One Summer: America 1927

Title: One Summer: America 1927
Author: Bill Bryson
Publisher: Doubleday, 2013 (First)
ISBN: 9780385608282
Pages: 557

This book is a glorified journal entry for the excruciatingly hot summer in the year 1927 which the United States endured. In the five months starting from May to September of that year, the country witnessed some landmark progress in aviation, radio broadcasting and financial prosperity. In addition to this, developments in sports — which means only baseball and boxing in the American context — and sensational news like murders and political assassinations are included. The book summarizes the major events of that summer in a well-researched narrative made richer by a humorous perspective. Looking back a century later, a yawning gulf separates today from that past age. Things we take for granted even in a third world country didn't exist then. Antibiotics still lay a decade in the future. So we read about the President of the USA's 16-year old son developing an infection while playing tennis on the White House grounds. The injury became septic and the boy died a week later. In his autobiography, Calvin Coolidge reflected heartbreakingly that 'when he went, the power and the glory of the Presidency went with him'. Still, there was something romantic about the era as it didn't like practical concerns to get in the way of its musings. Since many of his other books are reviewed here already, Bill Bryson does not need an introduction. Suffice it to say that he is one of my favourite authors.

The 1920s obviously lacked the most common forms of personal entertainment which we now take for granted. There was no mobile phone, no internet, no radio and no TV. That's why people really did gather in enormous numbers for almost any event. The 1920s was the peak decade for reading in American life. Each year, publishers produced 110 million books in more than 10,000 separate titles. The industry was so discreet that it boasted it never published a word that made a maiden blush. Soon, the industry was to be submerged in the flood tide of radio and it soon changed track to accommodate readers' demand for more explicit coverage. Radio picked up very rapidly, reaching every American home. Radio advertising took a large bite off newspaper and magazine ads. Nearly 250 newspapers went under in a decade because of the revenue crunch. Charles Lindbergh's maiden trans-Atlantic flight to Paris was the most famous event in 1927. When he returned triumphantly to the US, it was the day that radio came of age. His arrival was broadcast coast to coast. The ability to sit in one's own living room and listen to a live event in some distant place was as miraculous as teleportation. In spite of all these achievements, crime rate was high. The culprits were not caught in a majority of cases. Where arrests were made, the conviction rate was less than 20 percent.

Bryson observes that the US was staggeringly well-off. American homes shone with sleek appliances and consumer durables that would not become standard in other countries for a generation or more. This was greatly facilitated by the instalment scheme which made its debut along with the consumer revolution. Borrowing became an essential part of life with the invention of the instalment scheme. In the 1920s, America became a high-rise nation. As buildings grew taller, the number of workers pouring into the city centres grew and grew. Unimaginable to us now, but Prohibition was in full force in the US from 1920 to 1933 which mercilessly banned all alcoholic drinks in the country. It shut down the fifth largest industry, turning thousands into bootleggers. In 1927 alone, 11,700 people died from drinking de-natured spirit. The movement started by Wayne Wheeler grew so popular that politicians quickly learned either to support them or to give up any hope of being re-elected. In the 1920s, the share prices kept rising with little correspondence between the prices and the values of the companies they supported. The stock market eventually crashed in 1929, triggering the great depression that traumatized capitalism for a few years.

The central thread in this book is Charles Lindbergh's transatlantic flight and the widespread acclaim it received from an adoring public on both sides of the ocean. Even though the French saw the Americans usually with a low esteem, for a few weeks after Lindbergh's landing, the tide turned on French soil and Americans commanded immense respect. He was feted on a grand scale back home which the introvert Lindbergh found difficult to enjoy and he had an impossible time in that summer. He then embarked on a great aviation tour of America on the same plane on which he flew across the ocean. The tour was very gruelling with 69 overnight stops and 13 'touch' stops. From the moment he left his room in the morning, he was touched and jostled and bothered. Chicken bones and napkins from his dinner plate were fought over in kitchens. Cheques he wrote were rarely encashed; recipients preferred to frame them instead. He had no private life anymore. If he went into a men's room, people followed. Flying between cities was the most restful part of the tour. Bryson pinpoints the real significance of Lindbergh's flight in this book. His tour of America made the country ready for air travel which was unbelievable a year ago. Americans in the 1920s had grown up in a world in which most of the important things happened in Europe. Now suddenly America was dominant in every field such as popular culture, finance and banking, military might, invention and technology.

