A surprise from bestselling novelty-book author Stock (The Book of Questions, 1987, etc.): a jolting but seductively hopeful perspective on the future of human beings when the species is viewed—along with its culture, fellow species, and technology—as a superorganism. Though by no means original—the idea of society as an organism has its precedents in Lovelock, Teilhard de Chardin, Spencer, and innumerable science fiction novels, all the way back to medieval and ancient Greek thought—Stock's presentation of the superorganism ``Metaman,'' supported by scads of data, a winning style, and a sharp and powerful logic, has the potential to attract readers and believers. Though occupying the same intellectual ground as the Gaia hypothesis, Metaman has differences from Gaia that will strike some as dangerous and some as a welcome corrective to Green ideology. Where Gaia places humanity as one of many components, to be eliminated if its depredations grow too great for the superorganism's good, Stock places humanity at the core and soul of the Metaman superorganism, its purposes of paramount importance. Thus the author makes politically incorrect assertions like ``there are scores of matters more important to humanity than the loss of the snail darter,'' as well as arguments like his contention that individual privacy must yield to the data- collection needs of Metaman. Stock says that Metaman, the collective organism, is the next logical step in evolution, following three major transformations in levels of complexity: from biochemicals to primitive bacteria; from bacteria to animal cells; from those cells to multicellular organisms. With commerce and transport its circulatory system, telecommunications its nervous system, and potential space colonization its reproductive system, Metaman offers a coherent format for our future. Engaging and informative—but whether Stock turns out to be starry-eyed dreamer or hard-headed prophet remains to be seen. (Photographs and line drawings—not seen)
Pub Date: Sept. 15, 1993
ISBN: 0-671-70723-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1993
BOOK REVIEW
A book both educational and emotional.
A Vietnam War story about the mostly unreported role of military wives who ignored protocol to help free their husbands, held as prisoners of war, from torture by the North Vietnamese.
Relying on extensive personal interviews and previously unseen documents, Lee (Winnie Davis: Daughter of the Lost Cause, 2014) builds to February 1973, when 115 American POWs departed North Vietnam on U.S. military transport planes to receive health care, debriefings, and finally emergence into public view. Many of the American airmen never thought they would be shot from the sky, captured, and tortured—partly because of their ultraconfidence in their training, partly because they severely underestimated the fighting capabilities of the North Vietnamese military. Their wives back in the States, many with children, naturally felt desperate to learn the fates of their husbands. However, commanders in the American military services and diplomats in the U.S. State Department told them, often in condescending fashion, to remain quiet and docile so that negotiations with the enemy could proceed. Eventually, after years of excruciating worry, the wives of the prisoners—as well as fliers missing in action—began to actively discuss how to remedy the situation. As more years passed with no progress, wives on bases scattered around the country began organizing together. Lee’s cast of determined women is extensive and occasionally difficult to track as they enter and depart the narrative. Two of the most prominent are Sybil Stockdale (husband Jim) and Jane Denton (husband Jeremiah). (The renowned John McCain does not play a major role in the narrative.) In addition to the wrenching personal stories, the author handles context gracefully, especially regarding the wives and their ability to find their voices amid the continuing saga of an unjust war. “If these military wives hadn’t rejected the ‘keep quiet’ policy and spoken out,” she writes, “the POWs might have been left to languish in prison.”
A book both educational and emotional.Pub Date: April 2, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-16110-9
Page Count: 336
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Jan. 5, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2019
Hallahan's polemic against internal regulations within the national armaments industry is also a history of America's war machine since the founding of the Springfield Arsenal during the Revolution. Because the British had forbidden manufacture of muskets and ammunition in the colonies, the Americans had to invent an irregular form of warfare based on guerrilla tactics that made the best use of limited amounts of precious ammunition. The Revolutionary War demonstrated the effectiveness of the rifle, used as a sniper's weapon from long rage and from behind cover, over the bayoneted musket favored by the British. The rifle triumphed. But Edgar Awardwinning mystery writer turned military historian Hallahan's (Tripletrap, 1989, etc.) thesis, in germ, is that an obsession with conserving ammunition was to dominate American small-arms thinking for the next two centuries, resulting in the M- 16, which fires in economical bursts of three to five shells but which is outgunned by the continuously firing Kalashnikov. GIs found this a murderous disability in Vietnam, where they often abandoned their M-16s in favor of the Russian weapon. Ultimately, of course, Hallahan's target is the sclerotic, tradition-bound mentality of military establishments in general. We see the evolution of the US Ordnance Corps from its inception by the ebullient Henry Knox, the brilliant artillery engineer of the Revolution, and follow its aggrandizement into the arena of modern warfare, where the ``fixed tradition'' of the ``grave-belly long- range sharpshooter'' persisted. Hallahan guides the reader with a sure hand through the obscure but somehow ghoulishly intriguing complexities of weapons logistics: the creation, for example, of Earle Harvey's T-25 automatic rifle after WW II becomes, in the author's hands, a psychological and Cold War political thriller. Such dramatic narrative is unexpected in a book devoted to a subject that would at first appear to be of interest only to West Point cadets and jarheads. (Author tour)
Pub Date: Oct. 17, 1994
ISBN: 0-684-19359-0
Page Count: 578
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1994
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