Strategies of Sex includes verses by a physician-scientist member of the National Academy of Sciences that are a celebration of the diversity of arrangements (often bizarre) that ensure the propagation of species, from Anableps to surgeonfish. The result is somewhere between Cole Porter ("bees do it") and Elizabeth Barrett Browning ("let me count the ways..") with a touch of Ogden Nash.
Book 1, focuses on the title topic, Strategies of Sex. Pudgy moorhens, hairy-legged fruit flies, doubly endowed four-eyed fish - whatever turns you on - they are all here, immortalized with grace and style. The price of too much male enthusiasm is described in "The Ballad of Howie" a four-eyed fish blessed (?) with two sex organs, and in "Never on Sunday, Hunday" about a bull who sired too many calves before dying of exhaustion. In the case of the fruit fly, Melanogaster, "acts of millisecond brevity interfere with his longevity". But female promiscuity is the subject of "The Round-Heeled Snakes of Sweden."
Book 1, focuses on the title topic, Strategies of Sex. Pudgy moorhens, hairy-legged fruit flies, doubly endowed four-eyed fish - whatever turns you on - they are all here, immortalized with grace and style. The price of too much male enthusiasm is described in "The Ballad of Howie" a four-eyed fish blessed (?) with two sex organs, and in "Never on Sunday, Hunday" about a bull who sired too many calves before dying of exhaustion. In the case of the fruit fly, Melanogaster, "acts of millisecond brevity interfere with his longevity". But female promiscuity is the subject of "The Round-Heeled Snakes of Sweden."
Book 2, Annotated Animals, defines the "zoo out there" in which the implicit verbal defamation of the Slow Loris is decried and doubts are expressed on the arrival of a "Tiny Pale Whale" at Coney Island. If that isn't news, then read "The Hippopota-news" or about the dog, man's best friend, with "no control at either end".
Book 3 covers - in verse and in prose - a sample of Humanity's Inanities. The author has taken license to indulge in a mixed bag of philosophical musings, including an obsession with proper English, ("More Importantly").
