The average American woman is 5 feet 4, but author Ralph Keyes said “tallness in women is more fashionable than ever.”

Being tall doesn’t just mean seeing better in a crowd: tall people are also more likely to make the team, earn more money and achieve high office, according to Ralph Keyes. book The Height of Your Life.

I once wrote a column about Keyes, who advises women to give shorter guys a chance. In his research, he found many tall women who say lovemaking is better and “more energetic” with shorter guys. One 6-foot-tall woman told Keyes: “Things are equal when you. re lying down. I don’t find tall men active enough. They tend to be phlegmatic.”

A lively and informative book.

N.R. Kleinfield

Thorough and entertaining.

Tom Ferrell

Mr. Keyes makes it clear that attitudes — ours and others’ — toward size is what is decisive, and decisively wrong. Discrimination against women, he conjectures, may actually be discrimination on the basis of size. … The Height of Your Life is an odd, breezy book, quick to record a joke, occasionally rueful, that gathers a kind of sadness as it moves along. I haven’t consciously thought about height since I was in high school and realized I would never make 6 feet. … Now I am made to realize how crucial size is in social dynamics, and how cruel those dynamics are. We learn.

John Leonard

The book is full of fascinating anecdotes, facts, quotes, photos, cartoons and charts of the actual sizes of well-known people, measured against Mme. Tussaud’s famous was-work models. … The author provides us with considerable food for thought, along with endless material for cocktail-party conversation.

Keyes has done a spirited and thorough job in compiling facts and anecdotes about the physical, psychological, economic, and even sexual and political advantages and disadvantages of people of varying heights.