by Anne Moir & David Jessel. Published by Carol Publishing Group (New York, 1991). Available from National Vanguard Books for $20.95, postpaid.

"To maintain that [men and women] are the same in aptitude, skill, or behavior is to build a society based on a biological and scientific lie." (Moir & Jessel)

Does the opposite sex mystify you? Do you wonder why he is so uncommunicative? Are you amazed at times by her intuition? Brain Sex is a book dedicated to demystifying the differences between male and female behavior. Men and women act differently, according to authors Moir and Jessel, because our brains are structured differently.

Feminism holds that, except for obvious anatomical differences related to reproduction, men and women are essentially the same. Feminists argue that psychological differences -- differences in interests, mental abilities, or emotions -- are caused by social conditioning, not by genes. This book directly contradicts modern feminist theory, and it documents its conclusions with a myriad of scientific studies. It is ironic that "[r]ecent decades have witnessed two contradictory processes: the development of scientific research into the differences between the sexes, and the political denial that such differences exist." The evidence, however, is now "conclusive" and "incontrovertible" that men and women have different mentalities and thus perceive the world differently.

Moir and Jessel explain that the presence or absence of hormones is as important as XX or XY chromosomes in determining the sex of a fetus. Sex hormones working on the embryonic brain and nervous system cause the structure or "wiring" to develop differently in males and females. It is these sex hormones that "bear the ultimate biochemical responsibility for producing gender-related differences in interests, cognitive style, [and] gender role differences. . . ." What are these sex-based mental differences?

Men's brains are more specialized (which has advantages and disadvantages). Their abilities are those centered in the right hemisphere of the brain -- understanding spatial relationships and abstractions, seeing shapes and patterns, grasping the big picture. Women's abilities are less specific: The two spheres of the female brain are able to communicate more easily. Their strengths, however, lie in the left hemisphere -- verbal and linguistic skills; assimilating practical, concrete information; keeping track of the details. Men are the world's explorers and inventors. According to the authors, ninety-nine per cent of all patents applied for today are registered by men. Women are better at "people" skills: teaching and care-giving. Eighty-three per cent of elementary school teachers are women.

Differing abilities and the resulting sexual division of labor have a survival advantage and an evolutionary origin. Most of our race's existence has been spent in hunter-gatherer societies. Men were the hunters and protectors; women were the gatherers and nurturers. Men needed greater strength and speed to track and kill large animals. They also needed spatial abilities to be able to hurl a spear into the flank of a woolly mammoth and find their way back to camp. Women, who were pregnant or nursing most of their adult lives, needed to stay closer to camp. They could use their more acute sense of taste, touch, and smell to locate and select the best nuts and berries and then use their better coordination for rapid, repetitive fine motor tasks to gather them.

Some of the most interesting chapters of the book deal with contemporary heterosexual relationships. Men and women are attracted by their physical differences, yet our psychological differences keep us apart. One tip offered to guys: The best way to a woman's heart is through her ears, since the male voice is what many women find most seductive.

Why are men and women so different? The authors find it "hard to understand nature's plan in arranging this inherent incompatibility between the two sexes of the species. Maybe if we all felt and thought alike we would soon get bored with each other." At this point a better grounding in socio-biology would help explain the survival functions of different reproductive strategies.

The book also has a chapter dealing with sexual deviance. Apparently there is no single cause for homosexuality, and there may be two basic types: primary (congenital) and secondary (environmental). However, the more extreme forms of sexual confusion such as transsexuality, where the unfortunate individual feels "trapped in the body of the opposite sex," are certainly biological in origin. While the authors make a plea for tolerance toward sexual deviance, they admit that "intolerance may be biologically wired into our brains as a part of aggressive behavior to the outsider."

The authors give us information on psychological differences between men and women but do not tell us what these differences might mean for society, yet no one can read a book such as Brain Sex without thinking about the implications of its findings for society. Feminists might argue that even if we accept male and female physical and psychological differences as innate, there is some overlap. Some men are shorter than some women, and some women are better mathematicians than some men. Shouldn't we treat everyone as an individual? If only one women in a thousand would make a good paratrooper, shouldn't she be allowed to "be all that she can be"?

