Remember those giant vegetables in Woody Allen's Sleeper? They'll soon crop up on your local farm, along with five-ton cows and 12-foot-long pigs, according to this alarming report on genetic engineering by Fox (Inhumane Society, 1990, etc.). Fox observes that biotechnology—the business of gene splicing, which usually means mixing together the genes of different animals, including human beings—is ``the fastest growing industry in recorded history.'' It's also the most terrifying, if Fox's doomsday predictions bear fruit. For one thing, he claims, there's no control on current gene experiments and no way to predict their outcome. The genetic code for the AIDS virus has been implanted in mice; Fox believes that the virus may now mutate and become transmissible in saliva or urine. Other laboratory tomfoolery involves creating superplants; Fox's assessment is that ``we could end up with no trees.'' Furthermore, bioengineering is ``genetic imperialism'' and ``biological fascism.'' This assessment sounds realistic—especially when one hears about laboratory workers putting goat's heads on sheep's bodies through embryonic microsurgery, apparently just to see if it can be done, or engineering sheep that secrete insect repellent to produce the world's first mothproof wool. Fox's outrage comes both from the hubris in these experiments and from the animal suffering they cause. The villains are scientists, whose insistence on separating ethics and research Fox finds ``shocking''; he singles out some heavy hitters like DNA-decoder James Watson as especially culpable. Fox's relentless and impassioned attack collapses only when he offers alternatives: While his call for a federal bioethics council seems eminently reasonable, pleas for ``a fundamental change in worldview'' leading to ``a resacralization of nature'' are hopelessly vague and won't win the hearts and minds of many scientists. Eye-opening evidence that science fiction can indeed come true—and not always with happy results.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1992
ISBN: 1-55821-182-9
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Lyons Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1992
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.
The authors have created a sort of anti-Book of Virtues in this encyclopedic compendium of the ways and means of power.
Everyone wants power and everyone is in a constant duplicitous game to gain more power at the expense of others, according to Greene, a screenwriter and former editor at Esquire (Elffers, a book packager, designed the volume, with its attractive marginalia). We live today as courtiers once did in royal courts: we must appear civil while attempting to crush all those around us. This power game can be played well or poorly, and in these 48 laws culled from the history and wisdom of the world’s greatest power players are the rules that must be followed to win. These laws boil down to being as ruthless, selfish, manipulative, and deceitful as possible. Each law, however, gets its own chapter: “Conceal Your Intentions,” “Always Say Less Than Necessary,” “Pose as a Friend, Work as a Spy,” and so on. Each chapter is conveniently broken down into sections on what happened to those who transgressed or observed the particular law, the key elements in this law, and ways to defensively reverse this law when it’s used against you. Quotations in the margins amplify the lesson being taught. While compelling in the way an auto accident might be, the book is simply nonsense. Rules often contradict each other. We are told, for instance, to “be conspicuous at all cost,” then told to “behave like others.” More seriously, Greene never really defines “power,” and he merely asserts, rather than offers evidence for, the Hobbesian world of all against all in which he insists we live. The world may be like this at times, but often it isn’t. To ask why this is so would be a far more useful project.
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-670-88146-5
Page Count: 430
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
This a book of earlier, philosophical essays concerned with the essential "absurdity" of life and the concept that- to overcome the strong tendency to suicide in every thoughtful man-one must accept life on its own terms with its values of revolt, liberty and passion. A dreary thesis- derived from and distorting the beliefs of the founders of existentialism, Jaspers, Heldegger and Kierkegaard, etc., the point of view seems peculiarly outmoded. It is based on the experience of war and the resistance, liberally laced with Andre Gide's excessive intellectualism. The younger existentialists such as Sartre and Camus, with their gift for the terse novel or intense drama, seem to have omitted from their philosophy all the deep religiosity which permeates the work of the great existentialist thinkers. This contributes to a basic lack of vitality in themselves, in these essays, and ten years after the war Camus seems unaware that the life force has healed old wounds... Largely for avant garde aesthetes and his special coterie.
Pub Date: Sept. 26, 1955
ISBN: 0679733736
Page Count: 228
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 19, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1955
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