Mascia-Lees' outstanding ability to synthesize ideas rewards readers with a text that clearly conceptualizes how differences of gender, race, class, and sexuality, structure today's complex globalizing world. It exposes the strengths and weaknesses of different theoretical orientations used in anthropology to study gender, difference, power, and inequality including feminist anthropology black feminist anthropology; lesbian/gay/bisexua!/transgendered theory; practice, postcolonial, symbolic, and psyckological antkropology; as well as social evolutionism, sociobioiogy, and evolutionary psyckology, among others.

Mascia-Lees combines core components of these perspectives with insightful analyses and ethnographic examples to illusrate kow global events and transformations have molded and continue to skape gender identities, behaviors, and expectations and produce and sustain worldwide inequalities. This exemplary treatment provides a solid background to understand complex issues and to think critically about remedying uneven degrees of privilege and experiences of oppression both within and across nations.