Rating: 
Summary: Useful as a doorstop.
Review: Unparalleled for tedium, long-winded in the extreme, excruciatingly dull. 600 pages describing the boredom would not come close to the experience of reading this book. It reminds me of a hypochondriac aunt moaning on for hours about every imagined illness.This book should be a favourite of conspiracy theorists, fundamentalists, & New Age luddites, although I doubt if they would read it cover to cover. They would indulge in the occasional dip to feel justified in their escapist rejection of the modern world. Those with a taste for Postmodernist buffoonery may also find it attractive, and with their masochistic preference for ponderous tomes that only seem to make sense on some ethereal plane, it would be bedtime reading. Saul makes the rather ironic mistake of equating rationality with cold unrelenting logic. He then chooses a rather contrived list of examples and applies his own unrelenting logic to convince his readers how terrible the Western world is. Reason, & being reasonable, involves common sense and judgement based on experience. Logic is vital, but is not the whole story of rationality. The pointlessness of this huge uncreative exercise is underscored by the fact that he offers no suggestion of a solution. It appears to be just another excuse for the anti-Western bigotry and self-loathing that the trendy "politically correct" revel in. No doubt the author leaves the dreaming of a utopia to the reader. But before rejecting our world, be careful what you wish for. The only problem with utopia is that one person's idea of paradise is everyone else's hell. Go ask anyone who has lived under the Taliban.
Rating: 
Summary: A humble opinion.
Review: Voltaire's Bastards is an impressive book, both by size and content. And reading through the 650 odd pages does give you the impression that this book has taken a major slice out of Saul's life. I can easily relate to that. It has the qualities of a daily journal (which I appreciate in Jean-Jacques Rousseau's work) and yet remains very coherent, down to the little details. This combination immediately got me thinking and stimulated me greatly. There are some people, however, that have argued that it's reasoning is flawed - which is their right - and have therefore rejected the book. It's my belief that they missed the point. What John Saul has attempted to do with this book is to get some sort of debate going over where we are heading as a civilization. He is trying to get us out in the streets asking serious questions. And he is defying the accepted principle that the system works or at least can be reformed, by implying that it should simply be rebuilt from the ground up. This idea, obviously, does not and cannot please everybody. Now Voltaire's Bastards isn't without a few flaws, which is to be expected (specially if you take an exclusively rational approach), but nothing - at least for me - that is so bad that I had to drop the book. It's biggest problem - to the best of my knowledge - is that there is a lot of information being dispensed, sometimes very densely and usually shot in all directions. This can be too much for people who expect something very concise or something that concentrates on a very narrow path. So in conclusion, Voltaire's Bastard is a fantastic book, but it's not for everybody. Now if you happen not to agree with Saul, don't stop reading and don't judge. Let the book simmer slowly. It's not a cure-all instant solution. It's a long hard look at what our priorities have been in the last few hundred years.
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