what I thought about "the white plague" by frank herbert

An interesting book.  I felt simultaneously too smart and too stupid to read it.  The premise is that a man is in Ireland with his family, and his wife and two children are killed while crossing the street when an IRA car bomb detonates.  Being a molecular biologist, he creates a plague, as you would.  This plague infects anyone exposed to it, making men carriers and killing all the women.  There is discussion about how the virus bonds to the DNA of the host that was a bit over my head, but you don't need to know exactly how the virus works to enjoy the book, if enjoy is the right word.

There are two token female scientists at the beginning, and then a woman who plays a key role in the denoument who is a cotton-headed ninnymuggins.  She and her boyfriend enjoy a very traditional male fantasy type of relationship (he is thinky, she is hysterical) that irritated me immensely.  When there is talk about premarital sex and unwed pregnancy the Catholic church is portrayed with some pretty dinosaurian and sexist doctrine, which may be a function of this book having been written in the early eighties.  I am not familiar enough with Catholic doctrine to know if they still believe that use of condoms or being a victim of statutory rape brings damnation to your soul.  I would hope not.  And the end, in which women are being asked to take secondary husbands, is a bit unbelievable.  With men outnumbering women five thousand to one and the fate of humanity hanging in the balance let's not pretend that women are going to have any control of their sexual lives.

But it wasn't all depressing.  There is some interesting history of why the Irish hate the British so much, and a sweet moment of forgiveness and tenderness that I enjoyed.  And as in World War Z, Israel is way more prepared to deal with the problems than everyone else.  Paranoia--it's a good thing.