Unnatural by Philip Ball

I'm torn by Ball's attempt to understand the idea of making ourselves. On the one hand there are substantial sections of it that are poorly written, sleight pieces of thought - and to be honest those occur in the first half more often than not. However, at the same time he has also written some of the most coherent and clear essays on reproduction, the politics of genetics and the culture of 'scientific' self-improvement. Indeed, chapters on test tube babies, stem cell research and gene therapy are clear, insightful and thought provoking.

Ball is intelligent, generally reasonable and struggles honestly with some complex issues.

And yet.

There remains a central problem, so huge that most people will be put off within the first two chapters, it needs to be discussed at some length. Ball tries very hard to build a narrative of why, almost to our cores, we find the idea of creating people both problematic and irresistible. He touches on ideas such as taboo, danger, sanction and belief. The problem is, he doesn't really know what he's talking about. It's not enough to base one's ideas of historical (and purely western by the way) strands of political culture on poorly constructed caricatures when James Hanam's book on science and its emergence is lying there begging to be read. Caricatures may help you build you case but it undermines, fatally to be honest, the idea that you're either objective or substantial.

It's also pretty thin to rely on a high school student's level of literary criticism of Shelley's Frankenstein to build your case. It's akin to those pop-intellectuals who once read the Brother's Karamazov and then write whole tracts where their only real reference is that text. Not only is it too narrow, it's also too shallow and reveals its ignorance of entire swathes of human academic innovation. In this case the field of Anthropology, specifically that pioneered by Wildavsky and Douglas.

Even with that said, one could respect someone who, through their own learning, built a reasonably argued case, but Ball has an ideology to push, one I'm not sure he even realises he's articulating and that is what really left me sucking my teeth and wondering what Mary Douglas would make of it all.

Shame really. I'd give this one a miss.