter 2, titled simply "Killing," I had not really had much insight into why they were fascinating to me. In this chapter, Faust lucidly walks the reader through the processes by which these Victorian-era mostly christian soldiers resisted killing, reconciled it with their religious beliefs, confronted its realities, and gradually lost all fear and moral inhibition about it -- this was especially true for soldiers who witnessed the death of their comrades. Once loosed, some took on an "almost maniac wildness" and it became more about the joy of battle, killing as sport, almost as pleasure, and not necessarily in a depraved sense. Not depraved because of course the entire point of an organized military is that is creates a structure and a form in which natural fears are suppressed (close ranks and the mechanisms of drills that lessen doubt, turn it into muscle memory). Although the Civil War was by no means a precision battlefield, some of the same human tricks were used that have always been used in order to turn reluctant soldiers into soldiers willing and able to kill -- distance, conditioning, propaganda, drills. I realized in reading books about wars I have been learning a lot about how we have killed, but I've only been getting sideways answers to the greater mystery to me, which is why we kill. Or how any person goes from citizen to soldier. I'm not saying that the instinct to attack or defend isn't human; but there is something extra happening in that transformation. This chapter gave me insights into how it worked in 1800s America, which I found invaluable. This only flaw in this chapter is that while Faust capably addresses racist violence during the war, she does not make a substantial connection between racist violence and non-racist violence. For some of these "conflicted Christian" soldiers, wouldn't they have simply been transferring the norms of white-on-black violence to the battlefield against other white soldiers? Perhaps that's too simplistic. But I wish she had addressed that connection. The chapter still stands on its own quite well, though.

A dominant theme of the book is how disruptive it was to lose the expected norms of a Good Death, which was widely understood and described in many ars moriendi books. A Good Death happened at home, surrounded by kin, and you reconciled with god (not necessarily as a confession, just in a "I accept god's will and am willing to die" way). There was an elaborate art of interpreting a person's fate from their last words, motions and facial expressions. And then of course the rituals of burial, memorial, and formal mourning. Men died far from home, some were blown to bits and unrecoverable, men were buried if they were lucky, graves named and location recorded if they were luckier, letters sent to their families only sometimes. Until after the Civil War, there was no conception of the state as an entity responsible to soldiers after their death; there was no ambulance service to remove bodies from the battlefield until the last year of the war, there was no central way to record all the names of the enlisted, never mind if or how they had died. Faust's accounting of this accounting is fascinating.

Faust talks about how some argue that in the modern age we have become disconnected from death -- it happens in hospitals, not at home, fewer religious rituals proscribe its progress. But she points out that in the Civil War era, when death was everywhere and touched nearly every family, "great effort was [still] required to control and repudiate its horrors" (p. 177), largely through the ars moriendi of a Good Death. Many people expressed the sentiment that the prospect of a loved one going into battle was less terrifying than if a loved one was to go to hell -- in this era a reality that could be indicated by a missing body, missing last words (many were made up or embellished by comrades who had promised to write to the families), or an attitude of rejection or anger at death.

I recall being a kid or 11 or 12 and first expressing my lack of belief in god, and people would ask, so what do you believe happens when you die? I still believe what I believed then -- that the obliteration of ego, of thought, of consciousness, can be its own kind of heaven. A kind of dissolution, a boundarylessness, that's what I picture happening: in a kind of zen way, a complete dissolving of the boundaries between what makes up "me" and what makes up "everything else" at an atomic level. In a way, this idea of losing the boundary between myself and the world is why I have articulated loudly to my spouse and my family that I never want to be embalmed -- it seems like a sort of denial of the permeability of death, to me, a barrier to decomposition. Thinking about all this, I still found it kind of bizarre how important Civil War era people found all the rituals and whatnot of death; it strikes me as almost more important to believe in hell than to believe in god, to make it so pressing to achieve the Good Death. Heaven, in their conception, was only newly conceived as a domestic picture of bliss -- the family together forever. The centrality of family was huge, for survival and as a mechanism to understand society and reality; perhaps it is the fear of the loss of the family that was more real to them than anything else.

