Description: In "The Ingenuity Gap", Thomas Homer-Dixon, "global guru" (The Toronto Star), "genuine academic celebrity" (Saturday Night), and "one of Canada's most talked about and controversial scholars" (Maclean's) asks: Is our world becoming too complex and too fast-paced to manage? The challenges facing human societies -- ranging from international financial crises and global climate change to pandemics of tuberculosis and AIDS -- converge, intertwine, and often remain largely beyond our ken. Most of us suspect that the "experts" don't really know what's going on and that as a species we have released forces that are neither managed nor manageable. This is "the ingenuity gap" -- the term coined by Thomas Homer-Dixon, political scientist and advisor to the White House -- the critical gap between our need for practical and innovative ideas to solve complex problems and our actual supply of those ideas. Through gripping narrative stories and incidents that exemplify his arguments, he takes us on a world tour that begins with a heartstopping description of the tragic crash of United Airlines Flight 232 from Denver to Chicago and includes Las Vegas in its desert, a wilderness beach in British Columbia, and his solitary search for a little girl in Patna, India. He shows us how, in our complex world, while poor countries are particularly vulnerable to ingenuity gaps, our own rich countries are no longer immune, and we are all caught dangerously between a soaring requirement for ingenuity and an increasingly uncertain supply. When the gap widens, political disintegration and violent upheaval can result, reaching into our own economies and daily lives in subtle, unforeseen ways. In compellingandlucid prose, he makes real the problems we face suggest how we might overcome them -- in our lives, our thinking, our business, and our societies.

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