Woman: An Intimate Geography


Natalie Angier - 1999
    Angier takes readers on a mesmerizing tour of female anatomy and physiology that explores everything from organs to orgasm, and delves into topics such as exercise, menopause, and the mysterious properties of breast milk.A self-proclaimed "scientific fantasia of womanhood." Woman ultimately challenges widely accepted Darwinian-based gender stereotypes. Angier shows how cultural biases have influenced research in evolutionary psychology (the study of the biological bases of behavior) and consequently led to dubious conclusions about "female nature." such as the idea that women are innately monogamous while men are natural philanderers.But Angier doesn't just point fingers; she offers optimistic alternatives and transcends feminist polemics with an enlightened subversiveness that makes for a joyful, fresh vision of womanhood. Woman is a seminal work that will endure as an essential read for anyone intersted in how biology affects who we are as women, as men, and as human beings.

Why is the Penis Shaped Like That?: And Other Reflections on Being Human


Jesse Bering - 2010
    Exploring the history of cannibalism, the neurology of people who are sexually attracted to animals, the evolution of human body fluids, the science of homosexuality, and serious questions about life and death, Bering astutely covers a generous expanse of our kaleidoscope of quirks and origins.With his characteristic irreverence and trademark cheekiness, Bering leaves no topic unturned or curiosity unexamined, and he does it all with an audaciously original voice. Whether you're interested in the psychological history behind the many facets of sexual desire or the evolutionary patterns that have dictated our current mystique and phallic physique, Why Is the Penis Shaped Like That? is bound to create lively discussion and debate for years to come.

How We Do It: The Evolution and Future of Human Reproduction


Robert Martin - 2013
    Why are a quarter of a billion sperm cells needed to fertilize one egg? Are women really fertile for only a few days each month? How long should women breast-feed? In How We Do It, primatologist Robert Martin draws on forty years of research to locate the origins of everything from sex cells to baby care—and to reveal what’s really �natural” when it comes to making and raising babies. He acknowledges that although it’s not realistic to reproduce like our ancestors did, there are surprising consequences to behavior we take for granted, such as bottle feeding, cesarean sections, and in vitro fertilization. How We Do It shows that once we understand our evolutionary past, we can consider what worked, what didn’t, and what it all means for the future of our species.

The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature


Matt Ridley - 1993
    The Red Queen answers dozens of other riddles of human nature and culture -- including why men propose marriage, the method behind our maddening notions of beauty, and the disquieting fact that a woman is more likely to conceive a child by an adulterous lover than by her husband. Brilliantly written, The Red Queen offers an extraordinary new way of interpreting the human condition and how it has evolved.

Sex and Punishment: Four Thousand Years of Judging Desire


Eric Berkowitz - 2012
    However, that's not to say that the Sumerians, Victorians, and every civilization in between and beyond have not tried, wielding their most formidable weapon: the law. At any given point in time, some forms of sex were condoned while others were punished mercilessly. Jump forward or backward a century or two (and often far less than that), and the harmless fun of one time period becomes the gravest crime in another. Sex and Punishment tells the story of the struggle throughout the millennia to regulate the most powerful engine of human behavior.Writer and lawyer Eric Berkowitz uses flesh-and-blood cases—much flesh and even more blood—to evoke the entire sweep of Western sex law, from the savage impalement of an Ancient Mesopotamian adulteress to the imprisonment of Oscar Wilde in 1895 for "gross indecency." The cast of Sex and Punishment is as varied as the forms taken by human desire itself: royal mistresses, gay charioteers, medieval transvestites, lonely goat-lovers, prostitutes of all stripes, London rent boys. Each of them had forbidden sex, and each was judged—and justice, as Berkowitz shows, rarely had much to do with it. With the light touch of a natural storyteller, Berkowitz spins these tales and more, going behind closed doors to reveal the essential history of human desire.

