Search results for ""author michael bess""

How have the weapons of the nuclear age changed the rules of international politics? Can co-operation replace coercion as an instrument of security? This book compares the biographies of four dissident intellectuals who grappled with these questions throughout their careers - Louise Weiss, Leo Szilard, E.P. Thompson, and Danilo Dolci. Though they shared a revulsion for the "balance of terror," they possessed sharply divergent visions of a post-Cold War peace, from the Gandhi-like non-violence of Dolci to Szilard's relentless quest for US-Soviet joint diplomacy. Weiss, a French journalist and realpolitiker, believed that a united European military power would break the Cold War impasse; Szilard, a physicist and father of the atomic bomb, pressed for co-operative diplomacy between the superpowers; Thompson, a British historian, mobilized millions in the grassroots campaign for European Nuclear Disarmament; and Dolci, an Italian poet, experimented with conflict resolution through education and non-violence. By comparing the ideals, successes, and failures of these activists, this book illustrates the problematic boundary between "realism" and utopianism" in the nuclear age.

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Biomedical research is changing the both the format and the functions of human beings. Very soon the human race will be faced with a choice: do we join in with the enhancement or not? Make Way for the Superhumans looks at how far this technology has come and what aims and ambitions it has.From robotic implants that restore sight to the blind, to performance enhancing drugs that build muscles, improve concentration, and maintain erections, bio-enhancement has already made massive advances. Humans have already developed the technology to transmit thoughts and actions brain-to-brain using only a computer interface.By the time our grandchildren are born, they will be presented with the option to significantly alter and redesign their bodies. Make Way for the Superhumans is the only book that poses the questions that need answering now: suggesting real, practical ways of dealing with this technology before it reaches a point where it can no longer be controlled.

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The accelerating interpenetration of nature and culture is the hallmark of the new "light-green" social order that has emerged in postwar France, argues Michael Bess in this penetrating new history. On one hand, a preoccupation with natural qualities and equilibrium has increasingly infused France's economic and cultural life. On the other, human activities have laid an ever more potent and pervasive touch on the environment, whether through the intrusion of agriculture, industry, and urban growth, or through the much subtler and more well-intentioned efforts of ecological management. The Light-Green Society limns sharply these trends over the last fifty years. The rise of environmentalism in the 1960s stemmed from a fervent desire to "save" wild nature-nature conceived as a qualitatively distinct domain, wholly separate from human designs and endeavors. And yet, Bess shows, after forty years of environmentalist agitation, much of it remarkably successful in achieving its aims, the old conception of nature as a "separate sphere" has become largely untenable. In the light-green society, where ecology and technological modernity continually flow together, a new hybrid vision of intermingled nature-culture has increasingly taken its place.

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