Stanford professor Djerassi (Menachem’s Seed, etc.), eminent chemist and —Father of the Pill,— here concludes his ’science-in-fiction— tetralogy with another speculation about the frontiers of sexuality, this time concerning the effects of nitric oxide (NO) on male impotence. Carefully distinguishing his work from generic science fiction, Djerassi claims that his science is accurate, while implying that the ’science— of science fiction isn—t. He seeks to portray the —tribal behavior— of scientists, typically displayed as they work out methods to test a new theory—in this case, the effect of NO on penile erection. Then there are also the potential hazards of any new treatment to consider: its carcinogenic potential, for instance, duly tested in experiments with laboratory rats. The sometimes pompous Djerassi well knows this world, and his arch sexual humor is fun. Less persuasive, though, is the scientist-as-storyteller. First, Djerassi scuttles the suspense of whether NO will work at all simply by announcing to the reader that it does—both in an introduction and in his first chapter. Second, his protagonist and principal NO researcher, 26-year-old Renu Krishnan, is more of an ideal than a character. Back home in India, her brother and widowed mother continually urge Renu to marry and take up a normal Indian woman’s life, but Renu, insisting that she chart her own course, falls for an Israeli scientist, Jephtah Cohn, who has invented a device for injecting NO (and even tries it himself). The two become lovers but entertain doubts about male and female roles, Judaism vs. Hinduism, etc. As though meant to illustrate a theory of people, yet failing ever really to seem like people, the characters remain constructs who lack humanizing rough edges. Entertaining enough, but all the hoopla over Viagra has somewhat undermined Djerassi’s premise—and his moxie. But for insight into the grants apparatus, the bureaucracy of science, and the way scientists think and work, Djerassi’s your man.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-8203-2032-3
Page Count: 276
Publisher: Univ. of Georgia
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1998
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
Tinny perhaps, but still a minutely rendered and impressively steady feminist vision of apocalypse.
The time is the not-so-distant future, when the US's spiraling social freedoms have finally called down a reaction, an Iranian-style repressive "monotheocracy" calling itself the Republic of Gilead—a Bible-thumping, racist, capital-punishing, and misogynistic rule that would do away with pleasure altogether were it not for one thing: that the Gileadan women, pure and true (as opposed to all the nonbelieving women, those who've ever been adulterous or married more than once), are found rarely fertile.
Thus are drafted a whole class of "handmaids," whose function is to bear the children of the elite, to be fecund or else (else being certain death, sent out to be toxic-waste removers on outlying islands). The narrative frame for Atwood's dystopian vision is the hopeless private testimony of one of these surrogate mothers, Offred ("of" plus the name of her male protector). Lying cradled by the body of the barren wife, being meanwhile serviced by the husband, Offred's "ceremony" must be successful—if she does not want to join the ranks of the other disappeared (which include her mother, her husband—dead—and small daughter, all taken away during the years of revolt). One Of her only human conduits is a gradually developing affair with her master's chauffeur—something that's balanced more than offset, though, by the master's hypocritically un-Puritan use of her as a kind of B-girl at private parties held by the ruling men in a spirit of nostalgia and lust. This latter relationship, edging into real need (the master's), is very effectively done; it highlights the handmaid's (read Everywoman's) eternal exploitation, profane or sacred ("We are two-legged wombs, that's all: sacred vessels, ambulatory chalices"). Atwood, to her credit, creates a chillingly specific, imaginable night-mare. The book is short on characterization—this is Atwood, never a warm writer, at her steeliest—and long on cynicism—it's got none of the human credibility of a work such as Walker Percy's Love In The Ruins. But the scariness is visceral, a world that's like a dangerous and even fatal grid, an electrified fence.
Tinny perhaps, but still a minutely rendered and impressively steady feminist vision of apocalypse.Pub Date: Feb. 17, 1985
ISBN: 038549081X
Page Count: -
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: Sept. 16, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1985
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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