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Sarah Duant will be discussing her novel Birth of Venus. This historical fiction combines sacrifice and betrayal during Florence’s captivity under Savonarola to create a fascinating and intriguing story. Amanda Foreman has described Birth of Venus as “a tour de force”. 7 p.m. Wordsworth Books, Cambridge...
...Birth of Venus...
...Birth of Venus...
...different from Lust for Life (about Van Gogh) and The Agony and the Ecstasy (Michelangelo). Irving Stone's old blockbusters were the testosterone-laden version of art history. The central voice now is more likely to be a woman's. In Sarah Dunant's agile new novel, The Birth of Venus (Random House; 394 pages), the fictional narrator is Alessandra Cecchi, 14, the daughter of a wealthy cloth merchant in the Florence of Michelangelo and Botticelli. Alessandra yearns to live with a brush in her hand. For that matter, she would be happy just to get out of the house...
Once it was out, the news that human embryos had been cloned flew around the world with the speed of sound bites bouncing off satellites ... It was the start of the fiercest scientific debate about medical ethics since the birth of the first test-tube baby 15 years ago. A line had been crossed. A taboo broken. A Brave New World of cookie-cutter humans, baked and bred to order, seemed, if not just around the corner, then just over the horizon. Ethicists called up nightmare visions of baby farming, of clones cannibalized for spare parts. Policymakers pointed...