Common Experience

• Reviews of Oryx and Crake
• Reviews of Whose Water is it? The Unquenchable Thirst of a Water-Hungry World
• Instructional materials for Oryx and Crake
• Instructional materials for Whose Water is it? The Unquenchable Thirst of a Water-Hungry World

The common readings of the IU Southeast Common Experience for 2008-09 are Oryx & Crake by Margaret Atwood and Whose Water is it? The Unquenchable Thirst of a Water-Hungry World edited by Douglas Jehl and Bernadette McDonald. We invite you to join the campus in reading one or both of the books. See examples of reviews of each book below. Jehl and McDonald’s book will be primary reading during the fall semester and Atwood’s book will be primary reading spring 2009. However, the theme, which is addressed in each book, will be discussed both semesters. So join us in reading one or both of the books and participating in an exciting series of discussions about each book fall and spring semesters.

Book Reviews

Reviews of Oryx & Crake by Margaret Atwood

From Amazon.com
In Oryx and Crake, a science fiction novel that is more Swift than Heinlein, more cautionary tale than "fictional science" (no flying cars here), Margaret Atwood depicts a near-future world that turns from the merely horrible to the horrific, from a fool's paradise to a bio-wasteland. Snowman (a man once known as Jimmy) sleeps in a tree and just might be the only human left on our devastated planet. He is not entirely alone, however, as he considers himself the shepherd of a group of experimental, human-like creatures called the Children of Crake. As he scavenges and tends to his insect bites, Snowman recalls in flashbacks how the world fell apart.

While the story begins with a rather ponderous set-up of what has become a clichéd landscape of the human endgame, littered with smashed computers and abandoned buildings, it takes on life when Snowman recalls his boyhood meeting with his best friend Crake: "Crake had a thing about him even then.... He generated awe ... in his dark laconic clothing." A dangerous genius, Crake is the book's most intriguing character. Crake and Jimmy live with all the other smart, rich people in the Compounds--gated company towns owned by biotech corporations. (Ordinary folks are kept outside the gates in the chaotic "pleeblands.") Meanwhile, beautiful Oryx, raised as a child prostitute in Southeast Asia, finds her way to the West and meets Crake and Jimmy, setting up an inevitable love triangle. Eventually Crake's experiments in bioengineering cause humanity's shockingly quick demise (with uncanny echoes of SARS, ebola, and mad cow disease), leaving Snowman to try to pick up the pieces. There are a few speed bumps along the way, including some clunky dialogue and heavy-handed symbols such as Snowman's broken watch, but once the bleak narrative gets moving, as Snowman sets out in search of the laboratory that seeded the world's destruction, it clips along at a good pace, with a healthy dose of wry humor. --Mark Frutkin

From Publishers Weekly
Atwood has visited the future before, in her dystopian novel, The Handmaid's Tale. In her latest, the future is even bleaker. The triple whammy of runaway social inequality, genetic technology and catastrophic climate change, has finally culminated in some apocalyptic event. As Jimmy, apparently the last human being on earth, makes his way back to the RejoovenEsencecompound for supplies, the reader is transported backwards toward that cataclysmic event, its full dimensions gradually revealed. Jimmy grew up in a world split between corporate compounds (gated communities metastasized into city-states) and pleeblands (unsafe, populous and polluted urban centers). His best friend was "Crake," the name originally his handle in an interactive Net game, Extinctathon. Even Jimmy's mother-who ran off and joined an ecology guerrilla group when Jimmy was an adolescent-respected Crake, already a budding genius. The two friends first encountered Oryx on the Net; she was the eight-year-old star of a pedophilic film on a site called HottTotts. Oryx's story is a counterpoint to Jimmy and Crake's affluent adolescence. She was sold by her Southeast Asian parents, taken to the city and eventually made into a sex "pixie" in some distant country. Jimmy meets Oryx much later-after college, after Crake gets Jimmy a job with ReJoovenEsence. Crake is designing the Crakers-a new, multicolored placid race of human beings, smelling vaguely of citron. He's procured Oryx to be his personal assistant. She teaches the Crakers how to cope in the world and goes out on secret missions. The mystery on which this riveting, disturbing tale hinges is how Crake and Oryx and civilization vanished, and how Jimmy-who also calls himself "the Snowman," after that other rare, hunted specimen, the Abominable Snowman-survived. Chesterton once wrote of the "thousand romances that lie secreted in The Origin of Species." Atwood has extracted one of the most hair-raising of them, and one of the most brilliant. Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Reviews of Whose Water is it? The Unquenchable Thirst of a Water-Hungry World edited by Douglas Jehl and Bernadette McDonald.

