Eugene weekly., December 13, 2007, Page 28, Image 28

What’s Bugging You?
RIDDLED WITH LIFE: FRIENDLY
WORMS, LADYBUG SEX, AND
THE PARASITES THAT MAKE US
WHO WE ARE by Marlene Zuk. HARCOURT,
2007. HARDCOVER, $25.
Marlene Zuk, an evolutionary biologist
and noted science writer, gives new
meaning to the phrase “invading your per-
sonal space.” In Riddled With Life, she
elucidates the astonishing number of
ways in which humans coexist with para-
sites and bacteria and corrects the think-
ing that “bacteria are bad.” Human evolu-
tion has been influenced and even led by
microscopic creatures who evolved along
with us and became essential to our exis-
tence. In fact, sex itself evolved due to the
influence of parasites.
Zuk explains how a child’s immune
system grows strong through early expo-
sure to germs and common household
grime. In an environment that’s too clean,
a bored immune system has nothing to
do but turn on itself, which partially
explains the growing incidence of asth-
ma and other autoimmune diseases. I
love having ammunition like that when I
want to put off mopping and vacuuming!
She offers numerous examples of the
influence of parasites on genetics,
explaining why males of so many species
have fancy ornamentation (like a pea-
cock’s tail) and also carry more parasites.
Or how people with Crohn’s disease who
were medically treated with whipworm
eggs experienced remission of their
symptoms. There were so many fascinat-
ing examples I couldn’t stop reading
them out loud to whoever was in the
room with me at the time.
While Zuk is extremely apt at writing
for the non-scientist, the facts and figures
packed into each paragraph at times left
me feeling as if I was back in college
anticipating a pop quiz. Sadly, most of my
college textbooks weren’t this interesting.
The organisms that cause disease
also contribute to our health in mysteri-
ous ways. They are alive, with their own
evolutionary agenda, and yet their fates
THE ZOOKEEPER’S WIFE:
A WAR STORY , nonfiction by
Diane Ackerman. W.W. NORTON & COMPANY,
2007. HARDBACK, $24.95.
Diane Ackerman (A Natural
History of the Senses) is famous
enough that she can pretty much
write whatever she wants. In
Zookeeper’s Wife, she has a perfect
opportunity to recreate the largely
unknown (to Americans) world of
wartime Warsaw, the fear and
anguish and suffering of those try-
ing to resist the Nazis, the courage
of the family running the Warsaw
Zoo, where hundreds of Jews
escaped the death camps. Yet her
writing skills don’t lend themselves
to reconstruction, and her clumsy
attempts don’t come off well, to put
it mildly (a class in the UO’s Literary
Nonfiction program might be called
for, methinks). Luckily, the story she
has to tell, and the details with which
she tells it, compel attention anyway.
— Suzi Steffen
28 DECEMBER 13, 2007
intertwine with our own. We can never
lead bacteria- or parasite-free lives, and
we shouldn’t even try. — Vanessa Salvia
poetry
Chilean Bard
I EXPLAIN A FEW THINGS:
SELECTED POEMS by Pablo Neruda.
Edited by Ilan Stavans. FARRAR, STRAUS & GIROUX, 2007.
PAPERBACK, $16.
Pablo Neruda’s oeuvre gets a close
reading by noted Latin American scholar
Ilan Stavans, who writes that his objective
was to “distill [Neruda’s] exuberance to
its most essential while producing a book
affordable to young people.” For students
of Spanish language and literature, I
Explain a Few Things offers the appeal
of being a bilingual edition, but it can be
appreciated by a wide range of passion-
ate readers.
From 1924’s Twenty Love Poems and a
Song of Despair through 1973’s Winter
Garden, Stavans cherrypicks poems from
Neruda’s canon with an eye for what he
describes as the poet’s “ideological
odyssey.” Bearing witness to the greatest
upheavals in the 20th century should make
for an opinionated pundit, and Neruda cer-
tainly knows his enemies (Franco, Pinochet,
Nixon) from his compadres (Stalin, Castro,
Allende). But Neruda was never program-
matic, preferring odes to edicts, senses to
scripts. “I am a pale and artless poet,”
Neruda humorously noted in “The Great
Urinator,” “not here to work out riddles / or
recommend special umbrellas.”
His early powerhouse “Tonight I Can
Write” succinctly sums up in one line (“Love
is so short, forgetting is so long”) the roman-
tic trappings of memory and lost loves. But,
for Neruda, there were topics greater than
love. The titular poem carefully explains his
mid-career shift from aesthetic poems to
social justice poems. Answering his own
rhetorical question on why he won’t write
about dreams or the fruit of his motherland,
Neruda writes in repeated refrains: “Come
and see the blood in the streets.”
In “Ode to Salt,” Neruda takes kitchen
sink liberals to task. “In the salt mines / I
saw the salt / in this shaker,” he writes,
noting that solidarity with the workers
must extend beyond the breakfast table.
When he writes “I too knew homeless-
ness” in the poem, “The Saddest
Century,” Neruda is speaking of exile, not
vagrancy, but both, he implies, are born
from the same evils. — Chuck Adams