Last Sunday I finished reading Michael Crichton's "State of Fear". I get a real kick out of the marketing hype on the covers (me being such a marketing guy :-) ). It is called "Edge-Of-Your-Seat Storytelling" by USA Today, "Nothing short of spellbinding" by the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, "Thrilling" by the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. Now don't get me wrong, it really was a good book and I found it quite interesting. There were even a couple sections that might qualify for those definitions, but much of the book was on the whole role of fear, specifically as it relates to global warming.

Reading Dave Kearn's article yesterday on Identity Theft (here is the link Dave gave me where it will be when it is online) made me think of the book. He basically said we definitely should use caution online, but the media is playing to our fears and we should keep that in mind. Crichton is a bit more agressive in his book. He describes what he calls the politico-legal-media complex, the PLM. His character sharing this concept says, "And it is dedicated to promoting fear in the population - under the guise of promoting safety". I've never read a novel with this much factual data and SO many graphs and charts. One example was DDT, which he characterizes as "arguably the greatest tradgedies of the twentieth century". It was positioned as a carcinogen and unsafe, but it wasn't and was so safe you could eat it. As a result of the ban over 2 million people die each year, some 50 million in total so far. Read this if you think that's all fiction.

Anyway, good read and the price of my copy was just right - free. A woman sitting next to me on the plane a few weeks ago left it.