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Parents- I previewed the book and I have found two instances of school
defined "inappropriate" language which, in my opinion, is in written in
context.
Please preview for yourselves.... Mr. S |
HONORS BIOLOGY BOOK OF THE MONTH CLUB
Genesis - by Bernard Beckett
If robots began to self-evolve, learning to feel and create
as we do, what traits would set humans apart--and help us survive? Beckett
isn't the first to dramatize this question, and his Genesis pays
subtle homage to his predecessors (including Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke,
and Philip K. Dick). But his near-future tale feels unique, and oddly
credible. As the young historian Anax endures an examination by the
Academy--an order of philosopher-rulers as imagined in Plato's Republic--we're
brought up quickly on a catastrophic backstory: accelerating climate change,
dust storms, rising fear and fundamentalism, the Last War, and the rise of a
new Plato, who builds an island republic and seals it behind a Great Sea
Fence. Plagues decimate human populations outside, while the Republic's
surveillance society (thick with shadows of Huxley, Atwood, and Moore)
flourishes under the Orwellian motto "Forward towards the past"--until it
falls to forces led by the young rebel Adam Forde. The Academy interrogates
Anax on Adam's period of imprisonment with the most advanced android of his
time, and we witness their vicious sparring on the virtues of men and
machines, the nature of consciousness, and what gives any life worth. It may
not sound gripping, but Genesis reads like a thriller to the last
word, propelled by the power of ideas longing to be unleashed. --Mari
Malcolm
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