During the late 1970s and early 1980s, the author lived with a community of Bedouins in the Western Desert of Egypt for nearly two years, studying gender relations, morality, and the oral lyric poetry through which women and young men express personal feelings. In this book, the poems are haunting, and the evocation of emotional life vivid.

The real Hans Spemann, German embryologist (1869-1941), developed a concept of embryonic induction through his experiments on early amphibian embryos which demonstrated neural induction by the primary organizer and evocation of the lens by the optic vesicle.