Chief Reviewer
- Posts 6257
- Location Nullibiety
- WRZ$
339222.60
Turn of the Century by Kurt Andersen (May 1999)
Requirements: ePUB Reader | 2.85 Mb
Overview: As big and exciting as the next century, this is a novel of real life at our giddy, feverish, topsy-turvy edge of the millennium. Turn of the Century is a good old-fashioned novel about the day after tomorrow -- an uproarious, exquisitely observed panorama of our world as the twentieth century morphs into the twenty-first, transforming family, marriage, and friendship and propelled by the supercharged global businesses and new technologies that make everyone's lives shake and spin a little faster.
As the year 2000 progresses, George Mactier and Lizzie Zimbalist, ten years married, are caught up in the whirl of their centrifugally accelerating lives. George is a TV producer for the upstart network MBC, launching a truly and weirdly groundbreaking new show that blurs the line between fact and fiction. Lizzie is a software entrepreneur dealing with the breakneck pleasures and pains of running her own company in an industry where the rules are rewritten daily. Rocketing between Los Angeles and Seattle, with occasional stopovers at home in Manhattan for tag-team parenting of their three children, George and Lizzie are the kind of business-people who, growing up in the sixties and seventies, never dreamed they would end up in business. They're too busy to spend the money that's rolling in and too smart not to feel ambivalent about their crazed, high-gloss existences, but nothing seems to slow the roller-coaster momentum of their intersecting lives and careers.
However, after Lizzie, recovering from a Microsoft deal gone awry, becomes a confidante and adviser to George's boss, billionaire media mogul Harold Mose, the couple discovers that no amount of sophisticated spin can obscure basic instincts: envy, greed, suspicion, sexual temptation--and, maybe, love. When they and their children are finally drawn into a thrilling, high-tech corporate hoax that sends Wall Street reeling (and makes one person very, very rich), George and Lizzie can only marvel at life's oversized surprises and hold on for dear life.
Like Tom Wolfe's Bonfire of the Vanities, Kurt Andersen's Turn of the Century lays bare the follies of our age with laser-beam precision, creating memorable characters and dissecting the ways we think, speak, and navigate this new era of extreme capitalism and mind-boggling technology. Entertaining, imaginative, knowing, and wise, Turn of the Century is a richly plotted comedy of manners about the way we live now.
Genre: Fiction, Literary, Satire
Download Instructions:
Hulkload
Mirror:
Uploadrar
Requirements: ePUB Reader | 2.85 Mb
Overview: As big and exciting as the next century, this is a novel of real life at our giddy, feverish, topsy-turvy edge of the millennium. Turn of the Century is a good old-fashioned novel about the day after tomorrow -- an uproarious, exquisitely observed panorama of our world as the twentieth century morphs into the twenty-first, transforming family, marriage, and friendship and propelled by the supercharged global businesses and new technologies that make everyone's lives shake and spin a little faster.
As the year 2000 progresses, George Mactier and Lizzie Zimbalist, ten years married, are caught up in the whirl of their centrifugally accelerating lives. George is a TV producer for the upstart network MBC, launching a truly and weirdly groundbreaking new show that blurs the line between fact and fiction. Lizzie is a software entrepreneur dealing with the breakneck pleasures and pains of running her own company in an industry where the rules are rewritten daily. Rocketing between Los Angeles and Seattle, with occasional stopovers at home in Manhattan for tag-team parenting of their three children, George and Lizzie are the kind of business-people who, growing up in the sixties and seventies, never dreamed they would end up in business. They're too busy to spend the money that's rolling in and too smart not to feel ambivalent about their crazed, high-gloss existences, but nothing seems to slow the roller-coaster momentum of their intersecting lives and careers.
However, after Lizzie, recovering from a Microsoft deal gone awry, becomes a confidante and adviser to George's boss, billionaire media mogul Harold Mose, the couple discovers that no amount of sophisticated spin can obscure basic instincts: envy, greed, suspicion, sexual temptation--and, maybe, love. When they and their children are finally drawn into a thrilling, high-tech corporate hoax that sends Wall Street reeling (and makes one person very, very rich), George and Lizzie can only marvel at life's oversized surprises and hold on for dear life.
Like Tom Wolfe's Bonfire of the Vanities, Kurt Andersen's Turn of the Century lays bare the follies of our age with laser-beam precision, creating memorable characters and dissecting the ways we think, speak, and navigate this new era of extreme capitalism and mind-boggling technology. Entertaining, imaginative, knowing, and wise, Turn of the Century is a richly plotted comedy of manners about the way we live now.
Genre: Fiction, Literary, Satire
"If you're not computer-literate and don't read People magazine, you may miss some of the jokes, but will nevertheless probably enjoy this gargantuan (Tom) Wolfe-ian satire on millennial hucksterism - the first novel from a well-known New Yorker nonfiction writer. It's the story of a high-powered Manhattan post-yuppie couple's mutual and separate rises and falls during the watershed year 2000. He is George MacTier, the TV producer who hit it big with the virtual reality-oriented series NARCS (whose coup episode featured the real arrest of a genuine drug dealer), and is currently developing Real Time, a news show engineered to connect the outside world with its audience's personal lives (network execs having decided that 'politics is death among the under-50s'). She is Lizzie Zimbalist, whose thriving computer software company has attracted the interest of Microsoft, which is attempting a buyout. The (increasingly byzantine) details of Lizzie's and George's struggles to stay ahead of the sharks (and not step on each other's feet) in the high-pressure new century are juxtaposed against a generous bonanza of comic near-future concepts and particulars. Lizzie's father becomes a candidate for the first ''inter-species transplantation'' (he's to receive a pig's liver). Health-conscious smokers prefer 'American Spirit organic cigarettes,' and kiddies munch on 'Endangered Animal Crackers.' George Stephanopoulos hosts his own show. Michael Milken has become 'the richest and most respected criminal in America,' and Charles Manson's parole hearings are broadcast live. The gags keep coming as Andersen's preposterous plot lurches into dizzying overdrive, bringing Lizzie and George into regretful conflict, and ending with a neat surprise: a bizarre underwater accident seems to have altered Microsoft's plans . . . it's too good to give away. If Terry Southern had lived to see (or even imagine) the coming century, this is the novel he might have concocted. It's enormously overlong, and neither Al Gore nor Bill Gates will approve. The rest of us, however, will be, as they say, richly entertained.." ~Kirkus, Starred Review
Download Instructions:
Hulkload
Mirror:
Uploadrar
