Indicting the AIG-Bear Stearns-Lehman Brothers’ looting of the American dream, Easterbrook offers a must-have,...
Easterbrook’s (Sonic Boom, 2009, etc.) latest social commentary as literary fiction filters leverage buyouts, derivatives marketing and multimillion-dollar CEO bonuses through the lens of one wave-riding family.
Easterbrook isn’t subtle. Helot, the family surname, is ancient Greek for serf or slave. Posed as the author's symbolic question is whether this serfdom is voluntary. Life, after all, is pleasantly luxurious as the story begins in 2006. Easterbrook’s narrative tone is clinically ironic as he slides a slice of Helot life under the microscope. Tom is important at Corsair Assets, a private equity firm. Margo works a $2,500 coffee maker and chauffeurs daughters Caroline and Megan to fencing lessons and birthday parties. It’s the Reaganomics dream until Ken, Tom’s CEO in this world of debt swaps and derivatives, comes to dinner at the Helot house. Ken casually confesses to having looted Corsair into bankruptcy. Tom’s career enters a downward spiral, first spinning into consulting jobs with spare hope of permanent hiring, then to not-very-hopeful Internet startups, to commission sales at a big-box store, to temporary work as go-between for inept and corrupt management and recalcitrant and corrupt unions. Margo segues from at-home mother in a trendy McMansion to flirting for tips as a Hooters restaurant server. Meantime, Easterbrook itemizes, dissects and audits this world we have wrought: banking and investing; corporate life; health care and education; the ugly dichotomy between executive retention bonuses and an unlivable minimum wage; automation and manufacturing; consumerism and class distinction and social status; and nearly every other factor driving our “fast, flexible, kanban, sigma-six economy,” where people are expendable. Substitute class warfare for racial tension and what might be read as a sardonic, perhaps morbid, personal salvation narrative becomes a post-meltdown Bonfire of the Vanities.
Indicting the AIG-Bear Stearns-Lehman Brothers’ looting of the American dream, Easterbrook offers a must-have, Sub-Zero-refrigerator appraisal of what the Smartest Guys in the Room did to the American dream.Pub Date: Nov. 13, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-250-01173-2
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Sept. 15, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2012
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
A thoughtful and pensive tale with intelligent characters and a satisfying romance.
A promise to his best friend leads an Army serviceman to a family in need and a chance at true love in this novel.
Beckett Gentry is surprised when his Army buddy Ryan MacKenzie gives him a letter from Ryan’s sister, Ella. Abandoned by his mother, Beckett grew up in a series of foster homes. He is wary of attachments until he reads Ella’s letter. A single mother, Ella lives with her twins, Maisie and Colt, at Solitude, the resort she operates in Telluride, Colorado. They begin a correspondence, although Beckett can only identify himself by his call sign, Chaos. After Ryan’s death during a mission, Beckett travels to Telluride as his friend had requested. He bonds with the twins while falling deeply in love with Ella. Reluctant to reveal details of Ryan’s death and risk causing her pain, Beckett declines to disclose to Ella that he is Chaos. Maisie needs treatment for neuroblastoma, and Beckett formally adopts the twins as a sign of his commitment to support Ella and her children. He and Ella pursue a romance, but when an insurance investigator questions the adoption, Beckett is faced with revealing the truth about the letters and Ryan’s death, risking losing the family he loves. Yarros’ (Wilder, 2016, etc.) novel is a deeply felt and emotionally nuanced contemporary romance bolstered by well-drawn characters and strong, confident storytelling. Beckett and Ella are sympathetic protagonists whose past experiences leave them cautious when it comes to love. Beckett never knew the security of a stable home life. Ella impulsively married her high school boyfriend, but the marriage ended when he discovered she was pregnant. The author is especially adept at developing the characters through subtle but significant details, like Beckett’s aversion to swearing. Beckett and Ella’s romance unfolds slowly in chapters that alternate between their first-person viewpoints. The letters they exchanged are pivotal to their connection, and almost every chapter opens with one. Yarros’ writing is crisp and sharp, with passages that are poetic without being florid. For example, in a letter to Beckett, Ella writes of motherhood: “But I’m not the center of their universe. I’m more like their gravity.” While the love story is the book’s focus, the subplot involving Maisie’s illness is equally well-developed, and the link between Beckett and the twins is heartfelt and sincere.
A thoughtful and pensive tale with intelligent characters and a satisfying romance.Pub Date: Feb. 26, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-64063-533-3
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Entangled: Amara
Review Posted Online: Jan. 2, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