From Amazon.com
Each day at least 10,000 people worldwide die from disease-infected water. This is just one of the startling statistics contained in this collection of 13 essays, which address a wide variety of water-related issues, including global scarcity, pollution, privatization, poor distribution, and desalinization. In many parts of the world, useable fresh water (about 1% of the planet's total) is a resource more valuable than oil and even more essential to life. This book makes clear the sobering connection between inadequate clean water and poverty and the potential for increasing international conflicts (especially in parched places such as Middle East and sub-Saharan Africa), as well as some of the steps that might be taken to alleviate these problems: conservation, technological innovation, and effective cross-boundary water management. Its contributors--scientists, professors, journalists, and politicians--pile on one grim statistic after another, often repeating material from earlier chapters, which tends to dull what ultimately is a very compelling argument: that we use too much water, waste it foolishly, and degrade the environment by draining underground aquifers faster than they can be replenished.

By 2015, some 3 billion people will live in countries where fresh water is in short supply; by 2050, the number could be as high as 7 billion. Numbers this large are difficult to comprehend, which is why the most specific examples are the most horrifying. Consider the Taliban’s unauthorized construction of a dam on the Helmand River in eastern Afghanistan in the 1990s and its effect on neighboring Iran, where a 4,000-square-kilometer lake has been sucked bone-dry. All fish have disappeared and so has the village that until recently depended on catching them. What remains is an exposed lakebed, rapidly being covered by dunes from frequent sandstorms. A modest example maybe, but a particularly haunting symbol for a growing global problem. --Keith Moerer

From Publishers Weekly
McDonald, an environmentalist and editor of Extreme Landscape, and Jehl, a New York Times national correspondent on environmental affairs, gather 13 compelling essays on the state of water use in a collection that offers both dire warnings and causes for hope. Maude Barlow, in her essay "The World's Water: A Human Right or a Corporate Good?," looks at the issue of ownership. Besides private companies stepping in to operate municipal water supplies-as happened in a Bolivian city, with disastrous effects-organizations such as the WTO, the IMF and the World Bank are powerful allies working for the "liberalization of national laws in relationship to water"; water, she argues, should be a public trust, its management and distribution built on the "twin foundations of conservation and equity." As a poster country for poor water management, China has almost no equal, and several essays in the book highlight the problems facing a country where dangerous floods threaten the south as northern farms and industries go dry. "Why is China running out of water?" asks Marq De Villiers in his essay, "Three Rivers." "The answer is the same as for the rest of the world: it isn't running out. It's only running out in places where it's needed most." Other problems addressed include pollution, irrigation, the draining of "fossil aquifers" and the burgeoning population in many dry areas. Conflicts over water have begun to increase in number, scale and violence, but new ideas are being tested in hard-pressed Saudi Arabia, San Diego and other deserts-efforts include community planning, desalinization, use of gray water, conservation and reforestation. Though the book doesn't shy away from painful truths about global water use, it is far from a doomsday report, instead offering fresh insight and constructive, real-world solutions from a well-chosen group of authors. Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Instructional Materials

Instructional Materials for Oryx & Crake

Oryx and Crake is in some ways a sequel to Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale in that it carries the national catastrophe in the earlier novel to global level. A major reference seems to be to the "Last Man" topos in science fiction, as it appers in Mary Shelley's The Last Man, also a post-apocalyptic novel, whose main character is the only survivor of a plague that has killed off all other humans.

• Full Summary and Questions for Oryx & Crake (PDF)

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Instructional Materials for Whose Water is it? The Unquenchable Thirst of a Water-Hungry World

The chapters in this book are short. Each chapter will take approximately 15 minutes for the students to read. A short summary of each chapter, questions about each chapter and a green assignment for my FYS are below. The authors of the chapters at times repeat the issues concerning the water crisis, however, very little space is given to solutions. The FYS assignment is designed to focus the students' attention on what they can do to assist the environment.

• Full Summary and Questions for Whose Water is it? The Unquenchable Thirst of a Water-Hungry World (PDF)

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