The answer to this question comes down to fundamental values. If individualism is our guiding principle, if individual rights and self-fulfillment are society's highest goals, perhaps an argument might be made for a female paratrooper. Even then one runs into all sorts of practical problems with discipline and morale and with inefficiencies (separate showers, etc.). If , however, society's goal is the advancement of a racial community, it's not difficult to see how destructive individualism, especially the feminist variant of that ideology, has been. A dysgenic birthrate among better-educated women, a weakening of the family, and the breakdown of civility are, to an extent, by-products of contemporary feminism.

A strong case can be made that a majority of women have been hurt by feminism -- the feminization of poverty and devaluing of feminine qualities come to mind. Even more important is the fact that society has been profoundly disrupted by this ideology. Now that the scientific evidence overwhelmingly points to innate mental differences between men and women, the challenge is for society to accept that men and women are both fundamentally different and equally essential.

Brain Sex is written on two levels. Since both Moir and Jessel are journalists, the book is an entertaining synthesis for the layman. There is even a Brain Sex Test at the end of chapter three to determine how masculine or feminine the mentality of the reader is. For the more serious student who wishes to check original sources, Anne Moir, who has a Ph.d. in genetics, has compiled an extensive bibliography. Unfortunately, specific citations within the text are handled in a rather awkward way.

Brain Sex will give the reader plenty of ammo to use on any radical egalitarians who may cross his path. Perhaps the greatest value of this book, however, is in documenting another instance where our intellectual and political elites have chosen to disregard or distort scientific findings which do not fit their social agenda.

"Anti-Semites sensed the truth of Jewish history, the specialness of the Jews, their strangeness on the face of the earth. The anti-Semites could not stand to witness all the good things the Jews had brought mankind because that would remind these inferior people of their own underdevelopment and depravity." (p. 11) These two sentences sum up the 472 pages of Norman Cantor's book, its hubris and subjectivity. Yes, most everything you've heard about the Jews is true, but only a warped, envious, hate-filled person would object to the contributions of God's Chosen People to the benighted Gentiles.

The Sacred Chain is a survey of the history of the Jews from their obscure origins as just one of many Semitic tribes inhabiting the eastern Mediterranean to their unique position of international wealth and power today. Although Cantor is an academic, this is not an academic history, for there are no footnotes citing sources. There are a bibliography and a useful index, however, and the preface suggests that the book would be suitable for an introductory college course.

One of the themes of Cantor's book is that the Jews are indeed a separate race and not just a religious or cultural group. They are a race created, in part, by their religion and modified by their contact with other peoples, but nevertheless a race with their own peculiar mentality, which has endured for many centuries.

Another of Cantor's themes, as can be gleaned from the opening quote, is the "superhuman strength, intelligence, and durability" of the Jews. (p. 11) While the author's overweening pride of race may be difficult at times for the Gentile reader to stomach, it is itself instructive. More important, this arrogance and presumptuousness result in candor when the author discusses the more negative aspects of Jewish history.

A third motif of Jewish history chronicled in the book is the cyclical ups and downs in the fortunes of the race. Gamblers and speculators by nature, the Jews live close to the edge, pressing their luck, at times riding high on a winning streak, and at other times seeing their power and wealth come crashing down.

There is only enough space in a short review to cite a few of the many revelations and confirmations of misdeeds contained in this volume. The following will give the reader a brief sampling.

One charge made against the Jews has been their involvement throughout history in the slave trade. In the Carolingian Empire "Jewish merchants exported to the Mediterranean world not only fur, timber, and swords, but also slaves. Blond Germanic slaves brought to the markets and Arab Mediterranean cities by Jewish merchants were much in demand, especially if they were young boys or adolescent, nubile women." (p. 162) Cantor goes on to explain that by 1000 AD Jews were well established in the "towns along the Rhine, which they used as a conduit to trade in the Low Countries, northern Germany, and Scandinavia. The size and prosperity of the slave trade with the Mediterranean increased." (p. 163) How were the Jews allowed to engage in the trafficking of White slaves to Arab lands through the heart of Europe? Basically it came down to using their great wealth to buy "the goodwill of the magnates." (p. 166)

But such an outrage could not be endured forever. In 1096, at the beginning of the First Crusade, Christian knights on their way to the Holy Land "inflicted terrible pogroms upon the Rhenish Jews . . . . It was a rupture with several centuries of Jewish peace, prosperity, and privilege . . . ." (p.167) Thus, we see an instance of the Jews waxing prosperous for a time, overreaching themselves, and suffering the consequences.

