Word: risk
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Even more important, in his view, a joint mission might help draw the U.S. and the Soviet Union closer together. He dismisses fears that such a mission would risk giving away U.S. technology to the Soviets, pointing out that the Soviets are a decade ahead of the U.S. in several areas of spaceflight. "Technology transfer," Sagan concludes, "is likely to flow both ways...
...mutual support and to avoid disruptive sexual entanglements aloft. Former Astronaut Michael Collins has suggested an even simpler remedy: send up a crew of four married couples. "But eight is a bad number," he concedes, "because you want an odd number; in arguments, you don't want to risk a 4-to-4 tie vote...
There are, of course, other victims: intravenous-drug users, prostitutes, infants condemned in the wombs of diseased mothers, and patients who received tainted blood transfusions. This last category provides the subject of one of the first AIDS novels, Alice Hoffman's At Risk (Putnam; 219 pages; $17.95), a suburban drama about an eleven-year-old schoolgirl gymnast who is inadvertently doomed during a routine appendectomy...
...Risk, Amanda Farrell will not make it to puberty. Nothing wrenches so hard as the death of a child, and Hoffman knows just when and where to tug. Like Holleran, Hoffman (The Drowning Season, Fortune's Daughter) is mainstreaming a refined literary talent. Her new novel is structured like a movie, which probably explains why 20th Century-Fox wasted no time buying the film rights...
...Risk is also a carefully composed work of fiction. From its first lines ("There is a wasp in the kitchen. Drawn by the smell of apricot jam, lazy from the morning's heat, the wasp hovers above the children"), Hoffman establishes a rhythm of inevitability. She sketches a bosky world in Massachusetts, populates it with wholesome families and engaging eccentrics. One young woman with modest paranormal powers seems like a character prewired for film directors who might want to plug in an occult package. But in the book she represents a sensitivity to mysteries of life and death that Amanda...