This book exposes a quirk in American foreign policy. From a different perspective, this can be argued as the basic feature of it as well. The US wanted to send 100 million USD to Austria as food aid after World War I. It was technically an enemy country and American law prevented helping enemies even after war ended. A convenient way around the hurdle was thought up. 45 million USD each was sent to Britain, France and Italy and they obligingly lent the money to Austria on the understanding that it be used to buy American food. This helped American farmers to dispose of surplus food at attractive valuations. But when Austria defaulted on repayment, the US insisted and forced the three intermediaries to pay back. They protested in vain but the US had its way. Transportation was the single sector that grew by leaps and bounds in the period under consideration. But it came with its own set of problems. The railway system was bewilderingly fragmented. One could buy a ticket on any of the 20,000 scheduled services from any of 1085 operating terminals, tracks and ticketing systems. Luxury services in the trains offered a barber, ladies' hairdresser and even a stenographer for taking dictation. The automobile became ubiquitous. Henry Ford revolutionized American car industry by then, but he was an anti-Semite. He accused the Jews of manipulating stock markets, working for the overthrow of Christianity, using Hollywood as a propaganda tool for Jewish interests, promoting jazz music and encouraging the wearing of short skirts. He was greatly admired in Nazi Germany and was the only American mentioned favourably in Mein Kampf. It was said that Hitler kept a framed photo of Ford on his wall. Ford accepted one of Nazi Germany's highest civilian honours — the Grand Cross of the German Eagle.

Even though the US always boasted of personal liberty and an enlightened society, racial discrimination of the coloured people was universal to the point of being institutionalized. When a play in New York showed black and white children playing together as if that were normal, the district attorney for Manhattan sent the police to stop it. This was in the year 1927. Even in the face of severe restrictions, there was a movement of blacks out of the south in the Great Migration. Between 1920 and 1930, 1.3 million southern blacks moved north in the hopes of finding better paying jobs and more personal liberty. Before that period, only 10 percent of blacks lived outside the south. After this era, almost half did. On the other side of the spectrum, the 1920s was also the age of loathing. Bigotry was casual, reflexive and universal. Ku Klux Klan had a resurgence which loathed blacks and Catholics. It had five million members. Eugenics had a large following. In 1927, the US Supreme Court ruled that a woman of low intelligence be sterilized in order to prevent the continuation of her 'imbecile' line. About 60,000 people were sterilized against their will. About 30 states had sterilizing laws and some of them still have those rules in their statute books. 

Baseball is an American game and nowhere outside the US has it any following worth the name. Considering this in mind, readers find the prominent coverage the game gets in the book somewhat tiring and irritating. The biography and playing tenure of George Herman Ruth is a punishment for non-American audience who has no idea of the intricacies of baseball's rules. Similar is the case with boxing. Bryson exhibits fine control of the narrative in a book handling such a large array of diverse topics. The ideas are shuffled regularly but brilliantly made to appear coherent and conforming to the overall plan of the narrative. For example, the chapter on June month links prohibition, World War I, antagonism to German people and a murder victim, all of them referenced in the previous month's chapter as well. The conclusion of the book is admiringly simple, yet evokes a tinge of loss and longing when he condenses the narrative to this line: 'Whatever else it was, it was one hell of a summer.'

The book is highly recommended.

Rating: 3 Star

The Shoemaker and His Daughter

Title: The Shoemaker and His Daughter – One Ordinary Family’s Remarkable Journey from Stalin’s Soviet Union to Putin’s Russia
Author: Conor O’Clery
Publisher: Doubleday Ireland, 2018 (First)
ISBN: 9781781620434
Pages: 357

The socialist empire in the Soviet Union threatened capitalism in the post-World War II period when even the US apprehended that the communists might take over most of the globe. But the concern was a bit premature. Margaret Thatcher once famously said, "the problem with socialism is that eventually, you run out of other people's money". It did exactly that in the Soviet Union. Decades of mismanagement and ridiculous economic logic shattered the economy whose coup de grace came in the form of the oil price slump in the early 1980s. Three general secretaries died in quick succession in 3 years and a reformer named Mikhail Gorbachev took the chair. His structural changes got out of hand and ended up in the collapse and dismemberment of the Soviet Union in 1991. It took hardly 6 years to dismantle the communist regimes in eastern Europe. This book follows the life story of a master shoe-designer-cum-maker who weathered the storms of living in a strictly controlled society and still flourished. His daughter studied hard and earned high academic credentials. Incidentally, she is the author's wife and he tells the story of his in-laws in this book which is actually a mirror to the scourge of communism in the Soviet Union and proves that the communist system was founded on lies and monstrous crimes. Conor O'Clery is an Irish journalist and writer. He worked for the Irish Times for 30 years and represented them in many countries including the Soviet Union where he met his wife. He has authored many books.

