Reviews for Knobil and Neill's physiology of reproduction

The average rating for Knobil and Neill's physiology of reproduction based on 2 reviews is 2 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2008-01-14 00:00:00 Tony Minard A memoir of a poet who spent seven years in prison (two of which in solitary confinement) for "terrorism" during apartheid South Africa. If you want a straight "and then this happened, and then that happened" memoir, this is not it. Like I said, Breyten Breytenbach is a poet, and an obtuse one at that, but language is gorgeous, and having it the language so dense and feverish really gives you a feel for what is going on in someone's mind during such a harrowing experience. I also respect his position much more than other white liberals who said they were against apartheid. He definitely put his life on the line much more than other artists of the day. This book is not for everyone, but it's a good one.

Review # 2 was written on 2016-06-05 00:00:00 Timothy Pickens One of the most deep, impressive works of speculative (non)fiction coming out of the prison experience -- South Africa in this case. Breytenbach is a writer gifted with precise observation, explosive prose and deep emotional expanse. He is among my all time favorite writers, and a beautiful painter as well. If you like David Mitchell but want something more personal and at once more political, Breytenbach has the skillz. It's a wonder that he is relatively unknown still, but I would put him in Nobel Prize territory. Like Mitchell, his prose is poetic; both know how to switch from infinite magical realism to haiku at a moment's notice. True Confessions is an inspiring book, but also a daunting one, as we are choosing to look at things that are quite simply hard to look at -- that is, the fate of the political prisoner. While Kafka's characters' brushes with the Law are highly metaphorical and bureaucratic, here we have a narrator of his powers doing it for real, dealing directly with the isolation, the wavering of hope, the loss, the repetition of innumerable days. Of a nine year sentence, Breytenbach ended up spending 7 years incarcerated, just for fighting earlier in his life against Apartheid and making the mistake of visiting his homeland again after his exile years in Paris. Also, if you like this, I would also recommend the book Mouroir, which serves in a sense as a dreamtime companion to this book, delving deeper into the freedom of the imagination, which no one can take away.