Books: Making a Man of Her

If you're picking up on an undertone of empathy with the hairier sex, you're right. This isn't a we-are-the-world book in which Vincent rejoices in our common humanity. It's too subtle for that, too smart and too honest. If anything, she found the gender gap to be even more unleapable than she had expected. But she did come to believe that some feminist sniping at men is just too easy, that if women tried harder to understand men, they'd realize that men too are trapped by patriarchal prejudices in their own way. "I think men have been sort of forced to learn women's language, through the feminist movement," she says, "but women haven't seemed to evince a curiosity in learning men's language. Men have ways of communicating that women don't understand. And we think, because it's not our way, that nothing is being said." Ned would probably agree. Even though he's way too manly to say so.