Monday's Reviews Today: Queen Bee Moms and the Socializing of Scientists

by Staff, PW Daily -- Publishers Weekly, 12/2/2005

Sneek peeks of next week's reviews: After revealing the ugly side of teenage girls in Queen Bees & Wannabes, Rosalind Wiseman goes after their overbearing parents with Queen Bee Moms & Kingpin Dads. Exploring a much different environment, novelist Allegra Goodman takes on the social side of some scientists in Intuition.

Queen Bee Moms & Kingpin Dads: Coping with the Parents, Teachers, Coaches, andCounselors Who Can Rule—Or Ruin—Your Child’s Life
Rosalind Wiseman, Elizabeth Rapoport. Crown, $25 (320p) ISBN 1-4000-8300-1

If Wiseman was bold in her bestselling Queen Bees & Wannabes by telling the truth about entitled girls and theirexcesses, she’s even more daring here. The subject this time is parents, and the phrase "we have met the enemy and he is us" may be a little too true for comfort. As cofounder of the Empower Program, which teaches kids to stop violence, Wiseman works with more than 10,000 children annually; she knows her territory. She explains that she wants to help parents navigate "the unspoken rules of Perfect Parent World" so they can find their own "happy medium between overprotective parenting and frightened passivity." While she’s used to seeing through most adolescent subterfuges, she’s worked with enough parents to know their evil sides, too—how they curse out school counselors, threaten to sue principals, exclude other parents at meetings and one-up other parents over their kids’ college plans. Wiseman wants to show people how to behave better; she even includes sample scripts for difficult situations. Her bottom line: parents have to model good behavior if they want to end up with good kids. And since we all live in the same communities, good kids are in everyone’s best interest. (Mar.)

Intuition
Allegra Goodman. Dial, $25 (416p) ISBN 0-385-33612-8

In another quiet but powerful novel from Goodman (Kaaterskill Falls), a struggling cancer lab at Boston’s Philpott Institute becomes the stage for its researchers’ personalities and passions, and for the slippery definitions of freedom and responsibility in grant-driven American science. When the once-discredited R-7 virus, the project of playboy postdoc Cliff, seems to reduce cancerous tumors in mice, lab director Sandy Glass insists on publishing the preliminary results immediately, against the advice of his more cautious codirector, Marion Mendelssohn. The research team sees a glorious future ahead, but Robin, Cliff’s resentful ex-girlfriend and co-researcher, suspects that the findings are too good to be true and attempts to prove Cliff’s results are in error. The resulting inquiry spins out of control. With subtle but uncanny effectiveness, Goodman illuminates the inner lives of each character, depicting events from one point of view until another section suddenly throws that perspective into doubt. The result is an episodically paced but extremely engaging novel that reflects the stops and starts of the scientific process, as well as its dependence on the complicated individuals who do the work. In the meantime, she draws tender but unflinching portraits of the characters’ personal lives for a truly humanist novel from the supposedly antiseptic halls of science. (Feb. 28)