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Review Date: 2/14/2006
Helpful Score: 1
Pulp Faction is as good a name as any for the genre that Max Allan Collins may have created and certainly made his own with his Nate Heller series. Nate is a former Chicago cop turned private eye who has any eerie way of ending up in the middle of famous murder cases and solving them too boot. It all started in 1933, with the assassination Chicago mayor Anton Cermak, True Detective, and here it is 1935 and Nate has been hired to deliver a bullet-proof vest to Huey Long, who's been getting death threats. Mr. Collins takes full advantage of Long and the colorful cast of real-life characters who surrounded him, as well as of the physical and moral miasma that was Long's Louisiana. Nate is a dogged investigator, equally quick with a quip, a gun, and a dame, but as the girlfriend who Long pretty much throws in his lap says: "You know what I like about you? You're shifty, but you have standards." Those standards are challenged when the Kingfish is killed, nearly dying in Nate's arms, and he's hired by mutual agreement of the insurance company and Long's widow to determine whether it was an assassination or an accidental shooting as bodyguards tussled with the purported killer, Dr. Carl Weiss -- who then became a convenient patsy. Mr. Collins offers a plausible contrarian solution to the mystery and provides a fascinating history in the process, while entertaining the heck out of us along the way.
Review Date: 2/14/2006
Helpful Score: 1
Michael Crichton is hardly the first to note that the press, environmentalists, the Left and politicized science have combined to make modern humans--who live in unprecedented comfort and safety--absurdly fearful, but he's certainly the first to turn that argument into a best-selling novel. The thriller that overlays what is essentially a political/philosophcal polemic is a bit mechanical and formulaic, but it serves well enough to propel the reader through a set of facts and figures -- complete with charts, graphs, and footnotes -- that they might not otherwise ever encounter nevermind be forced to come to terms with.
One of the arguments that Mr. Crichton makes perhaps goes further than he intended and makes the novel entirely worthwhile, especially in light of how we can see its truth playing out in the reaction to the book. Having shredded much of the specific "evidence" for man-made global warming and the supposed dire effects of same, he moves on to the broader point that:
Every scientist has some idea of how his experiment is going to turn out. Otherwise he wouldn't do the experiment in the first place. He has an expectation. But expectation works in mysterious ways--and totally unconsciously.
Here too he cites studies to prove his point. And consider how deeply that point undermines the entire claim of sciencism. the dream of the Age of Reason and the central claim of those who place their faith in science is that they represent forms of knowledge that can be arrived at dispassionately, rendering truths that are untainted by human emotions, superstitions, religious influences and the like. That we arrive instead at the recognition that science too is just a product of the prejudices of scientists is quite devastating.
What makes this all so delicious though is that the reviews of the book then precisely followed the pattern this thesis would have predicted. Conservative publications, generally pro-business, welcomed it as at least a breath of fresh air if not a profound addition to the literary canon, while liberal reviewers denounced it as dangerous demagougery. The writing, plot and all the rest of the book were entirely superfluous, these experimenters picked it up already knowing what they expected to find and unsurprisingly they all found exactly that. You and I too find here confirmation of our own beliefs, one way or another.
One of the arguments that Mr. Crichton makes perhaps goes further than he intended and makes the novel entirely worthwhile, especially in light of how we can see its truth playing out in the reaction to the book. Having shredded much of the specific "evidence" for man-made global warming and the supposed dire effects of same, he moves on to the broader point that:
Every scientist has some idea of how his experiment is going to turn out. Otherwise he wouldn't do the experiment in the first place. He has an expectation. But expectation works in mysterious ways--and totally unconsciously.
Here too he cites studies to prove his point. And consider how deeply that point undermines the entire claim of sciencism. the dream of the Age of Reason and the central claim of those who place their faith in science is that they represent forms of knowledge that can be arrived at dispassionately, rendering truths that are untainted by human emotions, superstitions, religious influences and the like. That we arrive instead at the recognition that science too is just a product of the prejudices of scientists is quite devastating.
What makes this all so delicious though is that the reviews of the book then precisely followed the pattern this thesis would have predicted. Conservative publications, generally pro-business, welcomed it as at least a breath of fresh air if not a profound addition to the literary canon, while liberal reviewers denounced it as dangerous demagougery. The writing, plot and all the rest of the book were entirely superfluous, these experimenters picked it up already knowing what they expected to find and unsurprisingly they all found exactly that. You and I too find here confirmation of our own beliefs, one way or another.
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