Primates of Park Avenue: A Memoir. By Wednesday Martin. Simon & Schuster; 246 pages; $26 and £16.99.
NORTH of New York’s 59th Street and just east of Central Park is the natural habitat of a peculiar breed of higher-order primates. Among the females, a fiercely competitive tribal culture and a dramatic imbalance in sex ratios (reproductive females outnumber males by a factor of two to one) have yielded some evolutionarily extravagant adaptations. Food is plentiful, but calories are severely restricted and often consumed as fluids. To reinforce status and strengthen monogamous pair-bonds, females engage in extremes of ornamentation and elaborate “beautification practices”, which include physical mutilation and gruelling endurance rites. Although they appear powerful, these females occupy a socially precarious position: they rely on males for access to scarce resources and their lives are almost wholly consumed by descendant worship. Because children are such costly status objects, large numbers are a conspicuous sign of wealth.
Such are the customs and rituals of motherhood on Manhattan’s Upper East...
from The Economist: Books and arts http://ift.tt/1Gjec8Z
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