Ably explores the intersection of science, family and identity.
A college professor discovers that his father may not, in fact, be his father.
In June 1981, Davis (English, Disability Studies, Medical Education/Univ. of Illinois at Chicago; Obsession: A History, 2008, etc.), in his early 30s, received news that his father, Morris, had died. Shortly thereafter, his uncle Abie phoned him and said, “Well, I don’t know how to say this, but I am your father.” At first, Davis didn’t believe him, assuming that artificial insemination did not exist in 1949. (He was also upset at the realization about his conception: “So that was how I was conceived? No candles or flowers, no romance, no glint in the eye—just a quick jerk-off in a rank toilet?”) After researching the subject, he found that the procedure had indeed been performed in the ’40s, and in fact had roots stretching back further, to an instance in 1884 in which an American woman was artificially inseminated with the sperm of a man who was not her husband. Davis spent the next several years on a quest to uncover his genetic origins, investigating the history and science of artificial insemination and DNA testing along the way. The author also examines his complicated, difficult relationship with the man he thought was his father. When doubts were raised about Morris’s fatherhood, Davis reevaluated his childhood. He remembers how, when he misbehaved, his parents told him not to act like his black-sheep uncle Abie, and how his father often used the phrase, “Good father, good son.” Davis’s quest also affects other members of his family; his brother disapproves, saying, “It’s better not to know something like this.” But Davis persevered, and his book is a capable record of his journey and a serviceable overview of reproductive science.
Ably explores the intersection of science, family and identity.Pub Date: May 19, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-553-80551-2
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Bantam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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