Gestures of Healing

Booknews

A general survey and current thinking on special questions in an area receiving renewed attention. With the general decrease of perinatal mortality and morbidity, the complications arising from gestational diabetes have become more significant. Moreover, there is a growing realization that impaired maternal carbohydrate metabolism may lead to a non-genetic fuel-mediated disposition towards diabetes in offspring. Clayton (English, U. of Massachusetts, Amherst) analyzes the dominant novelists of American and British modernism--in particular, James, Lawrence, and Woolf--in terms of their families, finding that they share in common a weak or absent father and a central, strong-willed mother. He links this family configuration to the novelists' literary expression of anxiety produced by chaos in the self. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)