Gone native: how Manhattan’s richest women follow the laws of the jungle

To truly understand America's super-rich, observe them as an anthropologist would " that's what Wednesday Martin has done, and her memoir Primates of Park Avenue is provoking whoops of rage from wealthy wives

From Tom Wolfe's Bonfire of the Vanities to Candace Bushnell's Sex and the City, New York's Upper East Side has long offered novelists and satirists a rich seam to mine. But until Wednesday Martin came along, no one had thought to use primatology in a portrait of one of America's wealthiest - and most competitive - urban enclaves.

Martin, mother-of-two and wife of a banker, is the author of Primates of Park Avenue, part-memoir, part-study of young East Side mothers and their social customs. The book, published last week, has been variously described as sexist, harsh and inaccurate.