Edward Tenner

"Why Things Bite Back offers a much-needed healthy balance between contemporary technological utopian fantasies and neo-Luddite despair. This superb guide to our high-tech world deserves a wide readership." -- Howard Segal, Nature

"No one is safe from Mr. Tenner's analytical eye.... He has amassed a staggering amount of research in `Why Things Bite Back,' all of it clearly and succinctly presented. His truest remark is that no futurist `has ever lost business because of a wrong prediction.' --Dick Teresi, New York Times Book Review

"Depressed? Don't be. But do read the new book ... Edward Tenner's ``Why Things Bite Back: Technology and the Revenge of Unintended Consequences.'' Tenner .... is, on balance, cheerful, in his mordant manner, about ``the tendency of the world around us to get even, to twist our cleverness against us.'' -- George Will, Newsweek

"The historical rule of irony isn't a new concept. But it is the genius of Edward Tenner's Why Things Bite Back to provide us with new tools to analyze our predicament--tools we can use, perhaps, to occupy our time while trapped in a traffic jam in the car that was supposed to speed us on our way, or while idled by carpal tunnel syndrome caused by the machines that substitute information for physical labor, or while keeping vigil by the bedside of a chronically and painfully ill relative who would long since have been dead save for the miracles of medicine." --Philip Johnson, Amicus Journal

"Why Things Bite Back is a refreshing antidote to ... earnest risk-management orthodoxy. Edward Tenner has a keen nose for paradox and irony and a very different idea of common sense. Given the catalogue of errors that serves as his subject matter, he is remarkably cheerful--partly, I suspect, because he is one of nature's optimists and partly because like most of us he enjoys what happens when pomposity steps on a banana skin." -- John Adams, Scientific American