Stanislav Suvorov was a shoemaker who led a prosperous life in Grozny, Chechnya by making bespoke shoes which were highly prized. He was sent to prison for a charge that was a crime only in a communist polity. The prison term had a devastating effect on the family’s prestige. It migrated to Krasnoyarsk, Siberia to start a new life where too Stanislav led a good life. His wife Marietta hailed from Nagorno-Karabakh which was beset with ethnic tensions between Armenians — to which our family belonged — and neighbouring Azeris. His daughter Zhanna studied diligently and conformed to the norms of a socialist society. She joined the communist party’s youth wing and eventually joined the party itself. She represented a district in the legislative body of Krasnoyarsk. But she still harboured resentment about how her father suffered at the hands of communist officialdom. She married a friend, but gradually drifted apart from him. During her absence from home for her PhD program at Moscow, her husband gets killed in a drunken brawl over an illicit relationship. She meets O’Clery in Moscow as a Russian tutor and the relationship grew. O’Clery was a divorcee with five children but they marry and he adopts her daughter. This occurred during the critical time of USSR’s disintegration. The author and Zhanna relocated to other countries following his transfers to various places and they used to visit her parents occasionally. On the rich tapestry of the family’s story, the author carefully crafts the history of the Soviet Union and how the system affected the life of the family in unexpected ways.

Readers wonder at how inefficient the Soviet system was managed according to the politico-economic theories of communism. With private enterprise curtailed, shops relied on deliveries from central warehouses that were far distant. Provisions were snapped up as soon as they appeared, so it was advantageous to be at the head of the queue or be friendly enough with the manager to buy goods at the back door. A party membership usually helped in such situations. Usually, articles were rare and queues very long that people joined a queue and only later asked what it was for! Scarcity moulded the Soviet people in grotesque ways. The Ukrainian peasant soldiers who invaded Romania which was capitalist in 1944 are reported to have wept when they saw the pretty houses, the fattened cattle and the well-stocked barns. They wept for a way of life and a prosperity that could’ve been theirs if not for communism. The party crushed religion, but even with its suppression, it was rare for an Armenian child who has not been secretly christened, even in communist households. A form of consumer apartheid prevailed. Special shops called Beryozka which stocked food unavailable elsewhere which was open only to holders of hard foreign currency. There were shops reserved for party functionaries that were not accessible to common people. Strict obedience to authority was drilled into the people. People witnessing a state-sponsored unjust act did so in silence, avoiding eye contact with other people. In Stalin’s Russia, no one spoke to strangers about matters that did not concern them.

Communism shunned any kind of enterprise — however small — coming from the people who were meant only to toil hard as per the commands of authority figures. It was essential that they should not think for themselves, or more practicably, not have time to think. As a result, private enterprise was not only discouraged, but penalized too. After seven decades of this madness, party bosses wondered why their economy was in shambles. Even the modest shoe and boot business of Stanislav (the author's father-in-law) was forced to run low-key because it thwarted the state's aspiration to own and control all the means of production. He restricted services to only the customers he knew. He was detained one day for selling his used car at a higher rate than the approved one which amounted to speculation that was a punishable offence. Article 154 of the criminal code made punishable any act such as 'buying up and reselling of goods or any other articles for the purpose of making a profit'. Punishments were very harsh. Stanislav was arrested and sentenced to seven years in jail. His new car was confiscated and re-assigned to a party functionary. The judiciary was subject to directives from the Kremlin on penal policy. Judges served 5-year terms and their continued careers depended on the party's assessment of their conformity.

