Books: Notable

KONRAD LORENZ: A BIOGRAPHY

by ALEC NISBETT 240 pages. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. $10.

Alec Nisbett, a physicist and science writer, plainly had ample access to Konrad Lorenz, the ethologist and author of the widely read books King Solomon’s Ring and On Aggression. But Nisbett seems to have been overawed by his subject. As a result, he has failed to write a critical study of Lorenz and his work. Instead, he has produced an informative Festschrift.

The facts are all here. Nisbett’s interviews with Lorenz reveal the great man to be the son of a dominant father who wanted him to study medicine rather than zoology. They show how Lorenz managed to mollify the old man by doing both and by sharing a Nobel Prize for Medicine.

Nisbett’s book also describes Lorenz’s remarkably symbiotic marriage to his wife and collaborator Gretl and relates, in great detail, the studies upon which he based his books and theories. Lorenz, in the course of his work, served as “mother” to a family of goslings, spent apparently interminable hours observing jackdaws, fish and other animals before developing his hypothesis that overcivilized modern man lives in a state of moral decay.

But this book reveals relatively little of Lorenz himself. Nisbett fails, for example, to follow up on a particularly tantalizing tidbit of information about Lorenz’s pragmatism. When Doctoral Student Lorenz realized that his examiner had not read his thesis and was firmly committed to existing ideas, the founder of ethology smoothly switched tracks and gave the answers that were expected of him. Nor does Nisbett discuss Lorenz’s now regretted papers that appeared, in the early 1940s, to support Nazi race theories.

Nisbett’s problem is at least partially understandable: Lorenz, an impressive-looking figure at 73, is not only alive and well but perfectly capable of raising quite a ruckus over any statements, in this book or others, that offend either his sensibilities or his sense of moral purpose.

PINK COLLAR WORKERS

by LOUISE KAPP HOWE

301 pages. Putnam. $8.95.

When Bea, married to a printer and the mother of two, returned to work as a data processor, she was offered $2 an hour—a beginner’s wage. That was what she had been making four years before. For non-college-educated women, Bea’s predicament is not uncommon. According to Louise Kapp Howe, the odds are overwhelming that what such women do is vastly undervalued. To assemble her disquieting portrait of the work life of the average woman, Howe interviewed scores of women, met with unions and management and even took a job as a sales clerk. The vast majority of women, she writes, are in “pink collar” occupations: beautician, office worker, sales clerk, waitress. Among the problems contributing to their generally low wages: too many applicants and not enough jobs, indifferent unions, and company policy predicated on “A and P” (attrition and pregnancy) to hold down the office payroll. Wherever she can, Howe skillfully animates dry statistics with the experiences of women who are figures in a job world that only barely recognizes their existence.

To underline her point about how women’s work is consistently given short shrift, Howe includes a few choice listings from the Labor Department’s Dictionary of Occupational Titles. It ranks some 30,000 jobs according to their level of complexity. “Nurse, midwife” is classified as less skilled than hotel clerk; “homemaker,” cross-referenced with “general maid,” ranks slightly lower than dog-pound attendant.

SUPER-WEALTH: THE SECRET LIVES OF THE OIL SHEIKHS by LINDA BLANDFORD 319 pages. Morrow. $10.

What goes on behind the garden walls of oil-rich Arabs? Linda Blandford, an English journalist, decided to find out. Her book is no better than her superficial investigations, but they are not without a certain gossipy appeal.

One Saudi prince bought a $30,000 Rolls-Royce Corniche to tool around England with, and after two months gave it to his British chauffeur. Another likes to play with 16 hooded falcons, which go for $3,000 a throw. Sheikh Zayed of Abu Dhabi, President of the United Arab Emirates, has “a palace or two” in Pakistan, where he hunts for two months every year, and London digs with four-figure faucets designed by Godfrey Bonsack of May fair. Then there is the ruler of Dubai, who likes to hoist up his skirts—all the way—and then see which courtier will be the first to mention the royal flash. Linda of Arabia deals in crashing generalities. “Arabs are hypochondriacs,” she offers en passant. Bahrain is “tidy,” Qatar is dull and Kuwait is full of trendy boutiques but still very conservative. One sheikh found his unmarried daughter with a man and took her out to the desert—forever. The Saudi view of women boils down to “treasure or tramp.” Linda apparently does not fall into either category, which is probably why her hosts poured out their warm hearts to her.