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A review by bethgiven
The Freedom Factor by Gerald N. Lund
2.0
So I like Gerald Lund's stuff. I've read Fire of the Covenant a couple of times. I've read The Kingdom of the Crown series. I've read all nine volumes of The Work and the Glory ... twice. I've always found his books to be well-researched and educational while still being readable.
But The Freedom Factor was written before all of these others, and, well, it shows. I expected a deep exploration of what the Constitution means to America -- instead I feel like I got a watered-down, half-done idea of what freedom means to America. Not a bad concept, and I certainly came to appreciate that I don't live in some kind of totalitarian state, but it wasn't nearly as deep as I'd hoped for.
Admittedly, the concept of an alternate dimension is tough to pull off -- you start to think about it a little, and inevitably you're left with a bunch of unanswerable paradoxes. There are just too many details to try to iron out in only a few hundred pages. For instance (and this is minor, but represents one of the many questions I had in the back of my head that were never addressed): if this is the "America" without a Constitution, one that was divided into small alliances of states and not united together, would there have been a Civil War? And if not (which was my assumption), why would there be a West Virginia??
The other problem with sending someone off to another dimension is the question of how to bring him back to reality -- without it feeling hokey, anyway. And this ending was ... hokey.
This was a quick read and did help me appreciate the freedoms we take for granted today ... though there's plenty of other books that will do that, too. And in the meantime, Lund's written a few thousand pages of really good stuff -- read that instead. ;-)
But The Freedom Factor was written before all of these others, and, well, it shows. I expected a deep exploration of what the Constitution means to America -- instead I feel like I got a watered-down, half-done idea of what freedom means to America. Not a bad concept, and I certainly came to appreciate that I don't live in some kind of totalitarian state, but it wasn't nearly as deep as I'd hoped for.
Admittedly, the concept of an alternate dimension is tough to pull off -- you start to think about it a little, and inevitably you're left with a bunch of unanswerable paradoxes. There are just too many details to try to iron out in only a few hundred pages. For instance (and this is minor, but represents one of the many questions I had in the back of my head that were never addressed): if this is the "America" without a Constitution, one that was divided into small alliances of states and not united together, would there have been a Civil War? And if not (which was my assumption), why would there be a West Virginia??
The other problem with sending someone off to another dimension is the question of how to bring him back to reality -- without it feeling hokey, anyway. And this ending was ... hokey.
This was a quick read and did help me appreciate the freedoms we take for granted today ... though there's plenty of other books that will do that, too. And in the meantime, Lund's written a few thousand pages of really good stuff -- read that instead. ;-)