Within the first few pages of The Genome Generation I realised how ignorant I was about the world of scientific research. It didn’t matter, as Elizabeth Finkel offers an excellent explanation of the science of genomes through clever metaphor, which goes beyond the clichéd notion of genomes representing the complexity of a computer. This is not to say that The Genome Generation is pitched at a basic level. Finkel spends a lot of time looking to the future to consider the likely progression of genome research. She examines current debates regarding the potential of genome research, particularly in the field of developing a vaccine for HIV/AIDS, and the ancestral genetic makeup that may be of crucial importance. Finkel also offers readers advice on how to apply the science of genomes to their everyday lives, for example, through the effects of environment on offspring, and warns of the dangers of ‘dabbling where you don’t understand the controls of the system’. Finkel writes that her aim is to ‘empower the reader to know what to ask’ of genomes and in this task she has certainly succeeded. Her wit, knowledge and fascination with the intricacies of genomes is evident, and quite frankly, contagious.
Megan Hancock is a bookseller at Ellison Hawker Bookshop in Tasmania. This review first appeared in the Summer issue of Bookseller+Publisher magazine.
Babylon is a taut and unpredictable crime novel from Stephen Sewell, who is best known as a playwright and scriptwriter and who recently adapted the film Animal Kingdom into book form. Charismatic psychopath Dan is driving a stolen black Chevrolet when he picks up Mick, a young English backpacker, seemingly by chance. Dan’s flair and immediate power over the vulnerable Mick are slowly teased out in an extended cop-chase/road-trip through a dark and mythic east-coast Australia. While Dan remains an enigma (his violent murders are revealed ‘off-camera’), Mick is exposed as a vulnerable, fatherless young man who grew up in a no-hoper housing commission in Northern England. This is a detective story turned on its head: the cops’ appearances are limited, almost klutzy cameos that allow the reader a break from the remorseless evil of Dan and the delusions of Mick, as he begins to see things he’s never seen before. The filmic nature of the book is boosted by sharp descriptions of the landscape and the unrelenting evil of Dan, which work together to build this story towards a surprising ending. This is a tightly written literary crime novel.
Imagine talking to a life-size robot version of your favourite dead author. Crafted by a skilled sculptor and controlled by artificial intelligence, the android could—in the author’s voice and with human gestures and facial movements—answer questions about his life, his books and any topic you asked him. Now imagine the author was Philip K Dick, the paranoid sci-fi visionary whose most famous work, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, featured conscious androids almost indistinguishable from their human makers. The stranger-than-fiction Philip K Dick android was built by a team of young scientists at Memphis University’s Institute of Intelligent Systems, led by roboticist David Hanson and programmer Andrew Olney. In 2005 it briefly captured the world’s attention, appearing at technology conventions around the US, before going missing on a flight between Dallas and Las Vegas, never to be seen again. Dufty’s insider’s account blends the android’s story with that of artificial intelligence, robotics and Dick himself in a combination that will be fascinating to sci-fi buffs, popular science readers and nerds of all stripes (like me). It’s the best kind of popular science—a book that doesn’t require any previous knowledge, but leaves you hungry to know more, and wondering at the possibilities that may lie ahead.
It is difficult to feel much sympathy for the ridiculously overpaid futures traders and investment bankers who caused the Global Financial Crisis and then became its first casualties. The banking meltdown affected far more people than just the super-rich, of course, and Elisabeth Wynhausen tells some of their stories in The Short Goodbye. She also sets out to reveal the lie in the notion that the Australian government somehow averted the crisis and that we sailed through unharmed while the rest of the world foundered. She achieves this by relating personal accounts of ordinary Australians whose livelihoods and businesses were wrecked by the unrestrained greed of the era, and how the banks and the government have consigned the GFC to history already, without addressing its structural causes or its social cost. This book is the sort of social criticism that will appeal to readers of Will Hutton or Barbara Ehrenreich, but with a specifically Australian focus. The economic analysis is a little thin, but this is not a book about economics so much as about people and the failure of governments to protect their own from the rampant greed and rapacity inherent in the global financial system.
