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  • Primates of Park Avenue

  • Adventures Inside the Secret Sisterhood of Manhattan Moms
  • By: Wednesday Martin Ph.D.
  • Narrated by: Madeleine Maby
  • Length: 8 hrs and 9 mins
  • 4.1 out of 5 stars (24 ratings)
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Primates of Park Avenue

By: Wednesday Martin Ph.D.
Narrated by: Madeleine Maby
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Summary

Like an urban Dian Fossey, Wednesday Martin decodes the primate social behaviors of Upper East Side mothers in a brilliantly original and witty memoir about her adventures assimilating into that most secretive and elite tribe.

After marrying a man from the Upper East Side and moving to the neighborhood, Wednesday Martin struggled to fit in. Drawing on her background in anthropology and primatology, she tried looking at her new world through that lens, and suddenly things fell into place. She understood the other mothers' snobbiness at school drop-off when she compared them to olive baboons. Her obsessional quest for a Hermes Birkin handbag made sense when she realized other females wielded them to establish dominance in their troop. And so she analyzed tribal migration patterns; display rituals; physical adornment, mutilation, and mating practices; extra-pair copulation; and more. Her conclusions are smart, thought-provoking, and hilariously unexpected.

Every city has its Upper East Side, and in Wednesday's memoir, listeners everywhere will recognize the strange cultural codes of powerful social hierarchies and the compelling desire to climb them. They will also see that Upper East Side mothers want the same things for their children that all mothers want - safety, happiness, and success - and not even sky-high penthouses and chauffeured SUVs can protect this ecologically released tribe from the universal experiences of anxiety and loss. When Wednesday's life turns upside down, she learns how deep the bonds of female friendship really are.

Intelligent, funny, and heartfelt, Primates of Park Avenue lifts a veil on a secret, elite world within a world - the exotic, fascinating, and strangely familiar culture of privileged Manhattan motherhood.

©2015 Wednesday Martin. All rights reserved. (P)2015 Simon & Schuster, Inc. All rights reserved.

What listeners say about Primates of Park Avenue

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  • 03-09-21

Patronising to us plebs, elitist and intellectually arrogant.

The author fails to see that not everyone listening to this book left school at 15 and lives in a small rural town and has never heard of topics such as Sociology or outdated authors like Margaret Mead. The theme is established early that the author thinks that describing human life from the viewpoint of a cynical 1980’s Marxist educated Social Sciences graduate sounds highly intellectual.
The smug arrogance of privilege is annoying. I was hoping for an entertaining and intellectual observation of life in NYC amongst the ladies who carry small dogs in a Dumas Birkin bag but sadly it was an elitist description of a chosen life of excess from a person pretending to be an outsider.

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what a book

this was a really.good book a nice insight into the lives of thr new york equivalent of the stepford wives 😀 i enjoyed it

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Was really interesting and different

I 1 enjoyed listening to this title. It was interesting to hear about a different way of life from the prospective of someone who had lived it first hand. The narrator was a little dull to listen to at times though.

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