Word: rifkin
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...QUIBBLE with the value of having people think up revolutionary world views and test them on the public. But in Entropy, no matter how alluring the thesis, Rifkin does not persuade. Rifkin employs puerile rhetorical techniques like the word "just" ("That just doesn't true," "This just isn't the case," "That just doesn't hold up," "This just isn't so," to name a few). He capitalizes phrases like "Big Questions." He uses italics. He will do anything to help you believe...
Perhaps more impressive is the diverse roster of physicists and philosophers both contemporary and ancient figures whom Rifkin draws upon to prove his point. Still, his argument flows from the sublime to the ridiculous in an annoying cycle. His style is entropic; how else can you describe someone who in one breath quotes Einstein and in the next produces a remarkably declarative and pithy sentence like "Wrong!" to refute Newton...
...Rifkin's treatment of history best illustrates the deficiencies of a book to which any reader alienated by modern society would gravitate to as an answer to his problems. In one tidy half-page paragraph, Rifkin summarizes the historical theories of Toynbee, Spengler, Ortega y Gasset and Marx, allocating each scholar one sentence in this day of scarce resources. His next paragraphy begins...
...gereralization, then, Rifkin explains away any theory of history different from his own--Marx never incorporated entropy into historical materialism...
Much of what Rifkin puts forward in Entropy has a chillingly familiar ring. In his effort to make a grand, holistic leap to an integrated world view--"Here is the point where science joins metaphysics and ethics"--Rifkin has sacrificed a good measure of substance. But when he stops taking on great thinkers in three-page chapters and starts focusing on specifics, Entropy begins to suck you in, and the simple appeal of the entropy world view penetrates the rhetoric. Essentially, the moral equivalent of war in an entropic world view is peace. Warfare, and its preparation, are the most...