Not content with nipping private initiative in the bud, communism sought to wipe out individuality as well, encouraging conformity to a goal set from on high. All kinds of creative literature wilted as a result. Central planning did not allow for individual architectural expression whose spin off was the almost identical cities and towns across the country. All residential blocks looked the same. Each city had its statue of Lenin and streets named after Lenin and Marx. The shops were all the same, carrying numbers rather than names. Dissimulation was the norm when portraying 'achievements' of the Soviet system to outsiders and quite ironically, to its own citizens as well. In speeches cataloguing the milestones, the word 'and' was never put before the last item so as to give the impression that the list can go on and on. Legislature was a total mockery of that democratic function. The role of deputies in legislative forums was to endorse the decisions of the hierarchy. As a rule, discussion was minimal and endorsements unanimous. Every time a vote was required, a voice called out, "those for" and all hands went up; 'Those against', no reaction; 'Those abstaining', no reaction; 'Motion passed' and the exercise ended. Foreign travel was a state-controlled privilege and only certain categories of citizens with proven party loyalty were allowed. The state didn't even allow people to talk to international contacts and telephone calls could be made only through an operator. Direct international dialling was introduced in Moscow for the Olympics in 1980 for the convenience of foreign athletes, but was discontinued immediately afterwards. The academia was constantly reminded of their place in the socialist system. Even in the 1980s, students and faculty of academic institutions were forced to help with the harvesting on state farms. They would toil on distant stretches of muddy fields with no facilities and primitive sleeping arrangements.

The interval in which communism crumbled was miraculously short as to be unbelievable. The fleeting nature of its collapse was telling on the flimsy foundations and the rot to the core. Brezhnev managed a consumer spending boom due to the high price of oil which brought in hard currency. Gorbachev introduced glasnost (openness) and perestroika (reconstruction). He granted Soviet writers unprecedented freedom because he wanted the Intelligentsia on his side to discomfit the hard-line conservatives who were obstructing his reforms. Reassessment of historical figures, past events and revelations became ever more frank. This openness was genuinely believed to be capable of reforming the party and the existing system. Even in 1989, the party believed that perestroika was designed to fully use the potential of socialism and that only with a renewed and revitalized party in the vanguard can the Soviet Union move to a renewal of socialism and a bright future. Unfortunately for the party, Gorbachev was unlucky. It was his misfortune that oil prices had fallen but consumer expectation couldn't be lowered. He allowed constituent republics to get in touch with foreign partners and thereby unknowingly pushed them on the road to independence. With Khrushchev's thaw and Brezhnev's consumer society, people became less afraid to speak openly than the previous generation which had a memory of Stalin's arbitrary and cruel punishments for even a hint of dissidence.

O'Clery makes an analysis of the Soviet system's transformation to a market economy for which it suffered enormously. As Solshenitsyn said, 'whatever the communists told about their socialist system was false, but unfortunately, whatever they told about the capitalist system turned out to be true'. Hyper-inflation which followed the fall of the Soviet Union wiped out entire life's savings, turning millions of Russians into paupers. It was a humiliation for the generation that defeated Hitler to learn that war widows were getting Red Cross parcels from Germany. Russia entered the modern consumer era in the 1990s, with everything available in the stores, but it became a dangerous place with increased crime, financial chaos and no respite for the poor while a few powerful Russians syphoned off national wealth and the former captains of communism transformed themselves into oligarchs of capitalism. The book also provides an overview of the Russian society. Family ties were intense and close, which almost feels like India, in the importance it accorded to the extended family. Fathers were typically not appreciative of their daughters' boyfriends and we read about Zhanna's father breaking the finger bone of one when he gives the poor lad a 'firm' handshake after he caught them kissing! Parents offered financial help to their children to buy homes and donated furniture. Whatever the Soviet society lacked in some material comforts, they compensated for it in intangible things. Zhanna was accustomed to the discipline and respect shown to teachers in Soviet schools and she was taken aback to find her American pupils taking chewing gum in class and putting their feet up on the desks.

The book shares chilling details of how Islamic fundamentalism took hold in Chechnya once the central hold weakened that eventually made the non-Muslims flee from the province. It's true that Russia established itself there by resorting to brutal policies and stubborn suppression, but it does not justify the Chechen attempt to establish an exclusive religious state. When the author and wife visited Grozny in 1991, the Russians were living in fear that 'if incited, hitherto peaceful Muslim neighbours might turn against them overnight' (p. 279). Street graffiti threatening Russians came up quickly which warned them with dire messages such as 'RUSSIANS DON'T LEAVE — WE WANT SLAVES' and 'DON'T BUY THE APARTMENT FROM MISHA (meaning any Russian) — HE WILL BE GONE SOON ANYWAY'. This looks exactly similar to what the Kashmiri Pandits underwent in Kashmir at around the same time. The script was the same and universal with slight, local variations. Non-Russians were not exempt as seen in another slogan: 'RUSSIANS BACK TO RYZAN, ARMENIANS TO YEREVAN'. This exposed the true colour of the Chechen pogrom that it was not against Russians alone, but against all Christians. The book is structured in an engaging way where two stories unfold at the same time — that of the Suvorov family and that of Soviet Union itself. The writing style produces an intimacy to the characters among the readers. Family photographs are interspersed throughout the narrative. The story is presented in a charming present tense that appear contemporaneous to readers and attracts tremendous interest.

