Reviews were generally positive and a respectable amount of volumes were sold, but it did not become a bestseller until an edition was published in England. By 1896 the novel had gone through nine editions and Crane himself realized he was no longer "a black sheep but a star." A reviewer in the New York Press wrote "one should be forever slow in charging an author with genius, but it must be confessed that The Red Badge of Courage is open to the suspicion of having greater power and originality that can be girdled by the name of talent." Joseph Conrad, the famous author of Heart of Darkness (1899), wrote that Crane had written "a spontaneous piece of work which seems to spurt and flow like a tapped stream from the depths of the writer's being." Some critics, including the writer Ambrose Bierce, attacked the novel for, among other things, being too imaginative, depicting soldiers poorly, and lacking in a coherent plot and grammatical/syntactical purity.
Have students go back to Your Genes, Your Choices and read the other chapters in the book. Students can be divided into groups, each assigned to one of the chapters. They can present the scenario to the class and ask their classmates what they would do in such a situation. After a discussion led by the group members, the presenters can inform students what the patient actually did.
Students in the class can also take a survey of the entire school or their community about Carlos and Mollie's dilemma. They can take a poll about how many people think Mollie should get tested for CF vs. how many people do not think she should get tested. The survey can also include questions such as whether or not Carlos and Mollie should consider prenatal testing for CF once Mollie gets pregnant. If the results are positive, should Mollie get an abortion? This type of survey allows students to understand how the public views such a dilemma.
In the course of this enquiry I found that much more had been done than I had been aware of, when I first published the Essay. The poverty and misery arising from a too rapid increase of population had been distinctly seen, and the most violent remedies proposed, so long ago as the times of Plato and Aristotle. And of late years the subject has been treated in such a manner by some of the French Economists; occasionally by Montesquieu, and, among our own writers, by Dr. Franklin, Sir James Stewart, Mr. Arthur Young, and Mr. Townsend, as to create a natural surprise that it had not excited more of the public attention.