An informative, entertaining package from a gifted, original thinker.
A highly respected scientist takes a close, cleareyed look at the processes of invention.
Smil, the author of more than 40 books on scientific subjects and global matters, is always worth reading. In his latest, the author investigates some technologies that have not lived up to their promise despite huge investments of effort and capital. In the first section, he explores three inventions—leaded gasoline, DDT insecticide, and chlorofluorocarbons—that were initially welcomed but later shunned as environmentally hazardous. This was mainly due to the long-term consequences not being fully understood or the balance of benefits and disadvantages not being properly measured. Basically, they seemed like good ideas at the time. The second category deals with inventions that were supposed to be world changing but never quite got out of a niche—e.g., airships, nuclear fission, and supersonic travel. In these cases, the inventions were overtaken by alternatives that were cheaper and less dangerous. Then there are ideas that failed to mature into useful technology, like nuclear fusion, high-speed travel in vacuum tubes (hyperloop), and nitrogen-fixing cereal crops. These are all intriguing concepts, but there have always been problems that stubbornly resist solutions, and 90% of a breakthrough does not count for much. Smil clearly understands the technical issues involved, but he avoids jargon, and he has a cheeky sense of humor. He wonders why technologies that are proven failures receive regular bursts of enthusiasm, and he points to the media as a primary culprit. A novel, earth-shaking invention is an easy headline even if the fine print shows that real-world application is decades away. In fact, the author shows how new-generation supersonic travel would not markedly improve our lives. Today, the most crucial technologies involve better water treatment methods and improved agricultural yields. It may be unglamorous work, but advancements in both would make a critical difference.
An informative, entertaining package from a gifted, original thinker.Pub Date: Feb. 7, 2023
ISBN: 978-0-262-04805-7
Page Count: 208
Publisher: MIT Press
Review Posted Online: Sept. 20, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2022
SEEN & HEARD
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
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
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