State of Fear
“Everyone has an agenda. Except me.” That's how Michael Crichton ends his author’s message in his novel, State of Fear. The novel begins with a body . T he characters scramble around the globe to avert a series of disasters. Perhaps due to some technical elements, the dialogue can come across as preachy. The realism suffers once or twice when plot twists get a little too ironic. And some readers will not appreciate adult language and situations . Otherwise, the book describes the lengths to which some activists might go if they had the money, and it draws analogies to other “scientific” ideas other ideologues have used to justify moral outrages. T he plot revolves around the author’s conviction that the politicization of global warming keeps many from considering the whole body of scientific evidence. But Crichton does not how the purity of science can ever be preserved when it is practiced by humans who seem to be political as well as rational. All together, the...