Feminist and bioethical themes threaded through a fast-paced if familiar plot.
A successful executive runs a biotechnology company that could disrupt what it means to be born.
Widger (Real Happy Family, 2014) brings us Silicon Valley culture in full, satirized display. It is “a weird place,” as one character notes. “All that brainpower and ambition, but hidden underneath a kind of…laid-back skin.” There are many thinly fictionalized versions of real icons. People drive Elans; LikeMe is a social media company founded by Harvard-dropout Reed Zimmerman; and Tessa Callahan, our protagonist, is a tech executive and a famous feminist icon as the author of Pushing Through: A Handbook for Young Women in the New World. The Seahorse Solution, her company’s newest invention, accelerates pregnancy to nine weeks, and three women are participating in the first human trial. To Tessa, this technology can only empower women with more choices for if and how to become mothers. But it raises bioethical questions that feel neither far-fetched nor far off. Would this kind of technology actually empower women, or would it only further fortify the age-old expectation that women can and should become mothers? And what of those women who are ineligible or can’t afford an upgraded pregnancy? Disappointingly, the book doesn’t deeply explore these possibilities. Instead, it picks up pace and moves quickly in several directions. There is a lingering threat of potentially overlooked and very serious side effects. Luke, who is Tessa’s business partner (and the spoiled son of the late Reed Zimmerman), withholds crucial information from her. And a secret government agency has its own agenda for Seahorse. All this makes for a fast read that comes together a bit too quickly and cleanly in the end.
Feminist and bioethical themes threaded through a fast-paced if familiar plot.Pub Date: May 22, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5039-5007-8
Page Count: 353
Publisher: Little A
Review Posted Online: March 4, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
A modern day fable, with modern implications in a deceiving simplicity, by the author of Dickens. Dali and Others (Reynal & Hitchcock, p. 138), whose critical brilliance is well adapted to this type of satire. This tells of the revolt on a farm, against humans, when the pigs take over the intellectual superiority, training the horses, cows, sheep, etc., into acknowledging their greatness. The first hints come with the reading out of a pig who instigated the building of a windmill, so that the electric power would be theirs, the idea taken over by Napoleon who becomes topman with no maybes about it. Napoleon trains the young puppies to be his guards, dickers with humans, gradually instigates a reign of terror, and breaks the final commandment against any animal walking on two legs. The old faithful followers find themselves no better off for food and work than they were when man ruled them, learn their final disgrace when they see Napoleon and Squealer carousing with their enemies... A basic statement of the evils of dictatorship in that it not only corrupts the leaders, but deadens the intelligence and awareness of those led so that tyranny is inevitable. Mr. Orwell's animals exist in their own right, with a narrative as individual as it is apt in political parody.
Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1946
ISBN: 0452277507
Page Count: 114
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1946
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.
Written with quiet dignity that builds to a climax of tragic force, this book about the dissolution of an African tribe, its traditions, and values, represents a welcome departure from the familiar "Me, white brother" genre.
Written by a Nigerian African trained in missionary schools, this novel tells quietly the story of a brave man, Okonkwo, whose life has absolute validity in terms of his culture, and who exercises his prerogative as a warrior, father, and husband with unflinching single mindedness. But into the complex Nigerian village filters the teachings of strangers, teachings so alien to the tribe, that resistance is impossible. One must distinguish a force to be able to oppose it, and to most, the talk of Christian salvation is no more than the babbling of incoherent children. Still, with his guns and persistence, the white man, amoeba-like, gradually absorbs the native culture and in despair, Okonkwo, unable to withstand the corrosion of what he, alone, understands to be the life force of his people, hangs himself. In the formlessness of the dying culture, it is the missionary who takes note of the event, reminding himself to give Okonkwo's gesture a line or two in his work, The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger.
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.Pub Date: Jan. 23, 1958
ISBN: 0385474547
Page Count: 207
Publisher: McDowell, Obolensky
Review Posted Online: April 23, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1958
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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