archives

Reviewed by LAURA LLOYD

EVERYTHING CONCEIVABLE: HOW ASSISTED REPRODUCTION IS CHANGING MEN, WOMEN AND THE WORLD By Liza Mundy Alfred A. Knopf, 416 pages, $24.95

A newspaper in late 2007 featured a photo of 12 women in saris wearing surgical masks. They are surrogate mothers in an Indian hospital that is set up to take care of them, offering the best foods and the most comforts as they progress toward parturition. They are the very valuable carriers of fertilized eggs of infertile American women. They will be handsomely paid for their trouble, much more than if they worked in the call centers of U.S. companies. These women may be the ultimate in outsourcing: Third-World bodies that can perform the elemental functions of human life, housing First-World babies that require the ultimate in technological intervention to come into being.

Reviewed by DARRELL TURNER

A HISTORY OF SIN By John Portmann Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 240 pages, $24.95

John Portmann’s latest book is curious for what it does and does not emphasize.

A History of Sin reflects the University of Virginia religious studies professor’s continuing interest in problematic behaviors and attitudes, which he previously treated in such volumes as In Defense of Sin (which he edited), Sex and Heaven: Catholics in Bed and at Prayer and Bad for Us: The Lure of Self-Harm. His new work is eclectic, but perhaps too much so. In an effort to lace scholarship with popular culture and a reader-friendly style, the author throws out one intriguing observation after another without developing many of them.