Shedding Life: Humans, and Other Freaks of Nature

It's hard to break the habit of reading Eastern European writers for the shadow text. Every anecdote becomes a metaphor and every set of lines has another line invisibly squashed between. In the case of Holub, a Czech poet and immunologist, this probably works to his advantage. His opening thesis--that we are what a history of diseases has made us--makes a more stimulating read when the body is compared to the body politic. Other pieces touch more forthrightly on the practice of science in the Warsaw Pact--wittily in his piece on Vietnamese pigs and touchingly in the essay on the monkey farm at Sukhumi. Some essays would stand up on their own in any collection, particularly the title essay, which muses on the cellular life that continues after a neighbor shoots a cornered muskrat into a bloody pulp in Holub's swimming pool: ""Phagocytic cells were creeping like amoebas on the bottom of the pool, releasing their digestive granules in an attempt to devour its infinite surface."" His essay on how his speculations on the cause of death of Ladislaus the Posthumous helped him impress various medical-school examiners with his imagination (and perhaps a hint of patriotism) is very wry. But in other pieces, Holub tends toward truisms and questionable general assertions that claim for science a kind of moral greatness that is unconvincing (""science rids us of demons sprouting in the fertile soil of fear from progress, which includes human liberation from natural fate, from oppression, from disease, and from inane minds""). (Nov.)