Tuesday, August 02, 2005

State of Fear

If there is a book that TocqueVille's citizens cannot afford to ignore, that is "State of Fear" by Michael Crichton, better in the original English version. It is not just the usual, wonderful thriller by the author of Andromeda, Jurassic Park, The Lost World, Timeline, Rising Sun, Disclosure and Congo. It shares with the preceding works by Crichton, other than the divine writing style (700 pages go down as smoothly as a vodka&peach in a couple of days), the excellent work of research and localization that is a real trademark of the Crichton-team and of course a plot that seems built just to be transformed, without much effort, into a solid film script. But what raises "State of Fear" at least one step above the other commercial novels is, incredibly, its devastating and unmistakable political message. Yes, because Crichton's book is a powerful, detailed and extremely courageous accusation against environmental fundamentalism, rich in charts, footnotes and bibliography (Bjørn Lomborg, without any doubt, the most cited author). In "State of Fear", in short, the "bad guys" are the managers and lawyers of the environmental agencies and lobbies, the eco-terrorists and Hollywood stars that raid the world (using super polluting private jets) to defend tropical forests from the attacks by multinational corporations. Dying, in the development of the action, lay on the ground some of the most embarrassing myths of radical ecologism: ranging from the theories on global warming to those concerning exhaustion of natural resources. Further on, it cannot be missed the postface and the appendix where Crichton compares the pseudo-scientific theory of global warming to the theory, as well pseudo-scientific, of eugenetics that was very popular at the beginning of the 20th century, No excuses, then: get out of home and rush to the bookstore. "State of Fear" is the book of the summer. Moreover: of the year. (read the original post in italian)

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