Ship Fever (1996)

Barrett shines at the novel & the longer story. These briefer for the most part stories don't offer the same satisfaction as those of Servants of the Map or Voyage of the Narwhal. The title story is the best of the lot. ( )

This is a very lovely, well written group of stories. I enjoyed them a great deal. Each story in this collection shares a theme in that each gives a glimpse into the life of a scientist, focusing more on their humanity than on their scientific discoveries. Barrett’s stories touch on Mendel, Wallace, Linnaeus, Darwin, and others. Most times, when we learn about the famous scientists of the past, all we are taught is an equation. Or a theory. Or a law. Maybe some dates for context. This always bothered me a little bit when I was in class. Sometimes I’d wonder about these people and the conditions that they lived in that allowed/forced them to come up with their great ideas. Barrett seems to have had similar feelings. By extensively researching these scientists and the times/surroundings that they were immersed in, and mixing in her prodigious writin’ skills, she was able to produce stories that had both a very high degree of authenticity/realism and were a delight to read.

For the rest of this review, you can click on this link, if you want to --> http://andrewhideo.com/2014/01/29/a-book-review-ship-fever-by-andrea-barrett/ ( )

Brilliant. Understated, disturbing and very well-written. The stories are infused with science and scientific theories but it's the characters who linger after the book is closed. Highly recommended, and many thanks to Susann for leaving this on my to-read pile. ( )

There's been a lot of talk lately about a fourth culture that would put science and the humanities in productive conversation. There's plenty of art that does this, for example, the work of Steve Kurtz or Eduardo Kac. I know of some literature that does this too, and not only Paradise Lost: Richard Powers' The Goldbug Variations, in which DNA is a great symbolic ediface, comes to mind, as do the several episodes in Byatt's Frederica Tetrology that concern artificial intelligence, "deep grammar," fibonacci numbers, and ecology. Because of a shared concern with 19th-century naturalism, Byatt's Angels and Insects is probably the closest to Ship Fever.

All this is a long-winded way of praising Barrett for this set of stories about science, and natural science in particular, but also a way of saying, too, that many of the calls for "fourth culture" that I've seen (and I confessedly haven't read that many), seem to keep calling for a fourth culture without, however, speaking much about the various ways that artists have already been engaged in putting science--whatever that is--and the humanities in productive conversation. Highly recommended, then, for correcting this, and for its feminism and political engagement (especially in its title story: good for the angry anticolonial Irish who should be in all of us) and also, in its stories about Linnaeus and the (fictional) Marburg Sisters, for its very human concern for memory and loss and memory as a kind of having. ( )

Her characters are realistic. She deals with the sadness of real life - how things don't work out and how real people deal with it - growing old and dying but losing your memory first, giving up a marriage for a love you don't understand and regretting it, sisters and the connection between them, and the struggle to become what you were suppose to be. They are well developed - good examples of what a short story should be ( )