Word: medusae
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...DOCTORS are busy writing prescriptions, Dr. Lewis Thomas is writing books. Thomas, president of the Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, disturbs professional authors--he writes both infrequently and splendidly. His only other book, The Lives of a Cell, won a National Book Award in 1974, and his new book, The Medusa and the Snail continues with more notes of a biology watcher...
...Medusa, however, while Thomas sustains the fine prose and short-essay style of the previous work, he abandons the quality that made the former special: he doesn't restrict himself entirely to his field, biology. Thomas's talent lies in his ability to notice, describe and comment on man and nature. When he strays from this pattern, he gets in trouble. In essays such as "Notes on Punctuation" he plays too many intellectual games, and his essay on etymology is simply out of place...
Unlike Lives of a Cell, here Thomas writes what he feels like writing, disallowing any overall structure for the book. But taken one at a time, Medusa reveals Thomas as a gifted humorist, moralist, psychiatrist and critic. Thomas has no poses, no axes to grind, and so he remains humane, candid and optimistic...
NONFICTION: African Calliope, Edward Hoagland -Onward and Upward in the Garden, Katharine S. White - The Duke of Deception, Geoffrey Wolff -The Intricate Music, Thomas Kiernan - The Medusa and the Snail, Lewis Thomas -The Right Stuff, Tom Wolfe -The White Album, Joan Didion
Thomas Kiernan • The Medusa...