Criticism > Contemporary Literary Criticism > Lessing, Doris (Vol. 170) - Linda Simon (review date February 2001)

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Linda Simon (review date February 2001)

SOURCE: Simon, Linda. “The Alien.” World & I 16, no. 2 (February 2001): 235-40.

[In the following review, Simon contrasts the protagonist and themes of Ben, in the World with those of The Fifth Child.]

“It would be a good thing if man concerned himself more with the history of his nature than with the history of his deeds.” This remark by the nineteenth-century German dramatist Friedrich Hebbel serves as an epigraph for Doris Lessing's Prisons We Choose to Live Inside (1987), a collection of five essays that reflect on the causes—biological or social—of human behavior, essays that consider how often and how much we are dominated by our savage past, as individuals and as groups. What, Lessing asks, is our inherent nature: Are we barbaric, brutal beasts who must be socialized into civility? Or have we, as a species, evolved genetically from our bestial past to transcend...

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1. Introduction
2. Principal Works
3. Criticism
   1. Adele S. Newson (review date winter 1994)
   2. Julia O'Faolain (review date 5 April 1996)
   3. Ruth Brandon (review date 12 April 1996)
   4. Suzann Bick (review date fall 1996)
   5. Adele S. Newson (review date autumn 1996)
   6. Judith Grossman (review date October 1996)
   7. John Hobbs (review date 7 December 1996)
   8. Millicent Bell (review date summer 1997)
   9. Anthony Sampson (review date 31 October 1997)
   10. Jane Miller and Elaine Showalter (review date summer 1998)
   11. Elizabeth Powers (review date September 1998)
   12. Mara Kalnins (review date March 1999)
   13. Alex Clark (review date 2 April 1999)
   14. Judith E. Chettle (review date May 1999)
   15. Doris Lessing and Jonah Raskin (interview date June 1999)
   16. Mona Knapp (review date spring 2000)
   17. Miranda France (review date 24 June 2000)
   18. Trudy Bush (review date 13 December 2000)
   19. Susan Rowland (essay date 2000)
   20. Sarah Sceats (essay date 2000)
   21. Linda Simon (review date February 2001)
   22. Alan Davis (review date spring 2001)
   23. Philip Hensher (review date 1 September 2001)
   24. Stephanie Merritt (review date 1 October 2001)
   25. Jeff Zaleski (review date 21 January 2002)
4. Further Reading
5. Copyright