A Billion Wicked Thoughts: What the World's Largest Experiment Reveals about Human Desire


Ogi Ogas - 2011
     For his groundbreaking sexual research, Alfred Kinsey and his team interviewed 18,000 people, relying on them to honestly report their most intimate experiences. Using the Internet, the neuroscientists Ogas and Gaddam quietly observed the raw sexual behaviors of half a billion people. By combining their observations with neuroscience and animal research, these two young neuroscientists finally answer the long-disputed question: what do people really like? Ogas and Gaddam's findings are transforming the way scientists and therapists think about sexual desire. In their startling book, Ogas and Gaddam analyze a "billion wicked thoughts" on the Internet: a billion Web searches, a million individual search histories, a million erotic stories, a half-million erotic videos, a million Web sites, millions of online personal ads, and many other enormous sources of sexual data in order to understand the true differences between male and female desires, including: ?Men and women have hardwired sexual cues analogous to our hardwired tastes-there are sexual versions of sweet, sour, salty, savory, and bitter. But men and women are wired with different sets of cues. ?The male sexual brain resembles a reckless hunter, while the female sexual brain resembles a cautious detective agency. ?Men form their sexual interests during adolescence and rarely change. Women's sexual interests are plastic and change frequently. ?The male sexual brain is an "or gate": A single stimulus can arouse it. The female sexual brain is an "and gate": It requires many simultaneous stimuli to arouse it. ?When it comes to sexual arousal, men prefer overweight women to underweight women, and a significant number of men seek out erotic images of women in their 40s, 50s, and 60s. ?Women enjoy writing and sharing erotic stories with other women. The fastest growing genre of erotic stories for women are stories about two heterosexual men having sex. ?Though the male sexual brain is much more different from the female sexual brain than is commonly believed, the sexual brain of gay men is virtually identical to that of straight men. Featuring cutting-edge, jaw-dropping science, this wildly entertaining and controversial book helps readers understand their partner's sexual desires with a depth of knowledge unavailable from any other source. Its fascinating and occasionally disturbing findings will rock our modern understanding of sexuality, just as Kinsey's reports did sixty years ago.

The Lost Art of Putting


Gary Nicol - 2018
     To be childish is to expect a certain outcome will come your way, that you deserve to hole the putt or that you shouldn’t miss from a certain distance. The Lost Art of Putting will help you become more child-like on the greens and less childish. Leading tour coach Gary Nicol and performance coach Karl Morris have 60 years’ combined coaching experience. It is their belief that the game of golf is not about finding ‘the’ way to do it but more a case of discovering, or perhaps more importantly uncovering, ‘your’ way to do it. The perspective and concepts they share with you in this book have the potential to liberate you so that you can experience what you are truly capable of on the greens.

Not Gay: Sex Between Straight White Men


Jane Ward - 2015
    But can straight white guys experience the same easy sexual fluidity, or would kissing a guy just mean that they are really gay? Not Gay thrusts deep into a world where straight guy-on-guy action is not a myth but a reality: there’s fraternity and military hazing rituals, where new recruits are made to grab each other’s penises and stick fingers up their fellow members’ anuses; online personal ads, where straight men seek other straight men to masturbate with; and, last but not least, the long and clandestine history of straight men frequenting public restrooms for sexual encounters with other men. For Jane Ward, these sexual practices reveal a unique social space where straight white men can—and do—have sex with other straight white men; in fact, she argues, to do so reaffirms rather than challenges their gender and racial identity.Ward illustrates that sex between straight white men allows them to leverage whiteness and masculinity to authenticate their heterosexuality in the context of sex with men. By understanding their same-sex sexual practice as meaningless, accidental, or even necessary, straight white men can perform homosexual contact in heterosexual ways. These sex acts are not slippages into a queer way of being or expressions of a desired but unarticulated gay identity. Instead, Ward argues, they reveal the fluidity and complexity that characterizes all human sexual desire. In the end, Ward’s analysis offers a new way to think about heterosexuality—not as the opposite or absence of homosexuality, but as its own unique mode of engaging in homosexual sex, a mode characterized by pretense, dis-identification and racial and heterosexual privilege. Daring, insightful, and brimming with wit, Not Gay is a fascinating new take on the complexities of heterosexuality in the modern era.

