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Demonic Males: Apes and the Origins of Human Violence
by Richard Wrangham and Dale Peterson
Houghton Mifflin, 1996
368 pages. $24.95
Richard Wrangham's Demonic Males is not a book primarily about homosexuality, but it is destined to become a milestone in the progress of gay science. Every gay or lesbian graduate student should read this book, regardless of one's discipline, and everyone reading this review should read it, too; it's that important. This concise, well-written book, aimed at the intelligent layperson, tells a wonderful story.
Wrangham is now a professor of anthropology at Harvard. In the interest of full disclosure, I should state that Wrangham and I were graduate student buddies together--he in anthro and I in biology. Everyone knew that Richard was on his way to something big, and this book proves it.
Most of Demonic Males is an attempt to understand why certain...