SHAME OF MAN

The second of Anthony's uncircumscribed rants against humanity's plundering of the Earth's resources is structured, like its predecessor (Isle of Woman, 1993), as a succession of story-chapters propped up by expository paragraphs in which Anthony's tsk-tsking is all but audible. Though some characters from the previous book recur in minor roles, the archetypes this time are Hugh, a musician, and his beloved Ann, a dancer. Beginning eight million years ago with what appear to be cogitating chimpanzees, the chapters move briskly through various prehistorical scenarios to Orkney megalith-builders, the biblical Philistines, Carthage, third-century Japan, the Syrian Caliphate, Easter Island, Genghis Khan, 16th-century Basque whalers, the Chinese opium wars, modern ecological activists in Oregon, and finally the development or a sustainable society in 21st-century Tasmania. "Edutainment" for sound-bite mentalities.