Of the half-dozen books I bought in preparation for recycling some of the old stonewalls up through the woods on our farm into a new retaining wall, this is my clear favorite. It is more detailed than John Vivian's Building Stone Walls, particularly when it comes to retaining walls. Because it is not as glossy and illustrated as Haywards' Stone in the Garden or David Reed's Stonescaping (which are, by the way, both excellent in their own right), I'm not as wary about taking it out to the project with me.

The text is clear and concise, and includes a healthy dose of stone philosophy and the index is detailed enough to help the do-it-yourselfer find what he needs, but short enough so that he can find what he wants, even if he does not know the proper name for it.

However, the main reason I like this book so much is Gardner's assurance that anyone who puts his mind to it -- which includes me -- can build a stone wall. While his respect for old stone walls and the art of building them is obvious, he also has a healthy dose of practicality. "The notion that all, or even most, of the old stone-work we see around New England is the result of concentrated applicaion of arcane skill," he write, " is demonstrably false." Once that sacred cow was out of the way, my confidence level went up and anything seemed possible.

The black & white drawings that illustrate the text are clear and very helpful.

This is a wonderful book...it's about stone walls, and about building stone walls, and all the things stone walls have meant and done for 350 years, and what it feels like to live and work in a place where just past the urban sprawl every one of those 350 years blends with this one (and if you look out the corner of your eye there're older times than that hiding in the shadows.)

It's not a homeowner howto, though it's got everything you can learn from a book. It's a book for masons who love their craft, New Englanders who love their home place, and anyone who likes good work. Whatever that means to you.

What a remarkable book! Ms. Allport has all of her science together and presents it in a way that rivets the reader to the last page. I read this book, pausing to see the conceptual basis for so many of our concepts an actions as parents and as a society, and was sorry it was over.

This is an incredibly fun read if you enjoy natural history. It is filled with info such as why male breasts do not produce milk, or how bats nurse upside down, why wolf milk is high fat, or why some ewes abandon lambs. It is also an excellent intro to the often radical ideas of Robert Trivers, an incredible story in his own right and about whom some book ought to be written. For example, in some primate groups alpha females have more female children than males--why?

Doesn't have much about human parenting and often avoid tough questions and issues (do alpha female humans also have more female children, and if it is natural for young inexperienced ewes to abandon their young, what about teen moms?). It veers away from anything controversial--teenage pregnancy,for example, and why we really should nurse human babies on demand-- it just offers up the science, bare, fun, sweet, and as harmlessly as possible.

You're left feeling a bit off--are there lessons to be learned or not, I want to know. The implications remain un-explored. That perhaps is a future book.

Still, great fun. Really a great gift for new parents.

This fun insightful book began with the author's seemingly simply query based on something she witnessed on her own farm: Why did a ewe walk away from the lamb she had just given birth to? More importantly, why did the author expect that the ewe should have a mothering instinct and that it was wrong/bad for her to walk away? From here, she examines the behaviors of males and females in various species. The book illuminates gender roles and their origins in an evolutionary scheme, but also asks interesting questions like: isn't crying a problematic adaptation for primate and human babies, since it would draw predators near? (Answer: that is why apes sleep in groups, and in trees). When human parenting has got you down, sleepless, or just plain confused, this book will inform and amuse you, and remind you that we, too, are animals, and that some of our behavior is better understood in that way.

This is a great book for people who like to look at nature or who are or will be parents. I learned so much about animal parents and their relationship with their offspring. It will make you reflect upon the behaviors of humans to their children. It is a great read, you will learn why ducklings follow the first thing they see upon hatching to how the percentage of milkfat in breastmilk will tell you how an animal parents.

This book was truly an unexpected pleasure. Its not a how-to book but rather a history of the stone wall. Surprisingly, that history takes the reader into a wide range of topics: geology, botany, architecture, colonial american history, among others. Because stone walls were so commonplace, their builders left very little discussion of their motives and means. Allport acts almost like a detective, piecing the story together. Additionally, because she clearly loves stone walls (and writes well), she is able to capture the mystery and the beauty of her subject. This is a great read for a wide audience: from the historically curious to anyone who wishes to build a wall of stone.

If you think that a book on the stone walls of New England might be "dry," you are wrong. This brilliantly written and researched book is as riveting as any thriller. You will gain a new appreciation for the countless anonymous generations that went before us and left their mark-- those beautiful, enduring stone walls. An absolutely fascinating book!

Zoners and Atkins fanatics beware, this book provides strong arguments against your folly!

Allport's Primal Feast takes on the role of food in the evolutionary pschychology of human nature. This is a much-needed populalization of ideas that helps to balance the field's more alluring obsession with sex. I was most taken with her discussions of macronutrients in the human diet and how these shape culture and nature, and with her discussions about diet variety, foraging instincts, and the interesting ideas she has about the evolution of handedness--very intriguing!

However the book feels a little bit incomplete to me. It's "thin" on the subject of eating disorders and sexual competition and I thought she could have gone much further in discussing Hurtado's and Hawkes's work in hunter-gatherer cultures. Surely, food-sharing and caching are at least as important in shaping human nature as sex and status-seeking. Still what is here is a great introduction to the work of these two important anthropologists.

Cultural versus true evolutionary forces are also not well distingusihed in this book and Allport slips too easily from one to the other and back. It would have been more interesting to see how these are independent and how they are interdependent. She is far stronger on the science and evolution than she is with the cultural anthroplogy.

