Barrett seems to have had similar feelings. 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. This always bothered me a little bit when I was in class. Most times, when we learn about the famous scientists of the past, all we are taught is an equation. Barrett’s stories touch on Mendel, Wallace, Linnaeus, Darwin, and others. 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.

This is a very lovely, well written group of stories. Overall, it is a good book and one I am glad to have read. (Only later do I find out about his faith.) Even in the limitations brought on by his stroke, he appears satisfied with the events of his life. As he reviews his colleagues, acquaintances and students and their achievements, we find that he isn't unfulfilled but strangely content. Perhaps only our visit with Linnaeus could be considered 'happy'. (Please note this is not criticism, just a comment on an interesting style that isn't completely to my taste.) Many of the stories, perhaps even all of them, lack closure they just end when they do-not really hanging, but just ended and not resolved. None of the characters live 'happily ever after' and many are fairly miserable. The title story, Ship Fever follows some of the events of the Potato Famine in that we join a young doctor on a Canadian island while the ships empty sick Irish refugees onto shore. Or perhaps a better way to say it would be that we find the lives of the stories' characters intertwined with the historical figure. Whether we discover a connection with Mendel or Linnaeus or ponder the same mysteries they did, we get inserted into their lives in an interesting way. I tore through it in a couple of days really couldn't put it down!Īuthor Andrea Barrett includes several short stories in this volume, all with a historical, naturalist/science bend to them. A fellow bus-rider lent me this book to break up the non-fiction I wasn't getting through in my reading (slow reading? non-reading?) of.

Ship fever by andrea barrett