Rating: 
Summary: A textbook for those with eyes to see.
Review: Years ago, when I read Richard Bach's "Illusions, The Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah", the main Character reads a passage from Donald Shimoda's handbook for Messiahs': which states, " You only teach what you need to learn". In "The Ethos Effect", non-sequiter issues pop up to disturb the thematic flow for L.E. Modesitt Jr. to wrestle with in this otherwise fascinating work on politics, economics, the apathetic citizenry and the high level Crowd Mentality of bureaucracies.(i.e., a government is not made of leaders, only followers.)In his latest book, Modesitt's hero has forgone fruit and cheese, is a bit more sedentary and sounds like he has grown a paunch with too many Pale Ales. Cold. In seven years, Van Albert, Director of IIS who has the nous to run an entire arm of the galaxy hasn't yet found the courage to kiss his favourite lady and seems to stumble over his own feet in an 'aw shucks' attitude towards women. What is happening to Modesitt's heros?.They seem to be metamorphosing into the sorry state of vacillating, women fearing, blame-my-mommy wussys. Are our heros too comfortable in Utah? Our hero doesn't need to cut and run at the sight of a skirt. He needs a real woman; a team mate which would develop the other half of the thematic yin/yang cosmic potential. In this brilliant and timely treatment of the dangers of political correctness/apathy/appeasement, the author contradicts his own thesis by inserting some comfy appeals for normalizing same-sex marriage.(Yawn) Is RFS Commodore Van C.Albert an androygne? This book's hero is not Major Jimjoy Earl Wright, by a long shot. The "Ethos" thesis has enough scope to provoke a sequel which would develop Modesitt's fledgling recognition of telepathy, superior beings (The Farhkan), Ethics as guidelines for *infinite* economic/spiritual expansion, morals as generated by village-mentality policy, maturation of his archetypically adolescent heros into dynamic men and women whose character grows, demonstrating self-knowledge while leading humanity into a new era of higher, nobler games instead of inversion back into the worn-out snake-pit culture of gender suicide.
It's there. We wait.
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