Malala: The Girl Who Stood up for Education and Changed the World by Malala Yousafzai with Patricia McCormick
From the age of 10, living in the Swat valley in Pakistan and attending her father’s school, Malala campaigned against the efforts of the Taliban to deny her and other girls an education. Two years later, in 2012, she was shot in the head by affronted gunmen, but survived to be honoured internationally as a symbol of courage and freedom. Though she deliberately presents herself in this memoir as a role model for teenage girls, she can’t watch an episode of Ugly Betty without moralising about the commercialisation of Western women; she has little conversations with God; and in media interviews, it isn’t Malala speaking, but “the voice of so many others who wanted to speak but couldn’t”. Perhaps this idealised Malala is indeed a true portrait of an activist for our times, but an attitude of youthful piety blended with middle-aged political rectitude gives this book a high moral tone of precocious missionary zeal.
Malala: The Girl Who Stood up for Education and Changed the World by Malala Yousafzai with Patricia McCormick, Orion, 256pp, £12.99; ebook £12.99. To buy this book for £11.69, visit thetimes.co.uk/bookshop or call 0845 2712134
Why Can’t a Woman Be More Like a Man? The Evolution of Sex and Gender by Lewis Wolpert
To judge by Wolpert’s acknowledgements of professional advice and editing, we may be assured that the text of this book has been rigorously revised in the aftermath of allegations, admitted to be true, that unattributed material from other writers had been discovered in a previous book. Wolpert’s contribution as a developmental biologist to the fiercely contested gender debate accepts the largely uncontroversial idea that evolution has resulted in men being modified women. The modifications have made men faster, stronger, bigger, more aggressive and more likely than women to take physical risks. There seems to be little evidence that either men or women are programmed for monogamy. Though women may give an emotional reasons such as “falling in love” to justify extramarital sex, men just focus on physicality. Women, Wolpert says, though also capable of aggression, were genetically selected to be loving carers for their children. He concludes that there are few differences in the skills of men and women, though a greater degree of “empathy possibly makes women more willing to do what men request”. Though some may wish to argue with much in his book Wolpert candidly admits in his defence it was written by a “classic systematising male”.
Why Can’t a Woman Be More Like a Man? The Evolution of Sex and Gender by Lewis Wolpert, Faber, 210pp, £9.99; ebook £8.99. To buy this book for £9.49, visit thetimes.co.uk/bookshop or call 0845 2712134
Walking Home: My Family and Other Rambles by Clare Balding
Clare Balding would be the ideal surrogate sister or auntie; though fortunately for her she already has an extended family not only of human beings but equally of horses and dogs. Her fraternity/sorority also extends to the people she was walked with for 15 years of the Radio 4 series Ramblings over dry hill and soggy vale or vice versa. With her brother, Andrew, who trains racehorses and thinks a road map is a walking map, Clare decides to walk the 70 miles of the Wayfarer’s Walk near their family stables in Highclere. This makes for lots of family fun, but the meat of the book is her reminiscences of yomping the length and breadth of the country with frankly off-the-wall walkers, raucous ramblers and her producer, Lucy Lunt, who backstops for Clare with a microphone and an instinct for good radio. The joy of this book is Balding’s sheer rapture for life, movement and never shutting up about it.
Walking Home: My Family and Other Rambles by Clare Balding, Viking, 294pp, £20; ebook £11.99. To buy this book for £16, visit thetimes.co.uk/bookshop or call 0845 2712134