Barrett (The Forms of Water) uses science as a prism to illuminate, in often unsettling ways, the effects of ambition, intuition and chance on private and professional lives. Andrea Barrett is a masterful storyteller and a beautiful wordsmith, but be aware that her tales, while worth the read, have the power to stay in the brain and the heart whether you want them to or not. In ``The Behavior of the Hawkweeds,'' a precious letter drafted by Austrian monk Gregor Mendel, who discovered the laws of heredity, reverberates throughout the narrator's marriage to her husband, an upstate New York geneticist. In ``The English Pupil,'' Swedish botanist Carolus Linnaeus, who brought order to the natural world with his system of nomenclature, battles the disorder of his own aging mind as he suffers from paralysis and memory loss at age 70. Many of her characters are scientists, often 19th-century biologists. Her work reflects her lifelong interest in science, and women in science. Barrett is particularly well known as a writer of historical fiction. The story, which deftly exposes English and Canadian prejudice against the Irish, turns on the doctor's emotions, oscillating between a quarantined Irish woman and a wealthy Canadian lady, his onetime childhood playmate. In 1996, she received the National Book Award for her fifth book, Ship Fever, a collection of stories. In the graphic title novella, a self-doubting, idealistic Canadian doctor's faith in science is sorely tested in 1847 when he takes a hospital post at a quarantine station flooded with diseased, dying Irish immigrants fleeing the potato famine. The quantifiable truths of science intersect with the less easily measured precincts of the heart in these eight seductively stylish tales.
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