KONRAD LORENZ: A BIOGRAPHY
by ALEC NISBETT 240 pages. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. $10.
Alec Nisbett, a physicist and science writer, plainly had ample access to Konrad Lorenz, the ethologist and author of the widely read books King Solomon's Ring and On Aggression. But Nisbett seems to have been overawed by his subject. As a result, he has failed to write a critical study of Lorenz and his work. Instead, he has produced an informative Festschrift.
The facts are all here. Nisbett's interviews with Lorenz reveal the great man to be the son of a dominant father who wanted him to study medicine rather than zoology. They show how Lorenz managed to mollify the old man by doing both and by sharing a Nobel Prize for Medicine.
Nisbett's book also describes Lorenz's remarkably symbiotic marriage to his wife and collaborator Gretl and relates, in great detail, the studies upon which he based his books and theories. Lorenz, in the course of his work, served as "mother" to a family of goslings, spent apparently interminable hours observing jackdaws, fish and other animals before developing his hypothesis that overcivilized modern man lives in a state of moral decay.
But this book reveals relatively little of Lorenz himself. Nisbett fails, for example, to follow up on a particularly tantalizing tidbit of information about Lorenz's pragmatism. When Doctoral Student Lorenz realized that his examiner had not read his thesis and was firmly committed to existing ideas, the founder of ethology smoothly switched tracks and gave the answers that were expected of him. Nor does Nisbett discuss Lorenz's now regretted papers that appeared, in the early 1940s, to support Nazi race theories.
Nisbett's problem is at least partially understandable: Lorenz, an impressive-looking figure at 73, is not only alive and well but perfectly capable of raising quite a ruckus over any statements, in this book or others, that offend either his sensibilities or his sense of moral purpose.
PINK COLLAR WORKERS
by LOUISE KAPP HOWE
301 pages. Putnam. $8.95.
When Bea, married to a printer and the mother of two, returned to work as a data processor, she was offered $2 an hour—a beginner's wage. That was what she had been making four years before. For non-college-educated women, Bea's predicament is not uncommon. According to Louise Kapp Howe, the odds are overwhelming that what such women do is vastly undervalued. To assemble her disquieting portrait of the work life of the average woman, Howe interviewed scores of women, met with unions and management and even took a job as a sales clerk. The vast majority of women, she writes, are in "pink collar" occupations: beautician, office worker, sales clerk, waitress. Among the problems contributing to their generally low wages: too many applicants and not enough jobs, indifferent unions, and company policy predicated on "A and P" (attrition and pregnancy) to hold down the office payroll. Wherever she can, Howe skillfully animates dry statistics with the experiences of women who are figures in a job world that only barely recognizes their existence.