The book is highly recommended.

Rating: 4 Star

She Has Her Mother’s Laugh

Title: She Has Her Mother’s Laugh – The Powers, Perversions and Potential of Heredity
Author: Carl Zimmer
Publisher: Picador, 2018 (First)
ISBN: 9781509818549
Pages: 656

Heredity is a powerful tool with which life sustains and propagates itself on earth. Even though its effects were clear to every society, the methods by which it is transferred across generations came to light only in the twentieth century. With the discovery of genes and unwinding the mysteries of DNA, mankind basked in the tremendous potential the knowledge offered to enhance the wellbeing of people – and, by corollary, causing unforeseen consequences if the technology was not responsibly handled. Genes are the blessing and the curse that our ancestors bestowed on us. However, science identified many other factors that are equally crucial to the development of humans as genes. This book covers all these channels in excellent detail and provides a comprehensive view of genetic research. The single most important idea it gives off is that inheritance is a broad concept which propagates through DNA (what is usually called nature), environment (nurture), epigenetic (transfer of some acquired traits) and by teaching the young (culture). Even though these are quite diverse, a little consideration would show that the benefits it conveys to a living being are broadly of the same nature. Carl Zimmer is an American popular science writer, blogger, columnist, and journalist who specializes in the topics of evolution, parasites and heredity. He has authored many books.

The book provides a good overview of the study of heredity beginning from Charles V, the Habsburg emperor, to plant and animal breeding in subsequent centuries. Generations of interbreeding in the royal line resulted in specific genetic features such as a deformed jaw (later called the Habsburg Jaw) among the princes. Their overall health was very fragile too. Things got moving when Darwin appeared on the scene. ‘Origin of Species’ was one of the most influential books ever written. Darwin could not explain the biology behind why individuals varied and how traits are copied to the next generation. He believed that a trait acquired in life could be passed down to future generations. We read about Gregor Mendel and the birth of the concept of genes. Hugo de Vries discovered in the year Darwin died that every cell contained invisible particles that are responsible for passing traits from one generation to the next. He called them pangenes which was later shortened to genes.

When it was established that traits could be transferred to another generation, racism suggested the possibility that the white race was at the pinnacle of human evolution. Even among the whites, the Nordic stock was deemed to be superior. Whites suffering from genetic diseases ranked further lower in the hierarchy with blacks and coloured people going down to the bottom rung. A new branch of study called eugenics thought of ways to cleanse and thereby better the human stock. By the dawn of the twentieth century in the US, eugenicists wanted to improve the human stock by selective breeding and preventing people with genetic disabilities from having children. Across the ocean in Germany, it was copied by Nazis into a devilish strategy. It first targeted people with disorders (usually poor intellectual capacity) to be sterilized. Hitler established a set of racial hygiene laws. In the first year after establishing hereditary health courts, Germany sterilized 64,000 people and by 1944, the tally went up to 400,000 including the mentally ill, the deaf, gypsies and Jews. In 1939, Nazis started killing off people with hereditary disabilities. It is estimated that they eliminated 200,000 lives. In the US, the craze for eugenics sailed in the inverse ratio as its progress in Germany. American objectors of eugenics repudiated it as bad science and bad policy. The Eugenics Record Office was shut down in 1939. Eugenics is down for the moment, but it may spring back to life if a powerful backer comes to its rescue. How many of you did think of Donald Trump while reading these lines?

Zimmer gets into the question of whether a characteristic is heritable in the true sense of the term, that is, whether an organism will definitely suffer the consequences if a specific gene is present or missing in its genome. The gist of the discussion is that the linkage is too complicated to decide beyond doubt. Colour of eyes is a heritable trait. Citing the example of a genetic disease called PKU, the author argues that it showed a way to attack the idea that our intelligence is fixed by the genes. This is an unfortunate example for the argument however. The brains of these people get stunted and they end up with very low intelligence like a toddler. This is because the gene prevents the dissociation of the amino acid phenylalanine obtained from food which eventually reaches the brain and damages the nerve cells. If no treatment is made, it will lead to devastating intellectual disability. But if the infant is given a diet low in that chemical, the symptoms disappear. What this example proves is that genes are extremely important but in some cases, some alleviating measures can be found. This does not support the author’s logic that genes are not that critical. Then he takes up the case of height as a heritable trait. Here, the dependence on genes is as high as 86 per cent, but it is strongly linked to nutrition also. After each generation, the world is getting taller, not just in the developed countries. South Korean women grew eight inches taller in average height in a century, while Iranian men got taller by six and a half inches. The book then concludes that intelligence depends on several physical factors and genes that no direct relationship can be drawn. Studies held in Scotland suggest that lower intelligence test scores raised people’s risk of death. It’s possible that people who score higher may be better able to understand information their doctors give them. Genes still account for only a small percentage of the variation in people’s test scores. As with height, it has not been able to definitely prove which genes cause the effect to occur.