The Other Side of Desire: Four Journeys into the Far Realms of Lust and Longing


Daniel Bergner - 2009
    How do we come to be who we are sexually? How do we cope with the forces of desire? How can we understand the relationship between the transcendent and the physical, between the wish for love and the anarchy of the erotic? Daniel Bergner looks for answers in the stories of four people whose unusual desires raise fascinating questions about the erotic differences between men and women and the nature of ecstasy itself.

Advanced Biology


Michael Kent - 2000
    It provides complete coverage of the new A- and AS-level core specifications being taught from September 2000 onwards and presents concepts in separate, easily accessible double-page spreads. Each spread starts with learning objectives and ends with questions, to check understanding, making the book particularly suitable for self-study.

How to Live Dangerously: The Hazards of Helmets, the Benefits of Bacteria, and the Risks of Living Too Safe


Warwick Cairns - 2008
    Yet you'd have to fly every day for the next 26,000 years to assure yourself of dying in a crash. A leisurely canoe ride is more than 100 times deadlier. Think city streets are unsafe? You're more likely to come to harm in your own home, where every year you stand a 1 in 650 chance of being injured by your bed, mattress, or pillows—and each year 800 Americans die in accidents involving soft furnishings.We live in a world governed by fear, where packets of peanuts "may contain nuts" and children must be ever on the alert to "stranger danger." And yet, life expectancy has never been higher. Crime rates have plunged. Even unintentional injuries are down. So if we're so safe, why are we so afraid?How to Live Dangerously is a hilarious, straight-talking look at the things that terrify us. It considers life's real risks, not to mention the often ridiculous methods we've contrived to keep ourselves "safe." It encourages you to ignore fearmongers and embrace a new kind of freedom, in which we all worry a little less—and live a whole lot more.

The Scientific American Book of Love, Sex and the Brain: The Neuroscience of How, When, Why and Who We Love


Judith Horstman - 2011
    Among the findings: parental love makes our brain bigger, sex and orgasm make it healthier, social isolation makes it miserable-and although the craving for romantic love can be described as an addiction, friendship may actually be the most important loving relationship of your life.Based on recent studies and articles culled from the prestigious Scientific American and Scientific American Mind magazines, The Scientific American Book of Love, Sex, and the Brain offers a fascinating look at how the brain controls our loving relationships, most intimate moments, and our deep and basic need for connection.

Code of War


J.W. Clay - 2021
    She's a skilled hacker, and her focus is Cyber Kinetic Eliminations--remote assassinations conducted with sophisticated computer systems.With a growing success rate, she's given the ultimate target: a Chinese General who's sole responsibility is the reformation of the People's Republican Army.Can Jen Yates are her team assassinate one of China's most influential men? Can they derail the Chinese Communist Party's reform regimen? Even the thought could have disastrous consequences ...

King Dingaling: An African American Erotica


Cumilla Jenkins - 2019
    Fuck Me. Those are words that Dakota “King Dangling” Jackson likes to hear. He earned his reputation during his porn star days, but everything they say about him is true. He’s a beast in the bedroom. Always has been. Always will be. But has he met his match? Along comes Skyy, and she’s not like any other woman Dakota has ever come across. She doesn’t want love. She just wants to cum. And Dakota was the perfect man for the job. But, somehow, sex always leads to something else. Someone always wants more. But both Dakota, and Skyy, have other lovers in the picture and none of them are willing to give them up without a fight. In this sexy, fast-paced read, find out if King Dingaling will ever get his Queen.

If My Pussy Could Talk


Tamika Smith - 2012
    Makayla Young has over a thousand rules. She has rules about love, life and even sex. When will she ever learn you cannot control and keep a man with rules. Will her rules cause her to loose another man?