The Book of Adam: Autobiography of the First Human Clone 

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Hard to put down!
yasulh
Reader Rating:  
Posted May 12, 2010, 5:45 PM EST: This book was very good, but heartbreaking. It reminded me a lot of some of Stephen King's best work. The characters are well developed and you find yourself caring what happens to them. It also does a good job of building and sustaining suspense. It is hard to put down!

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July 03, 2010: I could hardly put this book down. It was a great example of technology and morality clashing. It had romantic parts as well as deep family dark sides. Many parts had humour, intensity, tear jerking, and the reality of our human nature.

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July 28, 2010: I would have absolutely paid for this book had it not been free. It was excellent with a very surprising ending. And I'm not easily surprised anymore it seems because I'm such a heavy reader. I absolutely recommend it!

http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7851025-the-book-of-adam

David Parker's review of The Book of Adam: Autobiography of the First Human Clone

rating: 

status: Read from March 27 to April 01, 2010

 

I thought this was an excellent book written very well. I sat up until 0600 reading it on the night that I finished it because the last half of the book was fascinating!

http://www.adventuresonacouch.com/ 

Robert M. Hopper’s controversial story, THE BOOK OF ADAM: The Autobiography of the First Human Clone will not be everyone’s favorite novel.  As a reader I am generally happy with a mix of cozy mysteries, police procedurals, action adventure yarns, Westerns, romantic comedies, and science fiction.  But I bring to this novel my own conflicting and ambiguous opinions about human cloning and what that might or might not lead to if it were legally permitted to happen.  (Many of my fears lie in the possibility of illegal cloning and what that progeny might be used for -- shades of Frankenstein, other monsters, and “The Super Race.”  Fears which may well reveal my limited knowledge of what human cloning entails.) 

That said, let me quote the first sentence of  the Prologue to this fictional autobiography as an example of a powerful “hook” to draw the reader into a story:

“Nine months after I died, my daughter gave birth to me.” 

Thus we are launched into a multi-generational “family” epic that spans some one hundred and twelve years, 1974 to 2086, exploring a number of moral and scientific issues in the process of depicting what is essentially a blood feud between different generations of the same two families who overlap one another because of the emerging science of cloning and other means of prolonging human and animal life. 

It is a story of unforgiving rage, of murder, incestuous rape, and insane cruelty.  But, above all, it is the story of fear -- a fear that can, and does, “make cowards of us all,” and that all too often divides the human species against itself in ways that retard the very concept of “humanity” and prolong far beyond reason the establishment of a truly civilized world.  The question of fear as a motivating factor in human life is sharply focused on in the character of both Adam-1, and Adam-2 whose autobiography the novel purports to be.  It is also present, though not always recognized, in the behavior of most of the other characters that inhabit the book.  Fear (and unchecked selfishness) is shown to  both inhibit action that might otherwise have prevented un-necessary emotional and physical pain, and might have saved many from death, and to motivate much of the violence that occurs. 

For all the moral and scientific questions the book asks, and poses some possible answers to, there is an issue that is never actually raised.  The questions of what the ultimate result might be if man were ever able to obtain the immortality suggested by the success of the reproduction of generations of a given, though not quite identical, human beings by cloning and the eventual development of artificial bodies capable of hosting a functioning brain for decades, even centuries.  Those are the questions of overpopulation on one hand, brought on by the cloning and existence of life in artificial bodies, and the normal biological reproductive drive of the human species and on the other hand, the need to prevent the human population from exceeding the resources needed to maintain life on this planet.   Who, or what, will make the decisions regarding who is allowed to reproduce by either natural or artificial means? 

Whatever your feelings about human cloning (or the cloning of animals in our food chain) The Book of Adam: The Autobiography of The First Human Clone will make you think about life, death, and any desire for immortality.  My own reaction to it may well have to do with the simple fact that my seventy-third birthday is only a few months away, and the thought of my own mortality intrudes on my thoughts more often than I would like.  So why did I read this novel? 

Because, once started I couldn’t stop!  The grabbing power of the first sentence of the prologue, “Nine months after my death, my daughter gave birth to me,” stayed with me through the three hundred and fifty-three pages of the novel. 

Reviewed April 21, 2010 by Tom  Amacker