This is a worthy addition to the growing shelf on the erosion of personal privacy in the service of public security.
A university professor worries about lost privacy and past sins after receiving cartons filled with years of personal data in this blend of psychological and political suspense.
When Jeremy O’Keefe failed to get tenure at Columbia, he took a post at Oxford University shortly after the 9/11 attacks, even acquiring British citizenship in the course of more than 10 years in the U.K. As the novel opens with Jeremy’s first-person narration, he has recently returned to the U.S. to teach at New York University, his chief area of interest being 20th-century German history, with a specialization in the Stasi and its informants. Then his seemingly comfortable, unremarkable life is overturned in the course of a few weeks. He receives from an anonymous sender four boxes containing a breadth of personal data—URLs, phone traffic, photos— that suggests something only a government agency could organize. Jeremy also repeatedly encounters a man who knows his wealthy son-in-law and behaves oddly enough to make Jeremy suspicious of him. As he searches his memory for possible causes and culprits, Jeremy revisits his years in England and wonders about incidents when he might have offended someone. There was also an unsavory colleague who compelled him to help a woman gain acceptance to Oxford. Could the woman’s Egyptian background include terrorist ties? The question of why Jeremy has fallen under Big Brother’s unblinking gaze—or even if he has—is left ambiguous, but Flanery (Fallen Land, 2013, etc.) makes his protagonist’s flaws common enough to let him serve as Everyman at a time when innocence might be irrelevant in a world that “assumes guilt by algorithmic association.” Less judicious is the writer’s decision to have Jeremy withhold from the narrative for a while vital information that is clearly ever present in his memory because doing so is useful to Flanery as novelist.
This is a worthy addition to the growing shelf on the erosion of personal privacy in the service of public security.Pub Date: July 5, 2016
ISBN: 9781101905852
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Tim Duggan Books/Crown
Review Posted Online: April 12, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.
Written with quiet dignity that builds to a climax of tragic force, this book about the dissolution of an African tribe, its traditions, and values, represents a welcome departure from the familiar "Me, white brother" genre.
Written by a Nigerian African trained in missionary schools, this novel tells quietly the story of a brave man, Okonkwo, whose life has absolute validity in terms of his culture, and who exercises his prerogative as a warrior, father, and husband with unflinching single mindedness. But into the complex Nigerian village filters the teachings of strangers, teachings so alien to the tribe, that resistance is impossible. One must distinguish a force to be able to oppose it, and to most, the talk of Christian salvation is no more than the babbling of incoherent children. Still, with his guns and persistence, the white man, amoeba-like, gradually absorbs the native culture and in despair, Okonkwo, unable to withstand the corrosion of what he, alone, understands to be the life force of his people, hangs himself. In the formlessness of the dying culture, it is the missionary who takes note of the event, reminding himself to give Okonkwo's gesture a line or two in his work, The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger.
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.Pub Date: Jan. 23, 1958
ISBN: 0385474547
Page Count: 207
Publisher: McDowell, Obolensky
Review Posted Online: April 23, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1958
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.
A lonely postman learns that he’s about to die—and reflects on life as he bargains with a Hawaiian-shirt–wearing devil.
The 30-year-old first-person narrator in filmmaker/novelist Kawamura’s slim novel is, by his own admission, “boring…a monotone guy,” so unimaginative that, when he learns he has a brain tumor, the bucket list he writes down is dull enough that “even the cat looked disgusted with me.” Luckily—or maybe not—a friendly devil, dubbed Aloha, pops onto the scene, and he’s willing to make a deal: an extra day of life in exchange for being allowed to remove something pleasant from the world. The first thing excised is phones, which goes well enough. (The narrator is pleasantly surprised to find that “people seemed to have no problem finding something to fill up their free time.”) But deals with the devil do have a way of getting complicated. This leads to shallow musings (“Sometimes, when you rewatch a film after not having seen it for a long time, it makes a totally different impression on you than it did the first time you saw it. Of course, the movie hasn’t changed; it’s you who’s changed") written in prose so awkward, it’s possibly satire (“Tears dripped down onto the letter like warm, salty drops of rain”). Even the postman’s beloved cat, who gains the power of speech, ends up being prim and annoying. The narrator ponders feelings about a lost love, his late mother, and his estranged father in a way that some readers might find moving at times. But for many, whatever made this book a bestseller in Japan is going to be lost in translation.
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.Pub Date: March 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-29405-0
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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