I was working at the Booknook last week and stumbled over this book, Why Beautiful People Have More Daughters. It's a very readable work on Evolutionary Psychology, my very favorite subject, so I splurged and dug out $1 in change. (Yes, we volunteers pay the same price as everyone else.)
The first three chapters explain the basics of Evolutionary Psychology and then the following chapters ask questions and provide answers showing how various human behaviors that can be proven to have been created by evolutionary pressures. For example, men and women are not the same. Women can have a maximum of about 20-25 children over their lifetimes, while men can have thousands if they get rich and popular enough. How many women did Hugh Hefner have sex with? Yeah, that's the point. "But what about The Pill?" Evolution has not yet noticed the invention of birth control so you have to ignore recent history. Our behavior is honed to deal with life 10,000 years ago. This is known as the Savannah Principle, first posited by co-author Satoshi Kanazawa  in an earlier work.
So, a woman is stuck investing 9 months of pregnancy and several years of upbringing into each child, but a "cad" not a dad, can spend 10 minutes and produce a child and never have to worry about raising it. A poor man may never get to produce a child, no woman wants to marry a homeless guy because they don't want their children to starve to death. But a poor woman can marry a middle class man and produce several children, so the reproductive floor for men is zero, but for women it's not zero. This difference, called fitness variance means that men are genetically programmed to work harder to get rich so they can have more children, whereas women have little to gain by getting rich, from a reproductive standpoint. In fact, rich women have no or few children, poor women have more children. So men are rewarded with more children for working hard, women of any income level can have the same number of children, and in fact, women who stay home to have children rather than having a career will have outbred women with careers. Rich men outbreed poor men, so there are more men who are workaholics, but evolution doesn't reward workaholic women, in fact it punishes them because the spinster workaholic woman leaves no offspring. Carly Fiorina, former CEO of Hewlett Packard and current US presidential candidate has no children other than two step daughters, and DNA does not pass down to children who simply live in the same house. This is the real reason there is a gap between men's and women's pay. It may be unfair, but it's natural, and not everything that's natural is fair; just ask the male Praying Mantis who gets decapitated when mating. Nature is not kind, and this book makes that point with gusto. Go ahead and pay men and women the same and the human race will go extinct, no women will stay home to have children, and while women can work as hard as a man, men cannot have babies. Adios mankind.
So why do beautiful people have more daughters? Luckily, the Camas library has one copy of this book, and if you go to the library's website you can put it on hold and get it delivered to your local FVRL library branch. The call number is 155.7 MILLER. Check it out, because I'm not giving up my copy of this fabulous book! It was in the Booknook, you could have bought it yourself but you didn't!

Death By Spelling is both a serious and hilarious book on a topic that everyone who is literate has to deal with. A misspelling in a letter to the editor, a Facebook post or Tweet, a blog, or (God forbid) on your resume can destroy your reputation for life. This is not a book that is to be taken lightly, even after you pay the outrageous price of $1 at the Booknook, you still have to pass a spelling test at the beginning of the book to be allowed entry into the bowels of this book. This book is full of pronunciation guides, stories on word etymology, and tests. For example, we learn that the word bully comes not from male cattle, but from the Dutch word for lover, boel. The section of London known as Rotten Row is derived from the French for The King's Highway, route de roi. If reading excellent prose is a good way to learn to write without making stupid mistakes, then you should get this book, and then hope that you can pass the plethora ( engorged, esp. with blood) of tests. It's an excellent way to avoid making yourself look foolish in public. Well, that and avoiding Karaoke bars.
In the Reference section at the Booknook today!