Word: mcewan
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...when word went out that Ian McEwan's new novel, Solar, would be about global warming, climate researchers might have hoped they'd found their champion. With his portrait of a relentlessly rational science writer in Enduring Love and his detailed descriptions of neurosurgery in Saturday, McEwan is the rare novelist who understands the scientific world - and the mind-set of the scientist. If anyone could make a best seller out of the sticky stuff of climate science and a hero out of one of its practitioners, it would be McEwan. (See the top 10 fiction books...
...largely by private enterprise. Hence, money and resources aren't simply accumulated by the government to parcel out as it sees fit. India's slow rise to prominence (again unlike China's state-sanctioned juggernaut) is actually pretty efficient at not radically altering the fabric of society. Neil McEwan, KENT, ENGLAND
...Atonement” and “Saturday,” McEwan employs a series of seemingly random accidents to set his characters on paths that they would not have otherwise contemplated. The main accident in “Solar” is a sudden and unforeseen death that enables Beard to recast himself as a friend of the environment. But “Solar” complicates the theme of accidental change that McEwan returns to so often by incorporating a new idea of willful self-deception. Though Beard believes that “barring accidents, life does...
...overwhelm Beard’s reptilian brain. This subtle allusion to the problems inherent in collective action against global warming is the site of McEwan’s true argument on the issue. While “Solar” incorporates amusing jabs at hippie environmentalists communing with nature, McEwan is clearly concerned with man’s inability to unite in the face of common adversity, regardless of whether that includes the melting arctic...
...cannot save him from “another night of unmemorable insomnia.” The environment of “Solar” is populated with miserable individuals who enjoy employment without understanding their purpose, and who embrace causes unprepared and unable to make a difference. Through Beard, McEwan hints that satisfaction is derived from the daily accomplishment of one’s own goals, rather than a perpetual search for a better future. But while living in the moment might allow for immediate happiness, it prevents the reflection necessary for addressing problems of the future, whether that problem...