A vigorous, sometimes-entertaining, but unconvincing tale of future imperfect.
A boy is raised to have a perfect life—as defined by a team of corporate scientists—in this strident satire of a near-future dystopia.
In the year 2020, the World Government—its president chosen by the World Economic Forum, its Congress composed of representatives from the 300 highest earning global corporations—adopts newborn Jimmy Clark as the prototype for its program of offering all citizens a perfect life. He is made handsome by infant cosmetic surgery, raised by a preternaturally nurturing robot, provided with a constant feed of drugs to keep his mood elevated and stable, and sent to Manhattan’s finest private schools to acquire not knowledge but the “skills” indispensable for success: grit, teamwork, data-crunching, and back-stabbing. Jimmy joins an investment firm run by his benefactor, a fundamentalist Christian plutocrat who thinks God and Mammon get along fine, and soon amasses his own business empire, including a company wrapping the planet in an electronically linked supersystem called “the Internet of Things Web.” The only complication in Jimmy’s life is Chelsea, a school sweetheart and dissident in an underground hacktivist group. Despite her rebellious proclivities, the World Government insists she marry Jimmy: “Your role is to support Jimmy’s success and make him happy. If you don’t, you’ll both be vaporized.” The novel’s rickety, absurdist plot and stick-figure characters—Jimmy is a Candide-like naif, Chelsea a doctrinaire romantic—exist mainly as pegs on which to hang Spring’s (Globalization of Education: An Introduction, 2014, etc.) vision of softly totalitarian capitalism that is a lurid extension of current trends. The colorful world features driverless cabs, unctuous artificial intelligence, custom-flavored synthetic food, and inescapable video surveillance, even during sex. Plastic forests feature animatronic fauna, and a global water vendor pollutes rivers and lakes so locals will have to buy its products. Substituting for happiness are drugs and an ethos of “shoppiness”: artificially induced dream fantasies bring crowds stampeding into malls. Among the bogus claims of convenience and personal empowerment, Spring’s spoof of consumer culture is often funny, and there’s an Orwellian verve to his prose: “If it wasn’t for your mother, we would reeducate you at the We Love You Farm.” But his dystopia feels less like a prophetic cautionary tale than a compendium of Occupier paranoias, with victims who are too robotic themselves to really care about.
A vigorous, sometimes-entertaining, but unconvincing tale of future imperfect.Pub Date: Aug. 15, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-692-48578-1
Page Count: 220
Publisher: Phoenix Books
Review Posted Online: Oct. 1, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.
Coelho is a Brazilian writer with four books to his credit. Following Diary of a Magus (1992—not reviewed) came this book, published in Brazil in 1988: it's an interdenominational, transcendental, inspirational fable—in other words, a bag of wind.
The story is about a youth empowered to follow his dream. Santiago is an Andalusian shepherd boy who learns through a dream of a treasure in the Egyptian pyramids. An old man, the king of Salem, the first of various spiritual guides, tells the boy that he has discovered his destiny: "to realize one's destiny is a person's only real obligation." So Santiago sells his sheep, sails to Tangier, is tricked out of his money, regains it through hard work, crosses the desert with a caravan, stops at an oasis long enough to fall in love, escapes from warring tribesmen by performing a miracle, reaches the pyramids, and eventually gets both the gold and the girl. Along the way he meets an Englishman who describes the Soul of the World; the desert woman Fatima, who teaches him the Language of the World; and an alchemist who says, "Listen to your heart" A message clings like ivy to every encounter; everyone, but everyone, has to put in their two cents' worth, from the crystal merchant to the camel driver ("concentrate always on the present, you'll be a happy man"). The absence of characterization and overall blandness suggest authorship by a committee of self-improvement pundits—a far cry from Saint- Exupery's The Little Prince: that flagship of the genre was a genuine charmer because it clearly derived from a quirky, individual sensibility.
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.Pub Date: July 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-06-250217-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1993
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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