A Friend of the Earth

Author: T. C. Boyle, Scott Brick
Category: Fiction/Literature
ISBN: 9780141002057
Format : Paperback
Publisher : Penguin Group USA

Min Price: 1.00 Max Price: 15.00

In the year 2025, when global warming and the collapse of the biosphere have resulted in the extinction of most species, Tyrone O`Shaughnessy Tierwater is the caretaker for the strange menagerie of animals kept by a rock megastar in southern California. Years ago, Tyrone was a convicted ecoterrorist, estranged from his wife and daughter. Now his daughter, Sierra, re-enters his life. In a series of flashbacks to the 1980s and `90s, Ty`s romance with Sierra`s mother, their revolutionary activities, and his years on the lam are recounted.

A Friend of the Earth ( ISBN 9780141002057 )

Left Coast Books

Santa Barbara, CA, U.S.A.
Price : 5 USD
349 pp.; 20 cm. Near fine. Tight, clean copy. Light edgewear to wraps. "In the tradition of The Tortilla Curtain, T.C. Boyle blends idealism and satire in a story that addresses the universal questions of human love and the survival of the species. In the year 2025 global warming is a reality, the biosphere has collapsed, and 75-year-old environmentalist Ty Tierwater is eking out a living as care-taker of a pop star's private zoo when his second ex-wife re-enters his life. Both gritty and surreal, A Friend of the Earth represents a high-water mark in Boyle's career-his deep streak of social concern is effortlessly blended here with genuine compassion for his characters and the spirit of sheer exhilarating playfulness readers have come to expect from his work. / T. C. Boyle is the author of eleven novels, including World's End (winner of the PEN/FaulknerAward), Drop City (a New York Times bestseller and finalist for the National Book Award), and The Inner Circle. His most recent story collections are Tooth and Claw and The Human Fly and Other Stories." - Publisher.

A Friend of the Earth ( ISBN 9780141002057 )

Abraxus Books

Seattle, WA, U.S.A.
Price : 14 USD
First off, A Friend of the Earth represents both a return and a departure for me - a return, in that it focuses on the environmental themes. As the book opens, in 2025, our hero, Tyrone O'Shaughnessy Tierwater, baby boomer, ex-radical environmentalist, ex-con, ex-father, widower and divorce, is seventy-five and battling to stay afloat in the rising Social-Securityless waters of a meteorologically-challenged society. He is working as an animal keeper for a wealthy but faded rock star who maintains a menagerie of some of the last specimens of formerly wild ex-wife, Andrea Cotton, comes back into his life after a twenty-three year absence. He is reluctant to get involved, but intrigued too. He makes an assignation with her for that very night at Ahigetoshi Swenson's Catfish and Sushi House, where he regales her with the locally brewed sake (wine is a thing of the distant past) and the only sushi left available on this picked-over planet: catfish, tilapia, and the always-in-demand crappy roll. And so begins his new career and his newly kindled romance. Alternate chapters take us back to the past, where we see a younger Ty and Andrea in action as the driving wheels behind the radical environmental group, Earth Forever! We also delve into Ty's relationship with his daughter, Sierra, now famous as a "matyr to the trees." All of this is presented with satiric verve - this is a funny book, albeit on the most depressing possible topic.

A Friend of the Earth ( ISBN 9780141002057 )

WebBookStore

Pittsburgh, PA, U.S.A.
Price : 8 USD
Brand new, not a remainder, no marks. As published by Penguin Publishing Company: Riverhead Books Division. Paperback edition.368 pages. Book Size: Length: 7 inches, Width 4 Height inches 0.8 Inches. Book weight: 0.55 pounds. This book will require no additional postage. Orders processed on AbeBooks Monday - Friday and ships 6 days a week. Synopsis: If, as we are frequently cautioned, ecological collapse is imminent, the future might someday resemble T.C. Boyle's vision of Southern California, circa 2025: strafing wind, extortionate heat, vast species extinction, and a ramshackle, dispirited populace. A more bleak backdrop--part Blade Runner, part Silent Spring--for his eighth novel is difficult to imagine. But the ever-mischievous, ever-inventive Boyle is all too willing to disoblige; and so, in extended homage to early Vonnegut, his Sierra Club nightmare is rendered, well, comically. Toss in streaks of unabashed sentimentality, a scattershot satire, and several signature narrative ambushes, and A Friend of the Earth only further embellishes the already prodigious Boyle reputation. During the 1980s and '90s, Ty Tierwater had exchanged a sedately acquisitive existence--"the slow-rolling glacier of my old life, my criminal life, the life I led before I became a friend of the earth"--for a fairly ambivalent position on the front lines of an ecoterrorist posse called Earth Forever! The only complication is his dual penchant for empathy and ineptitude, exacerbated by a frustration that swells with accumulating incitements. After his daughter is taken from him, and his second wife, Andrea, becomes more committed to the cause than to their marriage, Ty finds solace in blind destruction. He serves his almost predictable terms in jail; he endures the eventual death--and martyrdom--of his activist daughter, Sierra. At 75, and a quarter of the way into the dismal and decayed 21st century, he unaccountably finds himself tending an eccentric rock star's private mini-zoo of ragged animals and wryly lamenting the collapse of his race. And then Andrea resurfaces--along with his long-fallow faith in love. Old Testament digression stalks Ty throughout A Friend of the Earth, from a publicity-stunt-cum-Edenic-retreat during his heady Earth Forever! days to a chaotic menagerie roundup amidst flooding rainfall. Boyle's future, however, is less apocalyptic than resigned, more drearily pragmatic than angst-ridden. It's a world Ty ultimately finds untenable: a constricted diversity, ecological or ideological, proves stultifying, a fact he only dimly recognized while awash in his earlier radicalism. "To be a friend of the earth," he avers in retrospect, "you have to be an enemy of the people." Boyle's spirited tale sustains the brashness of Ty's convictions. --Ben Guterson. 13 Digit ISBN number: 9780141002057. 10 Digit ISBN: 0141002050.

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