As a last note, if you are ever putting together a course reader that needs to answer the question, how do writers respond to war, you could do a lot worse than Faust's excellent chapter 6, "Believing and Doubting" which discusses the roots of modernism during Civil War era writing, most notably through Ambrose Bierce and Emily Dickinson, but also others. I found this part particularly affecting: not just society and individual family bonds were threatened, but language itself, form, knowledge and knowing. (But then, I always was a closet deconstructuralist.)

4. Mother Nature: A History of Mothers, Infants, and Natural Selection, Sarah Blaffer Hrdy

Hrdy is justifiably the most influential, challenging voice in anthropology and evolutionary biology, and I found this book almost as enjoyable as her more recent Mothers and Others (see my 2012 review): where M&O was elegantly written and compact, Mother Nature tends to ramble in a few places, is much longer generally, and may have benefited from a more canny editor. But these are basically quibbles with what is an amazing, amazing book. Let me tell you more about how I learned to stop feeling guilty about my parenting experiences and love Hrdy even more than I did before.

Hrdy's central thesis is that maternal love as we know it is far from instinctual, it is in fact conditional, a phenomenon that emerges piecemeal and is "chronically sensitive to external clues." Humans do not, and have not over evolutionary history, nurtured every child that is born. We evaluate, at birth, both the baby and ourselves and the world around us. The bonding process is driven over the first couple weeks by the breastfeeding hormonal feedback loop, which is elicited by the newborn, and the whole thing is conditional on maternal acceptance of the child physically and emotionally, taking into account her perceptions of sufficient social support. Mothers who reject infants, fail to bond, abandon infants in dumpsters, commit infanticide -- as Hrdy explains, we can define these behaviors as mental illness, but in fact they are not aberrations but the finely tuned survival instincts of a species that has depended on a highly cooperative child-rearing model throughout our history on the planet (to read about that in depth, read her other book, Mothers & Others). Countering a couple centuries of Victorian-influenced anthropology, Hrdy musters a vast amount of evidence to point out that we aren't driven by the survival of our species as a whole (i.e. nurture all newborns by default, as some species do) but rather by context-specific decisions, hierarchy-driven maneuverings, and calculations over the long term. It was no contradiction in human history to abandon or kill a first child, perhaps even several early children, and then to rear a subsequent child (once social support is in place) with a perfectly "normal" amount of maternal love. It is how we have always survived and adapted to changing circumstances, since to rear an ill-timed or unsupported infant could mean death or ostracization (which may as well mean death in some circumstances).

Perhaps the hardest part of this book is the extensive exploration of the traditions and cultural practices of infanticide and newborn abandonment through history. There were many forms of sanctioned child abandonment, from the classic Greek "exposed on a hillside" practice to more prosaic hunter-gatherer tribes who simply abandoned a newborn in the bush, to a practice in early China of a special early-morning cart that would gather up babies drowned by midwives in milk buckets, to the extensive (and extensively fatal) system of foundling homes and orphanages in pre-modern Europe, like the Ospedale degli Innocenti in Florence, which like many others offered an anonymous outdoor cradle or wheel so you could pass the child off anonymously. Fatality rates in these institutions were sky-high, with perhaps 20% of children surviving in a good year in a good institution. Rates of 99% mortality were not uncommon. Hrdy points out that while it might be preferable to reabsorb unwanted fetuses (as some species do), or in modern times to perform an abortion early on, we have actually evolved to have a ~72hr window after birth during which we are able to decide to abandon or expose a child, with fewer repercussions -- milk has not come in fully yet, and the cycle of prolactin/oxytocin has not been activated between mother and child. She comes back to this point several times: there is no "instinctual" birth behavior in humans that creates love in the moments or even hours immediately after birth. The cycle is primed in those early hours, and the infant itself is armed with a myriad of systems designed to help it to latch on (like the breast crawl phenomenon) or designed to make it irresistible (plump cheeks, wide eyes, calls of distress). What we have created as the "maternal love" phenomenon is a socialized phenomenon (one which was also conveniently used to argue that women are nothing but mothers in many Victorian and other early anthropological views), no more cemented into the human experience than our variable expectations and traditions around what we believe about the pain of childbirth and our ability to withstand it with or without help. This is not to say that no one experiences instant love; but that it is no more "natural" than ambivalence, and that we have many socialized beliefs that play into it.

