MixedThe Times (UK)The introduction, the witchiest bit of the whole book, properly shocks ... Chollet’s thesis is simple: women today are still on trial for the same reasons witches were: for independence, childlessness and ageing. But after the force of the introduction, the book slides too often into the simple too. It rests heavily on second-hand sources ... I wanted to like this book, because skewering misogyny is fine by me. But Chollet’s first three chapters read mostly like the magazine articles she quotes, and from years ago ... Chollet has an intriguing exploration of how holistic female healers — who thought the body and mind one and treated accordingly — threatened the \'masculinisation\' of medicine ... Does Chollet prove her thesis that women are still on trial? Of course. It’s an easy one to prove against any metric of inequality ... I am grateful for any book that highlights that, even this flawed one.
Brian Switek
PositiveThe New York Times Book ReviewThere is much that startles in Skeleton Keys, Brian Switek’s cultural history of bone, not least that bone is startling at all ... Switek is an affable guide, and affability is required when the depth and breadth of his subject is so vast, when many characters are fossils or skeletons and most field trips are to yet another museum. His tone can veer from chatty...to overly academic, and there is enough repetition that one could wish for a sharper editorial scalpel ... But now, when it comes to these \'endless forms most beautiful and wonderful,\' to borrow Darwin’s words, I can see them better thanks to Switek’s keys.