As all good gamblers do, the Jews try to hedge their bets by wagering on more than one horse. Thus, if we move ahead 800 years we find that "empirical data support the contention of French and German anti-Semites in the 1920s and 1930s that Jews were both capitalists and communists." (p. 274) Yes, it is true: "Unfortunately, there were circumstantial and anecdotal, even some statistical, verifications for the popular anti-Semitic double-faced image of the Jews around 1930 as both slippery entrepreneurs and conspiratorial communists." (p. 335)

The author divulges other interesting facts: Organized crime in America originated in illegal Jewish enterprises around the turn of the century. "It was the Jews, by and large, not Italians, who created what was called the Mafia. In the 1920s the Italians began to replace the Jews in New York organized crime industry, but as late as 1940 if you wanted a spectacular hit you were looking for a representative of the Lepke Buchalter Gang, also known as Murder Inc. Jews also were also [sic] prominent in the gambling trade and developed Las Vegas in the 1940s. It was a Jewish gambler who fixed the 1919 baseball World Series -- what became known as the Black Sox scandal." (p. 387)

Continuing through Jewish history to the late twentieth century we come to the ascendancy of the Zionist state. Is Israel a parasite nation as some have charged? "The fact is that the Jewish economy in Israel from the first decade of the century to today has never been a viable one. The Jews in Zion have never been able to support themselves." (p. 369) So how have the Israelis managed to build both a modern welfare state and a mighty military machine? Since 1970 the Jewish state has "become thoroughly dependent on American government aid for both military and civilian purposes -- at least five billion dollars a year. When it is factored in that Jewish charitable sources abroad provide annually a similar sum, Israel has to be recognized as . . . greedily and recklessly used to living off other peoples' money." (p.385)

Although there are many more exposés in The Sacred Chain, Cantor is not a renegade Jew, and the book is certainly not a hostile critique of Jewry. Cantor is intensely proud of his people, warts and all, and if Jews have been highly successful slavers, subversives, gangsters, and mendicants it is simply that the Jews are a genetically superior people who will excel at any endeavor they choose to undertake.

The problematic issue of the future of the Jews is dealt with in a speculative concluding chapter. One thing is certain: even by the standards of their roller-coaster past "nothing in Jewish history equaled this [present] degree of Jewish accession to power, wealth, and prominence." (p. 406) The Jews are at the pinnacle; are they about to fall? No, not in the traditional sense of being brought low by an angry host population. Yet "it appears from present perspective that the history of the Jews as we have known it and them is probably approaching the end." (p.425) The agent of Jewish destruction is demographics, since "fifty-two percent of Jewish marriages in 1990 were intermarriages with Gentiles." Intermarriage and a low birthrate "signal the approaching end of Jewish history as we have known it." (p. 426)

In an apocalyptic version of the end of history, Cantor declares that the end is near because "the Jews have fulfilled their role in history. They have been a light to the world. . . . The Jews served their own purpose, and God's purpose, and mankind's purpose. . . . For three thousand years this special people lived and propagated and imparted their unique ideas to mankind. . . . Now the Jews' innate superior qualities will be perpetuated by intermarriage through the bloodlines of millions of people and diffused through American, Arab, and other societies." (p. 434)

So not to worry. Even after the Jewish race, as such, has all but disappeared Jewry will continue to exert a powerful influence through a sort of genetic half-life as a hybrid international elite of the New World Order: "The Jews are a superior people intellectually, and as long as Jewish genes exist, the extraordinary impact Jews have had in twentieth century thought will continue indefinitely." (p. 423) In case the reader did not grasp the full significance of this statement, the author reiterates: "The genetic intellectual superiority of the Jews will be extended and as long as its carriers are individually free and privileged to pursue their interests in science, philosophy, literature, and the arts, highly advantageous consequences for humanity will follow." (p. 425)

Whew! Is there any way to opt out from this unending flow of blessings?