Not an easy read, but substantial and rewarding.
A scholarly, somber debut about the life of the scientist who theorized continental drift.
Tackling the fascinating but ultimately sad times of real-life German meteorologist Alfred Wegener (1880-1930), the Welsh-born author blends impressive research with a dignified prose style that effectively evokes the turn of the 20th century. It’s a work with small appeal for casual readers but one that will fascinate anyone with an interest in how science is done. It should also absorb anyone of a certain age whose attention ever wandered from the subject at hand to the world map on the wall of an elementary classroom to note the tantalizing parallels at the edges of the new and old worlds. Today’s plate-tectonic savvy fourth-graders would be astonished to know that the supercontinent Pangaea was an idea rejected for decades after its early-20th-century postulation. Dudman follows Wegener from his rather sad Berlin childhood through an education that steered him to the new science of meteorology and his seminal explorations of Greenland, and on to the academic battles that littered his career as a scholar. The Greenland trips, daunting, life-threatening, taken on before the invention of Thinsulate, Gore-Tex, Ski-Doos, or any of the comforts that make it possible these days for amateurs to tackle the Yukon, are heavy going but critical in Dudman’s reconstruction of Wegener’s intellectual progression to his great theory. Patient readers will be rewarded as observations of weather and navigation connect step by step with fossil records and ice shifts until the movement of continents becomes understandable—and the resistance of Wegener’s contemporaries to his explanations becomes maddening. There is some leavening in the reconstruction of Wegener’s happy involvement with a pioneer meteorologist whose admiring young daughter becomes his capable and doting wife, but the science is always foremost. Amazingly, Wegener’s theory got lost on the shelves for decades after his death.
Not an easy read, but substantial and rewarding.Pub Date: Feb. 23, 2004
ISBN: 0-670-03276-X
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
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