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Title: Entwined Lives: Twins and What They Tell Us About Human Behavior by Nancy L. Segal ISBN: 0-452-28057-5 Publisher: Plume Pub. Date: 02 April, 2000 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $16.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.46 (13 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: Fascinating book about twins, family ties, genetic influence
Comment: I bought this book because I am an identical twin and I was curious about recent research on twins. Segal is certainly the expert here. However she goes beyond just the facts of the studies and ties in lots of interesting information and theories about how genetics influences our behavior and our attachments to the people in our family. Her theories on the reasons for the closeness of a mother to her children were very interesting to me.
This book has much to offer to different people - it discusses general interest topics like why we behave the way we do and end up a certain way. It should also be a "must read" for any identical twin or parent of a twin. Segal does an extraordinary job of describing the special relationship that exists between identical twins.
Rating: 5
Summary: Double the Intrigue
Comment: Despite this society's apparent fascination with twins, it's hard to find extensive literature and research on this topic. I've been looking for some time, and I'm happy to say that this one is quality. Especially interesting if you are a twin, but even if you're a singleton you'll find this hard to put down. It's fascinating to read evidence and theories about what makes each of us who we are individually, as well as what makes us human. I lost my twin before birth, which is the only area I would have liked more information on, but regardless this gave me an insight I didn't have previously.
Very well written, fairly easy to follow. I definitely plan to re-read this a few times and I've passed it on to friends & family.
Rating: 3
Summary: At times interesting but more often long-wided and anecdotal
Comment: In Entwined Lives, researcher Nancy Segal draws upon hundreds of case studies to explore the physical development of twins, and to tackle the thorny nature-versus-nurture question. Segal is competent and often interesting when she sticks to the former; her forays into the latter, on the other hand, are long-winded and anecdotal, and clearly highlight her shaky grasp of statistical methods, not to mention the benefits of editing.
Among the more interesting ideas raised in the book is a detailed description of the different ways in which twins develop in utero from conception onward. I also found intriguing a description of a third type of twin, one in which both siblings share their mother's, though not their father's genes. This second topic, though, is barely developed, and there is little mention of how twins of this type are identified. This is typical for the book - interesting ideas are raised and then promptly abandoned, leaving the reader with little understanding or context.
At the same time, Segal does not hesitate to make broad generalizations about genetics and socialization from small collections of anecdotes. Much of the book is devoted to demonstrating the influence of genetics upon intelligence, behaviour, and athletic ability. A chapter on twins separated at birth is well-written and its methods well-described, but it's the exception. On the whole, this section is filled with dozens of case studies and stories from which Segal draws a multitude of conclusions, some better founded than others. She has ample data to support her uncontroversial claim that genetics play a large role in determining intelligence and similarities in abilities, and belabours this obvious point for several chapters during much of the book. (Do we really need several paragraphs explaining that height and weight play a role in determining athletic ability?)
But she is just as prepared to base her theories on a story here, a fact there: one identical pair's preference for very rare meat, for instance, prompts Segal to hypothesize that not only do identical twins share preferences, but that the things they enjoy are likely to lie outside the mainstream. She also ponders at length the significance of one athletic twin claiming an Olympic gold while his cotwin ended up with the silver. After a paragraph of grade-school-level speculation, she raises the (most likely) possibility that the medal discrepancy doesn't mean anything. This book is filled with these sorts of useless, irrelevant tangents (the most bizarre involving a mention of the wholly theoretical "twins paradox" from special relativity in a section on a pair of identical astronauts) that go absolutely nowhere, and that should have been edited out of the first draft of the book. She devotes virtually no space whatsoever to explaining which of her data are statistically meaningful, but rambles at length about very minor aspects of her methodology, such as choosing the most suitable acronym to denote biologically unrelated same-age siblings.
The stories in Entwined Lives make for entertaining, if light, reading, and would have been more enjoyable if Segal didn't keep interrupting them with unsupported generalizations, or with the dozens of "see? Genetics ARE important" assertions that appear over and over again. And the scientific data would have been more useful had it been better, or more rigorously developed. As a book about human behaviour, which it claims to be, it is too long, and explains too little.
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Title: Twins: And What They Tell Us About Who We Are by Lawrence Wright ISBN: 0471296449 Publisher: Wiley Pub. Date: 27 January, 1999 List Price(USD): $14.95 |
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Title: Twin Stories: Their Mysterious and Unique Bond by Susan Kohl ISBN: 1885171587 Publisher: Wildcat Canyon Press Pub. Date: 09 August, 2001 List Price(USD): $13.95 |
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Title: Dancing Naked in Front of the Fridge: And Other Lessons from Twins by Nancy J. Sipes, Janna S. Sipes ISBN: 0968214924 Publisher: Fair Winds Press Pub. Date: 01 January, 1999 List Price(USD): $13.95 |
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Title: Raising Twins: What Parent Want to Know (And What Twins Want to Tell Them) by Eileen M. Pearlman, Jill Alison Ganon ISBN: 0062736809 Publisher: HarperResource Pub. Date: 02 May, 2000 List Price(USD): $16.95 |
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Title: Twins by David Fields, Ruth Sandweiss, Rachel Sandweiss ISBN: 0762404043 Publisher: Running Press Book Publishers Pub. Date: 01 November, 1998 List Price(USD): $27.50 |
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