Race or racial purity is a concept which is associated with the genome of people constituting a society. Zimmer makes an extraordinary effort to conclude that race is not supported by DNA. He observes that the concept of race is not a feature of the natural world beyond our social experience. But this looks uncannily similar to the wokeish canard that gender is a social construct rather than biological. Hence, take it with a pinch of salt! Up until the middle ages, writers never used the word in the present meaning. Racial laws were common in the US as recently as half a century ago. The Racial Integrity Act passed in 1924 barred interracial marriages. It defined the white people as those whose blood is entirely white (of course, not in colour) having no known, demonstrable or ascertainable admixture of the blood of another race. This law would stand till 1967 when a couple’s wedding was annulled on its basis. They appealed to the Supreme Court which struck down the law. The author argues that if races were biologically significant, most of the genetic diversity should exist between races rather than between individuals of the same race. In the 1950s, Richard Lewontin made a study of a wide range of human populations which found that genetic differences between races was only 6.3 per cent, whereas the diversity within populations was 85.4 per cent. Even with this data, it somehow feels that something important and which can tip the scales has not been told. Since the subject is contentious, it is understandable that authors would prefer to bet on the side of the politically correct option. There is a brief analysis on contagious cancer, which was a scientific secret hiding in plain sight for two centuries. Eight cases were identified so far and they would not be the last. In the case of humans, the documented cases show a single leap (from one person to another and not more). It may be that our immune systems are so strong that cancers never get the chance to evolve into parasites that can leap from host to host.

The birth of a living being is something which is looked at with awe and wonder even by committed rationalists. This book furnishes a good discussion on how cell division takes place when a foetus is developed, clearly articulating the intricacies of the process and the pure amazement at one cell replicating to hundreds of types of totally different cells in different parts of the body. There is a startling narrative on human chimeras where the genome and proteins contain traces of another person, usually a twin, whose genetic particles get mixed up in utero. If two embryos of the same sex are involved, it’s much easier for them to go unnoticed. In the other cases, the blood of the person may carry cells of a different blood type. A case is listed where a person possessed male and female sexual organs. In the case of animals, an example is described where it carried the genetic imprint of two fathers. Obviously, this possibility is not examined for human cases. We also read about unusual instances of a mother’s DNA not matching her children. This happens when the mother was a tetragametic chimera (where one embryo develops into a person combining that of a should-have-been-twin). It is now known that foetuses can pass cells to mothers and vice versa, whose effects can last for several years after birth. Women who had given birth to boys carried cells with Y chromosomes. This book pushes the envelope of genetic research to the end of the 2010s. It looks like a whiff of Lamarckism is returning to science under the lofty title of ‘transgenerational epigenetic inheritance’.

The author unveils a chapter in the life of the famous writer Pearl S. Buck who is the author of the masterpiece The Good Earth. It was one of the four books with which I started my reading career. In fact, I’m not sure how many times I have read this superb novel. It was news to me that Buck started writing fiction just to save enough money to settle her mentally stunted daughter in a good institution. The child was suffering from PKU. There is a good discussion on gene therapies on somatic and germ lines such as CRISPR and mitochondrial, fully exposing the ethical and scientific concerns associated with them. The apprehension that this may lead to a new kind of eugenics is also very strong. In vitro gametogenesis offers the dizzying possibility of transforming on ordinary skin cell into a sperm or egg from which a baby can take shape. The author displays an unnecessary wokeish bias in the last chapter in accusing the whites of inheriting wealth way more than the blacks and suggests that this may be legally stopped. In a second case, he suggests that instead of using for disease eradication, CRISPR should be employed for saving endangered species, but he does not consider who would fund such research. This is also a wrong appreciation of the priorities.

The book is highly recommended.

Rating: 4 Star