There was also a section that fascinated me on theories about post-partum depression. One compelling theory posits that it is an artifact of a clash of instincts: a mother who was prone to depression, or who lacked sufficient help postpartum, may have chosen to abandon her newborn in another era. However, we have few culturally sanctioned ways to do that now. In this way, PPD may arise as a clash between systems designed to tell us "bad time to keep a baby" and our culturally conditioned belief that we want to keep the baby, or that we have no choice. Furthermore, PPD is also in some theories a remnant of lactational aggression: it appears as lactation ramps up, at a time when prolactin spikes and dopamine drops, sabotaging our ability to maintain adequate social relationships for postpartum support at precisely the time when we need it most. Either way, it seems exquisitely fine-tuned to remind us that no matter what, we did not evolve to sit alone in a house with a newborn all day long, and modern nuclear family patterns are often not adequate to the task of replacing the much wider systems of support available in extended families or near-kin tribal structures that we evolved to require.

One of the most interesting conclusions I drew from reading this book was how aspirational and ultimately impossible it is to achieve the reality of every child a wanted child. We know already, of course, that this assumes perfect foreknowledge, which is impossible even without Hrdy's theories; but it also attempts to circumvent an evolutionary instinct to keep fetuses to term and decide after the birth whether circumstances have improved, and whether to keep or reject a child. Abortion and birth control can go a long way to reducing the circumstances that led many women throughout humanity's history to abandon children, but they will never perfectly replace that 72-hour flexibility that became privileged through evolution.

Mother Nature went a long way towards helping me understand my own initial indifference (and occasional estrangement) from my own newborn: there is no perfect instant love encoded in our instincts. There is a waiting period, during which we are primed for love, and then we ride its hormonal track, so to speak, but only a little bit later. There is no magical missed opportunity during those earliest postpartum moments and hours -- though of course there is plenty we can do to make those moments either gentle and humane, or abstract and medicinal. I believe the homebirth movement has begun to correct the damages done by the industrialization and mechanization of birth, but we still have a long way to go to dismantle the (usually Western) socialized myths and beliefs about perfect maternal instincts and instant bonding. I recall so clearly when my mother said in the delivery room how much she loved watching Kirk and I fall in love with Penny Jane; it rankled because I felt no such thing, and felt guilty about it. I was interested in my newborn. Was it the start of the process? Yes. Was it a repetition of a received, socially encoded myth? Also yes.

There is much, much more in this book that I'm leaving out (to summarize: women prefer quality in birth spacing! men prefer quantity! settled living patterns and resource competition drove male-controlled reproduction patterns! grandmothers are the key to our species' longevity!) but if you are at all intrigued by some of these conclusions, I highly recommend delving into this rich, complex book. It explores history, anthropology, literature, art, sociology, evolutionary biology, plenty of monkeys, and lots of fantastic (but respectful) take-downs of the Victorian holdover theories that biased the early attachment theory researchers like Bowlby. If Hrdy's Mothers and Others was the best unintentional utopia, where I learned about how our species evolved to utilize large non-nuclear family structures to provision and support infants and mothers, then Mother Nature was a way to repair my entire set of assumptions and guilt over how I bonded with my child, and how to understand these processes in the context of our evolutionary history. I can't recommend it highly enough.


ETA If you want to read more about Hrdy's personal background and how it plays into her scholarship intimately, she talked about motherhood and 1970s Harvard in a two part interview with Scientific American last March: Part I and Part II.