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The Female Brain | 
 enlarge | Author: Louann Brizendine
Publisher: Broadway
Category: Book
List Price: $14.95
Buy New: $6.94
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Avg. Customer Rating:  115 reviews
Sales Rank: 4843
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 304
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.3
Dimensions (in): 7.9 x 5.2 x 0.8
ISBN: 0767920104
Dewey Decimal Number: 612.8
EAN: 9780767920100
ASIN: 0767920104
Publication Date: August 7, 2007
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Shipping: International shipping available
Condition: A nice, clean copy.
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Product Description
Why are women more verbal than men? Why do women remember details of fights that men can’t remember at all? Why do women tend to form deeper bonds with their female friends than men do with their male counterparts? These and other questions have stumped both sexes throughout the ages.
Now, pioneering neuropsychiatrist Louann Brizendine, M.D., brings together the latest findings to show how the unique structure of the female brain determines how women think, what they value, how they communicate, and who they love. While doing research as a medical student at Yale and then as a resident and faculty member at Harvard, Louann Brizendine discovered that almost all of the clinical data in existence on neurology, psychology, and neurobiology focused exclusively on males. In response to the overwhelming need for information on the female mind, Brizendine established the first clinic in the country to study and treat women’s brain function.
In The Female Brain, Dr. Brizendine distills all her findings and the latest information from the scientific community in a highly accessible book that educates women about their unique brain/body/behavior.
The result: women will come away from this book knowing that they have a lean, mean, communicating machine. Men will develop a serious case of brain envy.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 110 more reviews...
Challenging the Standard Sociological Model October 12, 2008
I was trained as a sociologists to believe that gender differences were socially constructed. Turns out the science does not support this viewpoint....and gender is an important factor in our brains evolved. Would like to read about my brain...but being having two daughters and a lovely wife it is good to get some insight inside the heads of the folks I live with. Highly recommended.
 The reviewer's page does not fit with the book!!! September 27, 2008
When I entered the page to write my review of what I thought an easy and interesting reading, I found surprise after surprise. First there is the author's blog section:
"Thank you for reading and using my book in your life. I have heard from many of you out there who are reading "The Female Brain"-a soldier in his bunk in Iraq after his wife sent him the book in a care package [...]-a truck driver in the Midwest who just had his wife leave him after twenty-eight years and wants to know how to get her back-and many others of you who are finding answers to questions about female emotions [...], choosing who to love and marry"[???] [...] "I have heard from many men that they wish they had had the information in this book when they were younger-one 82-year-old man wrote saying it would have "saved me from many mistakes with women in my life". I hope you will write to me too and let me know how it has influenced your life and our relationships."[...]
Am I in the wrong book page? This blog of the author does not fit with the book I have read. This sounds more like a "self-help" book or a cliche of differences between sexes. If these statements from the author would have been on any the book's covers, I definitely would not have bought it. The book was supposed to be a science book and I believe it was also what the author wanted to convey (while reading it, it seemed scientific to me). Are the author's hormones to blame for this radical change?. The worst review in this page is the author's blog post itself.
Second I was surprised to see the huge polarization in the reviewers rankings, it seems that either you love the book, because it helps you understand sex differences and will probably help you to cope with them or you truly dislike it for being sexist, unprofessional and full of mistakes. I think the problem is the different expectations with which each reviewer approaches the book (intensified by the author's position). Is it a self-help book or a science book?
As I read the book, I found it interesting and entertaining. What interested me most was how the different genetic information contained in the Y and X chromosomes inffluences the development of the not born babies' brains. How this inffluences the relative sizes of some parts of their brains and its implications for the future sex differences in children and adults. (I hope this Info is not mistaken). The inffluence of hormones during a woman's life cycle is also very interesting. I agree with another reviewer that this is by no means deterministic, but I do believe (in fact I am sure) that hormones have an inffluence on women's moods and probably attitudes.
I would have rated the book with 4 stars until the author herself made me completely distrust everything inside it.
 Male bashing disguised as pseudoscience September 24, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
To be fair, the book has some valid points. For example, it admits that differences between male and female behaviour have a biological cause besides a cultural one. It teaches some bits of information which are useful to know. For example, about the female hormonal cycle. I won't explain about the lack of scientific rigueur of this book because this has been beautifully done in the reviews by David H. Peterzell and Linda Hirshman. I wanted to add something new.
This is one of the most sexist books I have read in a long time. The subtext of this book, the idea which is hammered once and again throughout the book can be summarized like that: "The female brain is superior in everything with respect to the male brain, except for sexual desire and aggression"
Even more outraging is the view of the author towards men who are depicted like some kind of Neandhertals, clearly inferior creatures who are unable to understand the subtleness and goodness of women and are only able of aggression and disruptive behavior. Let's see an example from page 21 :
"So why is a girl born with such a highly tuned machine [her brain] for reading faces [...]? This is the result of millenia of [...] evolutionary hardwiring that once has - and probably still has - real consequences for survival. If you can read faces [...], you can tell what an infant needs. You can predict what a bigger, aggressive male is going to do. And since you're smaller, you probably need to band with other females to fend off attacks from a ticked off caveman - or cavemen".
