Download Generosity: An Enhancement, by Richard Powers
To obtain this book Generosity: An Enhancement, By Richard Powers, you may not be so confused. This is on-line book Generosity: An Enhancement, By Richard Powers that can be taken its soft documents. It is different with the on the internet book Generosity: An Enhancement, By Richard Powers where you can purchase a book and after that the vendor will certainly send out the published book for you. This is the location where you could get this Generosity: An Enhancement, By Richard Powers by online and also after having manage acquiring, you can download and install Generosity: An Enhancement, By Richard Powers by yourself.
Generosity: An Enhancement, by Richard Powers
Download Generosity: An Enhancement, by Richard Powers
Do you think that reading is an essential activity? Locate your reasons why including is very important. Checking out an e-book Generosity: An Enhancement, By Richard Powers is one part of satisfying tasks that will certainly make your life high quality a lot better. It is not about only exactly what type of publication Generosity: An Enhancement, By Richard Powers you read, it is not only regarding the amount of e-books you read, it has to do with the habit. Checking out routine will certainly be a way to make book Generosity: An Enhancement, By Richard Powers as her or his friend. It will no issue if they invest cash as well as spend even more publications to complete reading, so does this publication Generosity: An Enhancement, By Richard Powers
The way to get this publication Generosity: An Enhancement, By Richard Powers is very easy. You might not go for some areas as well as invest the moment to just locate the book Generosity: An Enhancement, By Richard Powers As a matter of fact, you might not consistently obtain guide as you're willing. However here, only by search and also find Generosity: An Enhancement, By Richard Powers, you could obtain the listings of the books that you truly anticipate. Occasionally, there are numerous publications that are revealed. Those books of course will impress you as this Generosity: An Enhancement, By Richard Powers collection.
Are you interested in mainly books Generosity: An Enhancement, By Richard Powers If you are still puzzled on which one of guide Generosity: An Enhancement, By Richard Powers that ought to be acquired, it is your time to not this site to seek. Today, you will require this Generosity: An Enhancement, By Richard Powers as the most referred publication and also most needed publication as resources, in various other time, you can take pleasure in for other publications. It will depend on your willing demands. But, we constantly suggest that publications Generosity: An Enhancement, By Richard Powers can be a great problem for your life.
Also we discuss guides Generosity: An Enhancement, By Richard Powers; you might not locate the published books right here. Many compilations are given in soft file. It will specifically give you more benefits. Why? The initial is that you could not need to bring guide all over by fulfilling the bag with this Generosity: An Enhancement, By Richard Powers It is for the book remains in soft file, so you can wait in gizmo. Then, you could open the gizmo all over as well as read the book correctly. Those are some few benefits that can be obtained. So, take all advantages of getting this soft file publication Generosity: An Enhancement, By Richard Powers in this web site by downloading in link offered.
FROM THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD–WINNING AUTHOR OF THE ECHO MAKER, A PLAYFUL AND PROVOCATIVE NOVEL ABOUT THE DISCOVERY OF THE HAPPINESS GENE
When Chicagoan Russell Stone finds himself teaching a Creative Nonfiction class, he encounters a young Algerian woman with a disturbingly luminous presence. Thassadit Amzwar's blissful exuberance both entrances and puzzles the melancholic Russell. How can this refugee from perpetual terror be so happy? Won't someone so open and alive come to serious harm? Wondering how to protect her, Russell researches her war-torn country and skims through popular happiness manuals. Might her condition be hyperthymia? Hypomania? Russell's amateur inquiries lead him to college counselor Candace Weld, who also falls under Thassa's spell. Dubbed Miss Generosity by her classmates, Thassa's joyful personality comes to the attention of the notorious geneticist and advocate for genomic enhancement, Thomas Kurton, whose research leads him to announce the genotype for happiness.
Russell and Candace, now lovers, fail to protect Thassa from the growing media circus. Thassa's congenital optimism is soon severely tested. Devoured by the public as a living prophecy, her genetic secret will transform both Russell and Kurton, as well as the country at large.
What will happen to life when science identifies the genetic basis of happiness? Who will own the patent? Do we dare revise our own temperaments? Funny, fast, and finally magical, Generosity celebrates both science and the freed imagination. In his most exuberant book yet, Richard Powers asks us to consider the big questions facing humankind as we begin to rewrite our own existence.
