Simple Genius
by David Baldacci
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Book Summary Information
Author: David BaldacciEdition: Hardcover
Audio: English (Published)
Format: Bargain Price
Published: 2007-04-24
ISBN: 161552262X
Number of pages: 420
Publisher: Warner Books
Book Reviews of Simple Genius
Book Review: A bad war produces bad effects
Summary: 4 Stars
There is a fascinating style in Baldacci's books. We are always dealing with state business and crime intertwined in the plot. In this case the CIA, the FBI and the DEA are concerned. They are shown as shady and even dangerous if not criminal from the very start. Then two intriguing levels are woven into the narrative fabric. Babbage Town, a research center next to a major CIA base in Virginia. That highly private and secret research center is dealing with quantum computers, the generation promised to us for the next decade or the decade after the next. These computers will be so powerful that there will be no protection against their power and that may make the whole world crash because of an implosion in its mechanical brain (which is a rewriting of the `Terminator' axiom, or that of `Matrix'). Babbage Town is thus dedicated to that research in order to come to results first and have the necessary time to invent the protection before it is released on the market. The author takes great pleasure at sharing the grotesqueness of these scientific geniuses doing the research, and yet their normal ambivalence as for right and wrong, duty and betrayal makes them pathetic in all possible ways. The second level added to the plot is that of the private investigators hired by the owners of Babbage Town to solve the mystery of a suspicious death that seems to be a suicide of one of the scientists on the CIA base. These two people, that couple or pair, have left CIA, Secret Service or whatever, to run private. And they have their own problem, a relational problem, and - for the woman Michelle - some deep subconscious old conflict that disturbs her in her ability to cope with some crisis situation. When all the actors are on the stage you have to provide them with a plot. It is Afghanistan. When the West decided to take Afghanistan over the Talibans had eradicated the cultivation of opium poppies. But the occupation of the country has apparently brought its economy down and opium poppies started to be cultivated again and the brother of the Afghan President has recently been implicated in that drug dealing. The book pretends the CIA has been entrusted with buying this crop to prevent the profit from ending in the hands of the terrorists, and then destroying it. This shows how limited our dealing with the problem of terrorism is, how ineffective. We are not able to bring modern development to the Afghans because we have no way to make it as profitable as opium can be. The idea in the book is absurd because the USA cannot buy all the opium - or heroin - produced by Afghanistan without distorting the market: artificially low offer would increase the price of the drug, which would encourage its production. In other words that dealing with the problem goes against the principles of market economy, increases if not multiplies the problem, and thus is doomed to fail. But the worst part of this aspect of the book is that it shows how our invading Afghanistan was based on our absolute distrust in history and its power to produce progress from the very dynamic contradictions of any situation, and also on our foolish belief that democracy could be exported by military forces and the use of violence. Of course the book is nothing but a novel. So suspend your disbelief slightly. Yet we are dealing with politics and nothing else, so there cannot be any suspension, of any disbelief. It is too dangerous to suspend our disbelief: it breeds historical mistakes or crimes that could be prevented if disbelief had not been suspended (Auschwitz and the Shoah for one example: still in 1938 it was possible to stop the war machine of the enterprising criminals who were starting the Shoah then. But we did not have the courage to do it and we suspended our disbelief, or is it suspended our knowledge?)
Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University Paris Dauphine, University Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne & University Versailles Saint Quentin en Yvelines
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