Look how men are depicted. Bigger, aggressive people who want to attack women. Even more, to defend from such a threat, women have to band with each other. Hello? Is it anything inside the author's brain? Have you seen band of females to protect from males anywhere in the world?
The ones who have ALWAYS protected females from danger have been MEN. When a thief enters a home, it is the male who is going to see what happens while the woman tries to stay in a safe place. When a band is trying to attack a local village, it is the local men who get their guns and go out to face the danger, while women stay in their homes. When an army is trying to invade a country, armies composed of men protect their women for being invaded and submitted. Men die for women to be safe. But the author has such a negative view of men that indulges in a fantasy of women banding themselves, which is absurd and has never happened.
This could be only a mistake, but the book is full of derogatory language against men. "[The boys] would break anything [the girls] have created. The boys pushed the girls around, refused to take turns and would ignore the request of a girl to stop or to give the toy back" (page 11), "[Boys don't use language to get consensus the way girls do but] use language to command others, get things done, brag, threaten, ignore a partner's suggestion and override each other's attempts to speak. It was never long after Joseph's arrival on the playground that Leyla ended up in tears" (page 22). I could go on and on, but you get the idea.
On the contrary, women are depicted as a nearly angelical creatures. "If you are a girl, you are programmed to make sure you keep social harmony" (page 21). Hello? Has somebody worked in an office full of women and see the meanness, intrigues and subtle backstabbing that they have in their social interactions? And what about a woman in a divorce court? Girls are not always mean and boy are not always good but it is certainly not the other way around either.
After reading this book, I can't help wondering why over the last five decades women, who make up roughly 50 percent of the world's population, have claimed only 2 percent of the Nobel Prizes in the sciences, 8 percent in literature and 0 percent in economics. Why is this? If women are so superior to men, if men are only able to obsess about sex and proceed to aggression (because "they are marinated by testosterone") and are superated in any other aspect by women?
(During that period Jews, who were an oppressed minority and who comprise less than 0.5 percent the world's population, have claimed 32 percent of the Nobel Prizes for medicine, 32 percent for physics, 39 percent for economics and 29 percent of all science awards.)
If you are reading this, nearly everything that you see right now has been invented (and done) by a man. Your computer, your Internet, the Web, your room, the electrical power and so on. Maybe men are not that useless and dumb after all, are we?
I am really sorry for the author's son. It won't be easy for him to grow up with a mother who has so much contempt towards boys.
So if you are a feminist eager to feel superior to men, please buy this book and you will be reassured in your beliefs.
Sexist pseudoscience aimed at promoting the author's favourite pharmaceutical September 6, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
As a product of the female brain, I'm afraid to say that this disgraceful excuse for objective research does more damage to the reputation of female brain power than the worst mysogynist could. Just as I would reject research from an Anti-Semite that showed that Jews are genetically disadvantaged, research from a Ku Klux Klanner that showed that African-Americans are stupid, or research by a communist showing that capitalists are more greedy, so I do not consider research from a proven mysandrist who has shown that men are mentally inferior to women.
Louann 'Zoloft' Brizendine does no favours for the many intelligent women in the world by lumping them altogether into a mysogynistic community which 'men will develop a serious case of brain envy' over. Men will only start developing 'brain envy' when these supposedly superior brains put their money where their mouth is, and demonstrate their superiority. Instead, in the realms of brain power and its corresponding creativity these Einsteins have put on a poor show. There are no long lines of women outside the US Patent office, waiting to introduce to the world their brainwaves. Instead, they show the typical failure of supposedly master multitaskers to have any UNItasking skills, which alone can give one the focused, concentrated thinking necessary for a level of mentation far above that ever dreamed of by Ms Zoloft. What she demonstrates with this drivel are the devastating results of combining an unconscious inferiority complex with ignorance and arrogance. I don't know how much commission Brizendine is getting from Zoloft for promoting and marketing their products in a work of 'objective research', but I have no doubt the association of Zoloft with the paltry abilities of Brizendine can in the long term only damage the reputation of the pharmaceutical in question.
Don't, don't, don't waste your money on this book now - soon it will be cheaper than toilet paper, when at last it could be used to serve a useful function.
 Well researched and written August 28, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
I get it now! This book enlightened me to why girls/women do what they do and feel and think the way they do. Confirms what's going through my mind. Does some gender comparison which helps me to understand my teenage son better and accept some of his behavior.
A great gift for friends struggling with teenage daughters.
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