Allport's previous book The Natural History of Parenting has many excellent sections that seem to "complete" this book, in particalur the sections on breastfeeding and feeding children. It is important to note that in both her science books, Allport is profoundly influenced by Robert Trivers thinking on parent-child genetic conflict.

This book is also a bit too "anecdotal" for my taste. While I enjoy most of her personal stories, I found some of the writing over the top. The worst of it is over by chapter 2 and then she settles down to some serious writing.

An EXCELLENT bibliography with many good leads for further reading in a rather diffuse area of evolutionary psychology.

Susan Allport combines facts, theory and speculation from many fields of research to present an entirely unique view on the evolution of mankind. I could not put this book down and have since gotten my mate to start reading it as well. It has so much information that it will provide topics for conversation for weeks. I highly recommend this book.

Allport sees herself as a forager, a creature with a drive to look for food. She attributes this drive to her ancestors who spent much of their time searching the forests and savannas for food. From this personal observation, keenly felt, Allport branches out to thoughts about food and eating, from the habits of the deer and squirrels near her home to the proclivities of the chimpanzees of Africa. Primary among her concerns is how these behaviors relate to human food consumption, and how the search for food and what we eat has shaped our social structure and psychology.

This is a very interesting read, graceful written and full of intriguing bits of information. Did you know, for example, that virtually all common spices, oregano, thyme, cinnamon, rosemary, etc. have "powerful antibacterial and antifungal effects" (p. 118)? Or that there is a beeswax-eating bird used by the Hadza people of Tanzania that leads them to bee hives? The bird loves beeswax but is unable to open a hive, but is rewarded when people do. This "honey guide" is thought to be human kind's "oldest surviving partner in predation, much older than the dog or the falcon" (p. 148). Or that corn treated with an alkali (tortillas are made with lime) frees the otherwise unavailable essential amino acid tryptophan from the corn so that those who depend heavily upon corn in their diet will not develop pellagra, an often-fatal dietary disease? This is just one example of an eating technique developed through trial and error and happenstance that allows a people to live on an otherwise incomplete diet--a "cuisine" altered only at considerable risk.

Allport also goes from observation to speculate on such things as the origins of tool use, the sexual differentiation of hunting and gathering, and the use of food for social and sexual advantage. Generally she follows the well-documented and successful path of evolutionary biology and psychology, noting along the way where earlier ideas have proven wrong or incomplete (Raymond Dart's mistaken belief that Australopithecus was largely a meat-eater (p. 157) is a case in point.) She is insightful and presents her arguments well so that we tend to agree with what she says. Her idea that tool use began with females and then later spread to males, as presented in Chapter Twelve "The Nature of Food," is persuasive. Particularly interesting to me is the material on the nature of omnivores and how food choices dictate physiology and vice versa. For example, primates with their big brains that require large amounts of energy rich foods cannot subsist on leaves and other foods requiring long intestinal tracts and a slow-motion life style. Or, reverse that and observe that creatures that have the ability to find and consume energy rich foods can grow big, energy-demanding brains, while those who eat leaves and other foods that require a lot of digestion can't afford to grow a big brain.

Also interesting is the chapter on food and cooking aptly entitled, "The Only Cooks on the Planet." Cooking and other processing techniques such as leeching and preserving freed up many foods for our consumption not available to other creatures. In this connection, Allport makes the astute observation that the technique of cultivation, that of agriculturally engineering energy-rich and less toxic foods, made these plants edible to other animals creating a new ecology of vermin (p. 124). On the other hand the technique of cooking makes foods available only to humans.

One of the more startling observations made by Allport, who really has a keen eye for connections, is this on page 60. She is discussing the differentiation of sex cells, the female stationary and energy-rich, the male mobile and without nutritive value. She quotes biologist Robert Trivers as saying, "An undifferentiated system of sex cells seems highly unstable." She concludes, "So as soon as selection favored those that invested their sex cells with nutritious substances, it also favored those that cheated the system and became adept at numbers and mobility instead. As soon as selection favored eggs, it also favored sperm. And there you have it: the origin of the sexes."

This is startling because biologists are still in a quandary about how sex began. The main and latest idea has been that sexuality developed as a result of the arms race between the organism and its microbial predators (see Margulis, Lynn and Dorion Sagan. Mystery Dance: On the Evolution of Human Sexuality (1991) or Matt Ridley's The Red Queen (1993) for examples of this argument). Here however Allport suggests that one of those predators may have been another cell bent not on consumption, per se, but on reproduction! And so they formed a symbiosis...

I am pleased to note that although Allport doesn't mince words when it comes to pointing out male maleficence--apt and hard-hitting is her discussion of how in many cultures males manufacture food taboos that limit the foods females can eat, saving the biggest and best portions for themselves--she plays fair throughout, and at no time gets bogged down in the sexism that preoccupies some writers. On page 190, for example, she states quite directly that females shape male behavior by their reproductive choices, thereby implying that females are also responsible for the male violence that we post-moderns so wisely abhor.

Allport appropriately ends the book with a plea that we not turn the planet into "a giant McDonald's dispensing Happy Meals" to "Homo Sapiens alone," and that we not overuse the world's resources. Amen to that, and kudos to Susan Allport for writing such an interesting and wisdom-filled book.