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
Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters.
A retelling of ancient Greek lore gives exhilarating voice to a witch.
“Monsters are a boon for gods. Imagine all the prayers.” So says Circe, a sly, petulant, and finally commanding voice that narrates the entirety of Miller’s dazzling second novel. The writer returns to Homer, the wellspring that led her to an Orange Prize for The Song of Achilles (2012). This time, she dips into The Odyssey for the legend of Circe, a nymph who turns Odysseus’ crew of men into pigs. The novel, with its distinctive feminist tang, starts with the sentence: “When I was born, the name for what I was did not exist.” Readers will relish following the puzzle of this unpromising daughter of the sun god Helios and his wife, Perse, who had negligible use for their child. It takes banishment to the island Aeaea for Circe to sense her calling as a sorceress: “I will not be like a bird bred in a cage, I thought, too dull to fly even when the door stands open. I stepped into those woods and my life began.” This lonely, scorned figure learns herbs and potions, surrounds herself with lions, and, in a heart-stopping chapter, outwits the monster Scylla to propel Daedalus and his boat to safety. She makes lovers of Hermes and then two mortal men. She midwifes the birth of the Minotaur on Crete and performs her own C-section. And as she grows in power, she muses that “not even Odysseus could talk his way past [her] witchcraft. He had talked his way past the witch instead.” Circe’s fascination with mortals becomes the book’s marrow and delivers its thrilling ending. All the while, the supernatural sits intriguingly alongside “the tonic of ordinary things.” A few passages coil toward melodrama, and one inelegant line after a rape seems jarringly modern, but the spell holds fast. Expect Miller’s readership to mushroom like one of Circe’s spells.
Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters.Pub Date: April 10, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-316-55634-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
PROFILES
A masterpiece of craftsmanship that offers an unparalleled emotional experience. Send a copy to the Swedish Academy.
An ambitious scientific experiment wreaks horrendous toll in the Booker-winning British author’s disturbingly eloquent sixth novel (after When We Were Orphans, 2000).
Ishiguro’s narrator, identified only as Kath(y) H., speaks to us as a 31-year-old social worker of sorts, who’s completing her tenure as a “carer,” prior to becoming herself one of the “donors” whom she visits at various “recovery centers.” The setting is “England, late 1990s”—more than two decades after Kath was raised at a rural private school (Hailsham) whose students, all children of unspecified parentage, were sheltered, encouraged to develop their intellectual and especially artistic capabilities, and groomed to become donors. Visions of Brave New World and 1984 arise as Kath recalls in gradually and increasingly harrowing detail her friendships with fellow students Ruth and Tommy (the latter a sweet, though distractible boy prone to irrational temper tantrums), their “graduation” from Hailsham and years of comparative independence at a remote halfway house (the Cottages), the painful outcome of Ruth’s breakup with Tommy (whom Kath also loves), and the discovery the adult Kath and Tommy make when (while seeking a “deferral” from carer or donor status) they seek out Hailsham’s chastened “guardians” and receive confirmation of the limits long since placed on them. With perfect pacing and infinite subtlety, Ishiguro reveals exactly as much as we need to know about how efforts to regulate the future through genetic engineering create, control, then emotionlessly destroy very real, very human lives—without ever showing us the faces of the culpable, who have “tried to convince themselves. . . . That you were less than human, so it didn’t matter.” That this stunningly brilliant fiction echoes Caryl Churchill’s superb play A Number and Margaret Atwood’s celebrated dystopian novels in no way diminishes its originality and power.
A masterpiece of craftsmanship that offers an unparalleled emotional experience. Send a copy to the Swedish Academy.Pub Date: April 11, 2005
ISBN: 1-4000-4339-5
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2005
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