5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A good wake up call for today's slippery-slope culture., 28 Jun 1999
By A Customer - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: Winterflight (Paperback)
Reading this book ten years ago left me thinking that the mass euthanasia of our elderly and genetically impure could never happen. Now in the days of Dr. Kevorkian, and the increasing amount of governmental controls over our society, the book's content could become more of a reality than we would have expected. If you want to peek at future possibilities based on today's moral choices, this book will certainly make you think twice about the things our culture deems to be ethical now. Just what are we paving the way for??? This book gives a plausible answer.
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Hard to believe this was written in 1981., 16 Jun 2005
By Skylark Thibedeau - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: Winterflight: A Novel (Paperback)
I wouldn't really say this is a great work of fiction nor was it meant to be. I believe that the story is an allegory for the direction that the author saw the country turning.
He envisioned an America where everyone has universal healthcare and no one suffers from the ravages of Tay Sachs, hemophilia, or sickle cell anemia but where those who have these conditions and other congenital deformities are aborted or live Brain Dead in Body Banks ready to 'donate' a body part to those in need.
No one worries about having to live on social security into old age as once you turn 75, the government has you report to a euthanasia center(shades of Edgar G. Robinson in "Soylent Green").
The future he paints is not bright and the ending of the story is not pleasant, but with recent cases in the news and the ascendancy of the culture of abortion and euthanasia the late author may have painted a picture of where we are headed as a society
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Christians should act now, 19 May 2000
By A Customer - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: Winterflight: A Novel (Paperback)
The book is a disturbing look at what America might be in the future. 20 years after this book was originally written, I live in a state with legal abortion and legal physician-assisted suicide. An America closer to the one written about in the book than the one in which the author lived. I agree with another review that calls the book a wake up call. The most disturbing part of the book is the failure of the characters in the story to have acted earlier. They were content to live in an America that decided who lived and who didn't untill the ones who were told to die were in their own family. The father in the story, Jon, says that he "is no Dietrich Bonhoeffer." Indeed! Bonhoeffer opposed Hitler's policies of death from the beginning and resisted them untill his execution. Joseph Bayly never lets us forget in the book the parallels he draws between this futuristic America and Nazi Germany. As a medical student and scientist, I found the book to be an important reminder of the implications to today's research and medical practices.