Mendel's Dwarf
Language: English
Published by - -, 1997
- Hardcover
- Used
Seller: Bahamut Media, Reading, United KingdomBahamut Media
AbeBooks seller since August 15, 2012
Condition: Used - Very good
£ 4.30
Quantity: 2 available
Add to basketItem description from seller
This book is in very good condition and will be shipped within 24 hours of ordering. The cover may have some limited signs of wear but the pages are clean, intact and the spine remains undamaged. This book has clearly been well maintained and looked after thus far. Money back guarantee if you are not satisfied. See all our books here, order more than 1 book and get discounted shipping.
Seller Inventory # 6545-9780385408974
- Title
- Mendel's Dwarf
- Author
- -
- Publisher
- - -
- Publication year
- 1997
- Condition
- Very Good
- Binding
- Hardcover
- Language
- English
- ISBN 10
- 0385408978
- ISBN 13
- 9780385408974
"Synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.
Review
A distant relative of the first geneticist, pea-pollinating Gregor Mendel, Ben has long used libraries as a refuge and education as a way out (if not up). Still in his 20s, he's determined to identify the gene that made him "one of nature's practical jokes". Offered a post at the Royal Institute for Genetics, he immediately puts achondroplasia on the agenda. The director may well consider research into dwarfdom commercially unviable, but Ben knows better. His height will finally be of help: "There are lots of organizations interested," he insists. "The Little People of America, groups like that. When they see me coming they reach for their covenant forms."
Mawer intersperses Ben's research with the story of his affair (a "menage à une et demi") with the Institute's ill-fated assistant librarian, Jeane Piercey: "Mousy, of course. I feel that all librarians ought to be mousy. It should be a necessary (but not sufficient) qualification for the job. Mousy? Agouti? What, I wonder, is its genetic control? Perhaps it is tightly linked to the gene for tidiness." Mawer also juxtaposes Ben's passion with that of his legume-obsessed ancestor. Mendel, it turns out, pined for Frau Rotway, a married woman in the inevitable company of her own achondroplastic, a dachshund.
Mendel's Dwarf wears its considerable learning lightly (the author is a biologist) and readers will be alternately moved, charmed and shocked by Ben's "astringent kiss of irony". Because the hero makes several difficult choices in the course of this fine novel, we admire his bravery, along with his resilience, at every turn. For Ben, the smallest gesture can become the largest: for him, nods become "big absurd things, my head being about the same size as my body. You can't miss them. They are the gestural equivalent of screaming." And alas, such acts are often poignantly beyond Ben's grasp: "I wanted to put my arm around her, of course, to bring her that fragile thing that we call comfort. But of course I couldn't reach."
"About the title" may belong to another edition of this title.
Bahamut Media
Reading, United Kingdom
AbeBooks seller since August 15, 2012
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