ABSTRACT
Intellectual productions, however lofty their pretensions, ultimately stem from rather simple motives. That is certainly the case with the present book. One root from which it springs is the shock I remember feeling, as a young man at the time of the Vietnam War, hearing of a research chemist in California who was working to improve the adhesion of napalm to human ¯esh. We were daily seeing news from the war, including pictures of people on ®re with the inextinguishable ¯ames of napalm ± how did this man feel, I wondered, about the work he was doing? What was in his mind when he went home in the evening and embraced the (presumably) undamaged bodies of his wife and children?
