Sharp-toothed and Bluetoothed—gigabyte-size political and social satire for the wired generation.
In a dumbed-down, dystopic near-future America, high-tech tycoon Manny Kahn fights to save the nation from political pathologies brought about by his own creation, a ubiquitous online search engine.
Any resemblance to Google or Facebook is very likely intentional in Witherspoon’s satirical, near-future look at the political swamps into which info-tech pathologies are taking America. Manny Kahn was once an idealistic hacktavist who created a breakthrough search-engine algorithm called furtl, primarily to hype his parents’ floral business. Now furtl is everywhere as a tech device/multimedia platform. But after a grim long-range business projection due to unexpected killer-app competition from China, Manny gets ousted from his company (and failing marriage) via a fraudulent sex-harassment charge. After six years spent in an off-the-grid rustic retreat in Bhutan, Manny gets a glimpse of the isolationist, corrupt Red State nightmare that America has become thanks to his unscrupulous successors at furtl. A senile, Reagan-like president presides over 25 percent unemployment following calamitous privatization of most social services, which left a few powerful Washington, D.C.–connected corporations in charge. The rich dwell in gated communities with private militias, while dissent (or belief in evolution) among the poor and angry is quashed by a powerful Homeland Security–type department empowered by furtl’s data-mining surveillance. Obesity has hit 80 percent; potato chips are the standard diet. Manny returns to take down the establishment he unwittingly created, but even the Occupy-like terrorists (the “Leftea Party”) he joins seem to be the cretins of tomorrow from Mike Judge’s film Idiocracy. Tech-talk sometimes comes in massive doses, intimidating for noobs, but Witherspoon keeps the narrative as lean as an iPad and resists the gimmick of writing the thing in text-message shorthand. Though characterizations are often tweet-deep, the nonstop invention and wit spare neither the left nor the right. Such is the author’s Swiftian persuasion that the upbeat denouement rings rather hollow; a society gone this far down the anti-intellectual pipeline will have a hard time booting back up.
Sharp-toothed and Bluetoothed—gigabyte-size political and social satire for the wired generation.Pub Date: Nov. 23, 2013
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 180
Publisher: Marginal Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 20, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z(2006).
A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.Pub Date: June 16, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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