In Stanford chemistry professor Djerassi's second attempt (following Cantor's Dilemma, 1989) at a genre he calls science- in-fiction, science thrives but fiction is anemic. His themes, announced in a rather didactic foreword, are the graying of Western science and the conflict between collegiality and individual scientists' personal ambition. The narrator, Max Weiss, professor emeritus of biochemistry at Princeton, seeks revenge against a system that forces retirement on people who are still productive. Borrowing an idea from a group of French mathematicians who for years published collectively and anonymously under the pen name Nicolas Bourbaki, he conceives of a stunt designed to show the establishment just how creative oldsters can be. Abetted in this venture by Diane Doyle-Ditmus, a driven feminist historian with access to grant money, Weiss gathers a diverse group of aging scientists with similarly bruised egos: Hiroshi Nishimura, a Tokyo biochemist with a penchant for poetry; Sepp Krzilska, an Austrian molecular biologist; and Charlea Conway, a mathematical biophysicist from Chicago and the group's only female scientist. After establishing the reputation of Diane Skordylis, their chosen pseudonym, with a number of papers in selected journals, they hit the jackpot with a revolutionary technique for replicating fragments of genetic material. (This advance brought its real-life developer, Kary B. Mullis, a Nobel Prize in 1993.) Success spawns problems, however, as the egos of individual scientists resist being submerged, and Skordylis's true identity is soon revealed before an appropriate audience. Unlike Djerassi's memoirs (The Pill, Pygmy Chimps, and Degas' Horse, 1992), which were filled with engaging stories, not much happens here, and when it does, it happens slowly. Moments that should be dramatic have a static quality, and the dialogue frequently sounds stilted. Djerassi takes pains to make the science clear, however, and the announced themes are developed fully. No Michael Crichton thriller, but an interesting picture of how real science operates.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-8203-1652-0
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Univ. of Georgia
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1994
While the love triangle is interesting, perhaps most compelling is the story of one woman's single-minded pursuit of her...
Love and ambition clash in a novel depicting China's turbulent 1980s.
Jin's debut is at heart a mystery, as a young Chinese American woman returns to China to try to understand her recently deceased mother's decisions and to find her biological father. Liya grew up with a single mother, the brilliant but troubled physicist Su Lan, who refused to talk about Liya's missing father. Mother and daughter grew increasingly estranged as Su Lan obsessed over her theoretical research. Complicating Liya's search for truth is the fact she was born in Beijing on June 4, 1989, the very night of the government crackdown on the protesters at Tiananmen Square. Su Lan changed Liya's birth year on her papers to obscure this fact in America. The reader is meant to wonder if Liya's father perhaps died during the crackdown. However, this is not a novel about the idealism of the student reform movement or even the decisions behind the government's use of lethal force. Instead Jin focuses on the personalities of three students: the young Su Lan as well as Zhang Bo and Li Yongzong, two of her high school classmates who were rivals for her affection. The novel shifts point of view and jumps back and forth in time, obscuring vital pieces of information from the reader in order to prolong the mystery. Not all the plot contrivances make sense, but Su Lan is a fascinating character of a type rarely seen in fiction, an ambitious woman whose intellect and drive allow her to envision changing the very nature of time. The title refers to the thoughts of a nurse, musing about the similarities that she sees between the Tiananmen student demonstrators and the Red Guards of the Cultural Revolution: "A hunger for revolution, any Great Revolution, whatever it stands for, so long as where you stand is behind its angry fist. Little gods, she thinks."
While the love triangle is interesting, perhaps most compelling is the story of one woman's single-minded pursuit of her ambition.Pub Date: Jan. 14, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-06-293595-3
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Custom House/Morrow
Review Posted Online: Oct. 27, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2019
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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