| A Case Of Need |
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| 1968 novels | |
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| books by michael crichton | |
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The novel is a medical thriller in which a Boston on Karen Randall that led to her death. Crichton's later novels are preoccupied with technology: his novels can be extended examinations of the morality and implications of a particular innovation draped over the structure of a thriller novel. In ''A Case of Need'', however, it is a medical practice and not a techological innovation that is at issue. PLOT The protagonist, Dr. John Berry, learns that his friend, an patients were pregnant. In the course of his investigation, Berry runs up against the powerful Randall family, an established Boston medical dynasty. He also gathers a portrait of Karen's past, psychology, and character. THEMES The morality of abortion is the primary theme of the novel. Despite acknowledging the metaphysical arguments against abortion, Crichton never fully confronts them or attempts to disprove them. The tension between the arguments for and against abortion gives the book the gray-area milieu of a Sternwood's Nymphomaniac daughter in Raymond Chandler 's classic novel, The Big Sleep . Racial politics is a less prominent but recurring theme. It appears almost immediately with the revelation that Arthur Lee is half-Chinese. Berry discovers later that Karen had sexual relationships with a Jewish athlete and a black musician, both taboo for a member of a white, conservative, established Boston family in the 1960s. Later, Lee's attorney, George Wilson, is described as "a kind of freak, a product which society had suddenly deemed valuable, an educated Negro." |
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