Though this book can be nuanced and engaging, it's ultimately disappointing.
Since the day of his birth, Boston-born Alex Cohen has been expected to follow in his father’s footsteps and run the family shoe factory in southern China.
Now 26, Alex is caught between his desire to oversee a company where workers are respected and operations follow the latest energy efficiency standards and, at the same time, keep his money-worshipping father happy. It’s impossible. Dad is almost a caricature, soulless, greedy, opportunistic, and crass. He’s proud that his sweatshop is highly profitable and that his merchandise is sold in countless U.S. department stores. He’s also pleased by his ability to ingratiate himself with the corrupt, easily bribed politicians who are happy to look the other way on health and safety standards. At first, Alex finds his father’s modus operandi simply disagreeable. But after a worker kills herself because she can no longer take the constant abuse meted out by the company’s hard-driving overseers, Alex realizes that things have to change, and fast. As he gets to know Ivy, a somewhat older college-educated worker who intends to organize the plant, and then becomes romantically entangled with her, he not only learns about the international struggle for human rights, but has to parse for himself the never-ending debate over whether nonviolence can succeed in creating social change. The legacy of the 1989 massacre in Tiananmen Square is vividly rendered, and Ivy’s eyewitness account leaves Alex shaken. In concert with his employee’s suicide, it also helps propel the inevitable confrontation between father and son. The showdown is tense, if predictable, and leaves both men with a clear understanding that business as usual is no longer possible. Although this is a fascinating look at China’s race for economic growth, the Jewish businessman stereotype is unsettling and makes this first novel less compelling than it could be.
Though this book can be nuanced and engaging, it's ultimately disappointing.Pub Date: June 5, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-335-14590-1
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Hanover Square Press
Review Posted Online: April 15, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2018
These letters from some important executive Down Below, to one of the junior devils here on earth, whose job is to corrupt mortals, are witty and written in a breezy style seldom found in religious literature. The author quotes Luther, who said: "The best way to drive out the devil, if he will not yield to texts of Scripture, is to jeer and flout him, for he cannot bear scorn." This the author does most successfully, for by presenting some of our modern and not-so-modern beliefs as emanating from the devil's headquarters, he succeeds in making his reader feel like an ass for ever having believed in such ideas. This kind of presentation gives the author a tremendous advantage over the reader, however, for the more timid reader may feel a sense of guilt after putting down this book. It is a clever book, and for the clever reader, rather than the too-earnest soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1942
ISBN: 0060652934
Page Count: 53
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 17, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1943
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
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