Doctor Rat

Product Information

The copyright on this book is 1971, a few years prior to the 1975 publication of Peter Singer’s Animal Liberation, which is often credited with launching the animal rights movement. One of the people who claimed the US dropped the insects was Australian journalist Wilfred Burchett. I have Doctor Rat (the Laidlaw illustrated edition, above), and at least 5 of Kotzwinkle’s other novels (Fata Morgana, etc) but have never got around to reading any of them – I must rectify that, soon!

Within, walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone. Few people, even professed animal lovers, wish to consider vivisection, and legislation and cultural changes have succeeded in keeping the vast majority of it hidden entirely from public view. He’s sensitive chap and it was his exquisite sensitivity that caused him to dream up the item that’s become the latest rage here at the lab: the fabulous removal of the eggs from a female rat’s body—to the tail, to the ear, to the stomach. This helps to expand the tale out from just the somewhat confined premise of Doctor Rat’s isolated world alone, and helps to create the much bigger picture that the author is gradually attempting to achieve. Kotzwinkle acknowledges that snakes are dangerous to rats, and badgers to elephants, but there is not a mention in his book of snakes biting people, or dogs biting people, or lions eating people.You are welcome to report back to me on the topic as I probably will not be reading any movie-tie ins soon! Moving from general historical images to specific historical documents, Kotzwinkle provides a harrowing parallel to the scientific articles: as humanity slaughters the animals Doctor Rat triumphs as “down goes the special container of spiders carrying good old hemorrhagic anthrax meningitis. Cloth "Cloth-bound" generally refers to a hardcover book with cloth covering the outside of the book covers.

And so he accepts his and every other animal in the laboratory’s fate at the hands of the scientists and academic scholars. Plus, we are no doubt losing drugs because they fail the animal tests, that could actually be beneficial to people. OFFICIAL AUTHOR INFO: American novelist William Kotzwinkle is a two-time recipient of the National Magazine Award for Fiction, a Book Critics Circle award nominee, a winner of the World Fantasy Award, the Prix Litteraire des Bouquinistes des Quais de Paris, the PETA Award for Children's Fiction, and he wrote the narration for Michael Jackson's E.Not so much a novel as a manifesto for respecting other life and recognizing that we have not been given "dominion over the fish of the sea, over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth" (Genesis 1:26 [NKJV]). The village has a by-pass now which means there is easy access to the village and ample space for parking. As with John Brunner’s Stand on Zanzibar (1968), William Kotzwinkle creates the substrate of Doctor Rat’s world (or delusion) by referencing both invented pseudo-knowledge and real events.

The novel works best when exploring the viewpoints of individual animals around the world as they build toward a global gathering and when using the actions of Dr. Excitingly, the French pharmaceutical company Sanofi was then allowed to go ahead with a clinical trial without doing any animal tests.He is a two-time recipient of the National Magazine Award for Fiction, a National Book Critics Circle Award nominee. Some of the other stories I read can be as violent, but Kotzwinkle‘s writing dug his claws of horror and despair into my brain. To preserve these articles as they originally appeared, The Times does not alter, edit or update them.