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The Alien |
| Section: BOOK WORLD / REVIEWS |
| Author: Linda Simon |
| Publication: The world & I online |
| Issue Date: 2/1/2001 |
| Size: 1,687 Words, 10,125 Characters |
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BEN, IN THE WORLD
Doris Lessing
New York: HarperCollins, 2000
178 pp., $23.00
"It would be a good thing if man concerned himself more with the history of his nature than with the history of his deeds." This remark by the nineteenth-century German dramatist Friedrich Hebbel serves as an epigraph for Doris Lessing's Prisons We Choose to Live Inside (1987), a collection of five essays that reflect on the causes--biological or social--of human behavior, essays that consider how often and how much we are dominated by our savage past, as individuals and as groups. What, Lessing asks, is our inherent nature: Are we barbaric, brutal beasts who must be socialized into civility? Or have we, as a species, evolved genetically from our bestial past to transcend our animal nature?
These quest...
. . .
...ritique of class prejudices and expectations, of the limits of psychological and sociological explanations of behavior, of the ways we make and rationalize moral decisions, occurs in a world she knows intimately and renders with conviction. She seems to lack that conviction in this new work of fiction, however deeply she cares about the profound philosophical questions at the novel's heart.
(821 of 10,125 characters)
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