Because Eisner is himself a former engineering executive who ran a Boston company similar to Electronic Technologies, it’s...
William Eisner’s (The Sevigne Letters, 1994) tale of corporate intrigue has an interesting start: Laid-off high-tech engineer George Breal spends half a year coping with unemployment and finally secures an interview with Dr. John Lowell, president of the Cambridge, Mass., company Electronic Technologies.
Their talk is an apparent disaster, with Lowell living up to his reputation for being eccentric, obsessive and short-tempered—and Breal nonetheless gets the job. The setup hints at a high-tech version of The Devil Wears Prada, but the remainder is quite different. No conflict ever develops between the two; Breal in fact becomes a relatively minor character. And the book hinges largely on Lowell’s attempts to maximize his company’s profits and save it from a hostile German takeover. A more promising subplot concerns the friction between Lowell’s mistress, Edna, and his estranged daughter Catherine, who is revealed to have acted in pornographic movies. But readers are likely to lose patience with the lengthy boardroom scenes, which give more background on the development of an integrated circuit than most will ever need to know. And not everyone will relate to Lowell when he wins battles with his two great adversaries, labor unions and the press, just in time for a vacation in Paris. Hints are dropped throughout that Lowell’s health may be failing, but he winds up fully vindicated both as a business visionary and a family man.
Because Eisner is himself a former engineering executive who ran a Boston company similar to Electronic Technologies, it’s perhaps too easy to assume that this book is partly a memoir. But in either case, it never quite crosses the line that divides a compelling novel from a vanity project.Pub Date: Feb. 15, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-57962-312-8
Page Count: 341
Publisher: Permanent Press
Review Posted Online: Dec. 2, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2012
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
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
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