- Sales Rank: #646275 in eBooks
- Published on: 2009-09-29
- Released on: 2009-09-29
- Format: Kindle eBook
From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. About halfway into Powers's follow-up to his National Book Award–winning The Echo Maker, a Nobel Prize-winning author, during a panel discussion, talks about how genetic enhancement represents the end of human nature.... A story with no end or impediment is no story at all. This then, is a story with both. Its hero, at least initially, is Russell Stone, a failed author of creative nonfiction turned reluctant writing instructor who cannot help transmitting to his students something of his flagging faith in writing. One of them, a Berber Algerian named Thassadit Amzwar, is so possessed by preternatural happiness that she's nicknamed Miss Generosity by her prematurely jaded classmates and has emerged from the Algerian civil war that claimed the lives of her parents glowing like a blissed out mystic. After Stone learns that Thassadit may possess a rare euphoric trait called hyperthymia, her condition is upgraded from behavioral to genetic, and Powers's novel makes a dramatic shift when Thassadit falls into the hands of Thomas Kurton, the charismatic entrepreneur behind genetics lab Truecyte, whose plan to develop a programmable genome to regulate the brain's set point for well-being may rest in Miss Generosity's perpetually upbeat alleles. Much of the tension behind Powers's idea-driven novels stems from the delicate balance between plot and concept, and he wisely adopts a voice that is—sometimes painfully—aware of the occasional strain (I'm caught... starving to death between allegory and realism, fact and fable, creative and nonfiction). Like Stone and Kurton, Powers strays from mere record to attempt an impossible task: to make the world right. (Oct.)
Copyright � Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From Bookmarks Magazine
Hailed as Powers's most accessible work to date by the Denver Post and, conversely, as his most demanding novel thus far by the Washington Post, Generosity created a stir among critics. While Newsday protested the throng of subjects vying for readers' attention, others praised the complexity of Powers's novel of ideas. Critics also diverged over Powers's characters—"flesh-and-blood" (Denver Post) or "two-dimensional" (Los Angeles Times)—and his unnamed, postmodern narrator, who periodically interrupts the story to question readers' beliefs about the characters and plot. Despite these differences of opinion, all reviewers agreed that Generosity is a chilling and fascinating work that will provide readers with much food for thought.
Review
“Provocative . . . fascinating . . . dazzling.” ―Ron Charles, The Washington Post
“An excellent introduction to Powers's work, a lighter, leaner treatment of his favorite themes and techniques . . . An engaging story-teller . . . even as he questions the conventions of narrative and character, Generosity gains in momentum and suspense.” ―Jay McInerney, The New York Times Book Review
“Powers is a brilliantly imaginative writer, working here with a lightness of touch, a crisp sense of peace, and a distinct warmth. . . . Powers shows both his reach as a student of humanity and his mastery as a storyteller.” ―O, The Oprah Magazine
“When written by Dostoevsky, Dickens, or Richard Powers at his best, one may feel that [the novel] can contain every facet of the world.” ―Michael Dirda, The New York Review of Books
“Powers fuses riveting narrative and spot-on dialogue with thought-provoking social analysis.” ―Dan Cryer, Newsday
“One of our most exciting contemporary novelists.” ―Amanda Gefter, Philadelphia Inquirer
Most helpful customer reviews
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful.
A somewhat difficult but provocative read.
By Chicago girl
Complicated but engaging story of a young woman with the "happiness gene." Some of the language is stunning and some of it is tedious and over-written. Our book group gave it mixed reviews as some could not finish it because it was unapproachable. But there was lively discussion about several topics from gene manipulation to psychology to the give and take of relationships.
8 of 8 people found the following review helpful.
Interesting but unsatisfying fiction
By Silicon Valley Girl
What's great about "Generosity": Memorable characters and a fascinating premise. What's not great: The inevitable depressing trajectory of the plot and the author's irritating attempts to break the fourth wall.
You know from the beginning that this is going to be one of those literary novels whose theme is "anything good in the world inevitably gets ruined." I've read that book too many times already. And the author evidently thinks he's doing something really cool and clever by commenting on his writing process within the book. News flash: It's been done before, and better--Pirandello's "Six Characters In Search of An Author" is almost a hundred years old. In my opinion, unless an author has something really unusual to offer by intruding into the story, s/he should stay out of the way and let the story do the talking. I think the story would have been strong enough on its own (if still kind of a downer) without the authorial self-insertion, but if Powers didn't have that much confidence in it, maybe he should have written another book.
