The perfect gift for everyone who has ever cursed Windows. A not insignificant market.
A huge and bullying software vendor branches into food technology, bringing shrink-wrapped user agreements and techno-menace to outdoor cooking.
The Wholly Grill is just the first of many odious puns foisted on helpless end-users by ThinkSoft, a giant Silicon Valley firm bearing more than casual resemblance to a certain real-life Redmond, Washington, corporation in a mostly amusing sendup of software’s darker side. Flooding the mails with sirloin tips sealed in Saran Wrap like so many CDs, ThinkSoft hopes to hook a barbecue-loving America on a seamless system of hardware and software that includes laser-fired, Internet controlled grills and special crystal-embedded roasts and sausages. The catch? Well, there are many, but the first is most familiar to anyone who has ever dabbled in computing. Just clawing at the he plastic to get your hands on the CD, or—in this case—the brisket, binds the user to an ironclad agreement that he will not even think of using the old Weber Kettle or anything but ThinkSoft’s own sauce on anything but ThinkSoft meat. But, of course, fat, lonely, bachelor and credit-card victim Lenny Milton, when he can’t get his brand-new Wholly Grill to make the modem connection and fire up the lasers, reaches for the charcoal and very quickly incurs the mighty wrath of ThinkSoft. He would be squashed like a bug were it not for the interest of Edwin G. Ostermyer, the quintessence of West Coast Geraldo–savvy legal maneuvering, Ostermyer’s blue-blooded but action craving young assistant Will Swanson, and ravishing technical industry reporter Persi Valentino. While Persi, invisible in janitorial uniform, scopes out ThinkSoft’s HQ, Will frantically works the legal angles, and Edwin works on many levels on his expert witness, a sexy psychiatrist. The action ratchets up when Lenny’s beloved Chihuahua is blinded in a barbecue catastrophe for which ThinkSoft must surely, surely accept culpability. On the way to the climax, there will be an important appearance by Saint Tostada, a mythic force in the South Bay long before Larry Ellison arrived.
The perfect gift for everyone who has ever cursed Windows. A not insignificant market.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-7867-0965-0
Page Count: 336
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2001
Tinny perhaps, but still a minutely rendered and impressively steady feminist vision of apocalypse.
The time is the not-so-distant future, when the US's spiraling social freedoms have finally called down a reaction, an Iranian-style repressive "monotheocracy" calling itself the Republic of Gilead—a Bible-thumping, racist, capital-punishing, and misogynistic rule that would do away with pleasure altogether were it not for one thing: that the Gileadan women, pure and true (as opposed to all the nonbelieving women, those who've ever been adulterous or married more than once), are found rarely fertile.
Thus are drafted a whole class of "handmaids," whose function is to bear the children of the elite, to be fecund or else (else being certain death, sent out to be toxic-waste removers on outlying islands). The narrative frame for Atwood's dystopian vision is the hopeless private testimony of one of these surrogate mothers, Offred ("of" plus the name of her male protector). Lying cradled by the body of the barren wife, being meanwhile serviced by the husband, Offred's "ceremony" must be successful—if she does not want to join the ranks of the other disappeared (which include her mother, her husband—dead—and small daughter, all taken away during the years of revolt). One Of her only human conduits is a gradually developing affair with her master's chauffeur—something that's balanced more than offset, though, by the master's hypocritically un-Puritan use of her as a kind of B-girl at private parties held by the ruling men in a spirit of nostalgia and lust. This latter relationship, edging into real need (the master's), is very effectively done; it highlights the handmaid's (read Everywoman's) eternal exploitation, profane or sacred ("We are two-legged wombs, that's all: sacred vessels, ambulatory chalices"). Atwood, to her credit, creates a chillingly specific, imaginable night-mare. The book is short on characterization—this is Atwood, never a warm writer, at her steeliest—and long on cynicism—it's got none of the human credibility of a work such as Walker Percy's Love In The Ruins. But the scariness is visceral, a world that's like a dangerous and even fatal grid, an electrified fence.
Tinny perhaps, but still a minutely rendered and impressively steady feminist vision of apocalypse.Pub Date: Feb. 17, 1985
ISBN: 038549081X
Page Count: -
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: Sept. 16, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1985
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
A modern day fable, with modern implications in a deceiving simplicity, by the author of Dickens. Dali and Others (Reynal & Hitchcock, p. 138), whose critical brilliance is well adapted to this type of satire. This tells of the revolt on a farm, against humans, when the pigs take over the intellectual superiority, training the horses, cows, sheep, etc., into acknowledging their greatness. The first hints come with the reading out of a pig who instigated the building of a windmill, so that the electric power would be theirs, the idea taken over by Napoleon who becomes topman with no maybes about it. Napoleon trains the young puppies to be his guards, dickers with humans, gradually instigates a reign of terror, and breaks the final commandment against any animal walking on two legs. The old faithful followers find themselves no better off for food and work than they were when man ruled them, learn their final disgrace when they see Napoleon and Squealer carousing with their enemies... A basic statement of the evils of dictatorship in that it not only corrupts the leaders, but deadens the intelligence and awareness of those led so that tyranny is inevitable. Mr. Orwell's animals exist in their own right, with a narrative as individual as it is apt in political parody.
Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1946
ISBN: 0452277507
Page Count: 114
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1946
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