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
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.
A woman accused of shooting her husband six times in the face refuses to speak.
"Alicia Berenson was thirty-three years old when she killed her husband. They had been married for seven years. They were both artists—Alicia was a painter, and Gabriel was a well-known fashion photographer." Michaelides' debut is narrated in the voice of psychotherapist Theo Faber, who applies for a job at the institution where Alicia is incarcerated because he's fascinated with her case and believes he will be able to get her to talk. The narration of the increasingly unrealistic events that follow is interwoven with excerpts from Alicia's diary. Ah, yes, the old interwoven diary trick. When you read Alicia's diary you'll conclude the woman could well have been a novelist instead of a painter because it contains page after page of detailed dialogue, scenes, and conversations quite unlike those in any journal you've ever seen. " 'What's the matter?' 'I can't talk about it on the phone, I need to see you.' 'It's just—I'm not sure I can make it up to Cambridge at the minute.' 'I'll come to you. This afternoon. Okay?' Something in Paul's voice made me agree without thinking about it. He sounded desperate. 'Okay. Are you sure you can't tell me about it now?' 'I'll see you later.' Paul hung up." Wouldn't all this appear in a diary as "Paul wouldn't tell me what was wrong"? An even more improbable entry is the one that pins the tail on the killer. While much of the book is clumsy, contrived, and silly, it is while reading passages of the diary that one may actually find oneself laughing out loud.
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.Pub Date: Feb. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-30169-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 3, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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