Still, it's a well-written book and one I'm still thinking about, albeit with a high degree of irritation. What is happiness, anyway? For me, it's reading a story where the author stays offstage!
23 of 24 people found the following review helpful.
Characteristic Powers
By Jay C. Smith
Generosity: An Enhancement
Many fans, myself included, appreciate Richard Powers as a humanist who can artfully bridge his understanding of sciences into his fiction, as he did in Gold Bug Variations and Galatea 2.2: A Novel, for example. In his new novel, Generosity: An Enhancement, Powers explores issues entangled in genetic engineering, questions about what it means to be human and to be happy.
The principal characters are a young Algerian woman who appears happiness gifted, Thassadit Amzwar (Thassa), and her writing teacher at a fictional Chicago college ("Mesquakie"), Russell Stone. Based on just a few exposures to Thassa in his writing class Russell begins to worry that she is too happy, which he somehow perceives to put her at risk. He involves a college counselor, Candace Weld, who after a brief informal meeting assigns a diagnostic name to Thassa's condition, "hyperthymia." The plot proceeds along two main lines from there, as television personalities and bio-engineering entrepreneurs fasten on to Thassa to serve their own ends and as a romance between Russell and Candace inches along.
Powers brings in a fair amount of what psychologists, neuroscientists, and geneticists have to say these days about the causal correlates and manifestations of happiness. His chief vehicle is his fictional genomics entrepreneur, Thomas Kurton, who takes on Thassa as an object of study and potential profit. Kurton believes there are happiness genes and he advocates market access to them for parents who want to bestow such blessings upon their children.
Powers is more satirically critical of contemporary culture in Generosity than in his earlier works. In addition to over-reaching bio-engineers, he particularly targets mass communications: cell phones, blogs, streaming "news," "time shifting," "user generated" content, social networking sites, television news, science celebrity shows, the Oprah show, and more.
One other significant thing is going on in Generosity: Powers writes about writing. Interlocutions from an author character are staggered throughout. We are frequently reminded that it is just a story, that the author hasn't figured out yet what will happen, and that he cares about his characters. Remember too that Russell teaches (the course is "creative non-fiction"), so the class scenes and his assigned text ("Make Your Writing Come Alive") offer opportunities for further commentary on the enterprise of writing. One wonders whether this aspect reflects Powers' own doubts and concerns about the story he is constructing.
Powers has been criticized in the past for failing to fully animate his characters. Here Thassa might appear to rescue him from that charge. But it is never credibly demonstrated for us why people are so convinced of her elevated and persistent happiness almost immediately upon meeting her. For the most part we are simply told that they are. When Russell and Candace quickly become concerned about her they have insufficient evidence either that she has some sort of unique endowment or that she is exposed because of it. Consequently they become rather too frantic about Thassa's fate very early on when nothing was yet out of hand.
Russell himself is not the sort of dynamic protagonist that might ease the author's task. At one juncture we are told that, "He's forgotten exactly what subassembly of the collective human project he is responsible for, or when exactly it might be due," a characterization that seems applicable more or less throughout. Candace is the responsible adult, a consummate professional in her counseling work and a dutiful single mother. Powers writes that together Russell and Candace "... stand there awkwardly, two more victims of natural selection, caught between negativity bias and the eternal belief that the future will be slightly better than the present." As you might surmise, this hardly makes for a sizzling romantic relationship.
Most of the other characters basically represent stereotypes, particularly Kurton and Thassa's classmates. The most fully-realized may be Tonia Schiff, a television science journalist -- we learn enough about her upbringing and the changes she's gone through that she seems authentic, even if we may not like her. Russell's brother Robert makes only a few appearances, but delivers the funniest passages in the book.
Typically it is the fundamentals that carry good fiction, the plot and characters. With Powers it is more the intellectual superstructure. If you have read him before and enjoyed it you will likely find Generosity satisfying as well. If you are looking for some breakthrough in his writing you may be disappointed. If you are new to him, this book will show you how he works.
Generosity: An Enhancement, by Richard Powers PDF
Generosity: An Enhancement, by Richard Powers EPub
Generosity: An Enhancement, by Richard Powers Doc
Generosity: An Enhancement, by Richard Powers iBooks
Generosity: An Enhancement, by Richard Powers rtf
Generosity: An Enhancement, by Richard Powers Mobipocket
Generosity: An Enhancement, by Richard Powers Kindle
Tidak ada komentar:
Posting Komentar