The Pursuit of Perfection : The Promise and Perils of Medical Enhancement

Rating:
Summary: Boring and Dry
Review: Found this an exceedingly difficult read. Not because it was controversial or hit home. But becuase was more boring then watching the grass grow. The prose is dry. The authors ramble on and on. And so much of it is history or just lifted straight from medicial journals.

Do something more interesting with your time: watch paint dry.

Rating:
Summary: Most current and on-target book on the subject
Review: I've found the Pursuit of Perfection both readable and informative. I come from a family of MD's and let me tell you they're wound up about this book. (I withstood the demands for conformity and went into veterinary medicine myself.) My father, still a practicing GP in a dying Great Plains town whose patients frequently can't pay, feels that his public health orientation has been vindicated. A cousin in cosmetology in Dallas who specializes in liposuction and breast enlargement ... well, I couldn't adequately convey what HE thinks without using rude language. And another cousin in "drug engineering" rants and raves about how "Luddite" the arguments of the authors are but just sputters when you ask him for specifics. In fact, I finally read this book because I'd never heard this clan pitch in at each other about a book in a lay publishing house before.
One of the reviewers said that no notice of this book had appeared in the New York Times Sunday Magazine. Isn't that just about fashion and big houses?

Rating:
Summary: disappointing
Review: The authors do an admirable job of covering a wide range of medical techniques, whether these originated in new technologies which have outrun our society's poorly-grounded and tottering ethics or result from the greed of fumbling M.D.'s who shouldn't be trusted to repair a wheelbarrow properly. A swarm of negative reviews at this site suggest the authors are out to outlaw face reconstruction, etc. This is nonsense. Nonsense also to suggest the authors are not sufficiently expert in these areas. If anything, they are perhaps too scholarly for some readers to handle, in particular, maybe, the clodhopper who wants to protect his trashy trade and feels threatened by this fine work.

Rating:
Summary: Far from topical
Review: The New York Times Sunday magazine had a long cover piece about the pursuit of perfection among elite athletes today. Did they quote from this book once? NO. Did they interview the authors? NO. Why? Because this book has nothing relevant to say about any of the controversies going on in the world to regarding enhancement.

This is a history lesson. Another boring lecture by boring people with nothing to help guide us through the morass of today and tomorrow's very real dilemmas.

If you are looking for a guide to understanding the enhancement mess we are in today, look elsewhere. Policy wanks, politicans, doctors in the field, women facing the choice of whether or not to take estrogen, my advice to you is not to buy this book.

But if you are for a very (!) a dry recitation of history and the history of endocrinology at that, then I guess this is your book.