Review by Booklist Review
McKibben (The End of Nature, 1989) turns a passionate and revealing spotlight on our headlong rush into technology. He explains an array of procedures--including germline engineering and therapeutic cloning--that represent a slippery slope. For although they hold the promise to cure disease, they also offer the option of "improving" or "perfecting" human beings, providing the ability to choose a child's sex, boost intelligence, or implant a predisposition to music. If we're not careful, we could end up engineering our children to the point that they're no longer human, he cautions. Technological advancements are proceeding so rapidly that we will soon need to make decisions about how much technology is enough. McKibben makes genetic engineering, robotics, and nanotechology understandable even to those readers who are not techno-savvy, and he makes a strong and compelling case for examining the medical, social, ethical, and philosophical arguments against certain technological advancements that come eerily close to leaving behind humanness and, thus, all the intangible irrationalities that make us who we are. This is a disturbing though ultimately optimistic book that explores the possibility of technology replacing humanity and rouses within us the impulse to declare: enough. --Vanessa Bush
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
In 1989, McKibben published The End of Nature, a gorgeously written and galvanizing book about the true cost of global warming, the destruction of the ozone layer and other man-made ills-the loss of wild nature and with it the priceless aspect of our humanity that evolved to listen to and heed it. Now McKibben applies the same passion, scholarship and free-ranging thought to a subject that even committed environmentalists have avoided. Here he tackles what it means to be human. Reporting from the frontiers of genetic research, nanotechnology and robotics, he explores that subtle moral and spiritual boundary that he calls the "enough point." Presenting an overview of what is or may soon be possible, McKibben contends that there is no boundary to human ambition or desire or to what our very inventions may make possible. In an absorbing and horrifying montage of images, he depicts microscopic nanobots consuming the world and children born so genetically enhanced that they will never be able to believe that they reach for the stars as pianists or painters or long-distance runners because there is something unique in them that has a passion to try. Indeed, in the view of the most unbridled "technoutopians," the day of the robotically striving human is already here. What does set a human being apart from other beings, McKibben argues, is our capacity for restraint-and even for finding great meaning in restraint. "We need to do an unlikely thing: We need to survey the world we now inhabit and proclaim it good. Good enough." McKibben presents an uncompromising view, and an essential view. Readers will come away from his latest brilliantly provocative work shaking their heads at the possible future he portrays, yet understanding that becoming a pain-free, all-but-immortal, genetically enhanced semi-robot may be deeply unsatisfactory compared to being an ordinary man or woman who has faced his or her fear of death to relish what is. This is a brilliant book that deserves a wide readership. Author tour. (Apr.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Much as Francis Fukuyama discussed complex and nuanced bioethical choices in his Posthuman Future, McKibben, the well-regarded author of The End of Nature, argues convincingly for restraint in the current race to expand the frontiers of genetic engineering, robotics, and nanotechnology. McKibben asks good questions: have we really thought through all the implications of life prolongation and designer babies? Are we being realistic about our ability to "cure" mortality and to make good choices for ourselves and for others? These aren't easy issues to educate ourselves about, and McKibben's treatment led this reviewer to the web site of the President's Council of Bioethics (www.bioethics.gov) for more information, accessible to nonscientists, on cloning, sex selection, genetic enhancement, and in particular the search for perfection (www.bioethics.gov/ bookshelf/search). This can be frustrating, for no one has any real answers yet about these issues. But McKibben's work remains a good, stimulating read and a worthwhile addition to almost any library.-Mary Chitty, Cambridge Healthtech, Newton, MA (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Bleakly expanding on arguments made in The End of Nature (1989), McKibben paints a grim canvas of what will happen if nothing is done to arrest the "technotopian" dreams of . . . . . . the gene engineers who will germline-insert all the smart genes that will turn rich kids into a superspecies and leave the poor behind on the evolutionary tree; the nanotechs and roboticists who will combine their inventions to produce atom-sized servants able to synthesize anything; the immortalists who will develop strategies never to die and thus populate the planet (and space) forever. The author has talked to them, heard them lecture, read their books. And he is worried. His powerful jeremiad calls for a self-controlled decision not to pursue certain goals because they will destroy the meaning of life, take away choice, take away consciousness. McKibben even conjectures a sci-fi dark side of nano-robot technologies in which these particular genies from the techies' bottles gobble everything on earth and reduce it to gray goo: the world ends not with a bang but with a slime. He doesn't claim that this posthuman world will happen overnight, but in time--and at the kind of rates observed in computer speeds and memory sizes--all that the futurist engineers propose may come to pass. So let's rein in technology, McKibben says: we did it with nuclear arms, we are learning less profligate ways to live on the planet, we move toward ending racism and have abolished slavery. Since it is already apparent that monkeying with genes is fraught with complexities, that Artificial Intelligence nowhere near matches a human brain, and that natural laws (perhaps including the vaunted second law of thermodynamics) impose their own limits on what can be wrought, the kinds of progress McKibben deplores may be less likely to come to pass than he fears. Nonetheless, a provocative, conservative invocation of the need for awe, love, spiritual life, and humanity. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Review by Booklist Review
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Review by Library Journal Review
Review by Kirkus Book Review
