March 2018 Book, A Hologram for the King

Alan Clay is a consultant. He started off as a door-to-door salesman and worked his way up through Schwinn bikes, the Chicago manufacturer. In the traditional way of such characters, he's facing an existential-type crisis. He's divorced, he drinks too much, and the recession has worn down his earnings to practically nothing. He's "virtually broke, nearly unemployed", and he won't be able to pay his daughter's college fees unless he can pull off one more big job. Reliant, a huge conglomerate, has sent him to Jeddah to pitch for the IT infrastructure contract for King Abdullah Economic City ("KAEC"), a massive new development in the middle of nowhere. Alan and his colleagues hope to impress the king by showing him a cutting-edge holographic teleconferencing system, which can make a colleague in London appear in 3D in a tent in Saudi Arabia.

 Alan and his team wait in the stiflingly hot "presentation tent" in the desert to pitch to King Abdullah who, Godot-like, refuses to show. A Hologram for the King treads lightly and elegantly, considering its weighty subject matter: globalization and its discontents, the downsizing and outsourcing of the American dream, real people lost in an increasingly virtual world.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

March 2024 Book, American Dialogue: The Founders and Us

Image
  Talk About Books meets every third Wednesday of the month at 6:30 at Guilford Free Library.    In American Dialogue, Ellis divides four chapters into two parts each: Then and Now.  Each chapter focuses on what he identifies as four enduring issues that are more salient and challenging in the first quarter of the twenty-first century. Ellis establishes the historical foundation for each subject and then examines the complexity of each in the context of a divisive political climate complicated by domestic and international obstacles.  Acknowledging that a true conversation with the founders is obviously impossible, he attempts to connect their concerns regarding these controversial topics with those of modern America. Hence, his use of the term dialogue in his title.  The four areas he identifies are race, equality, law, and foreign policy. In each case, Ellis chooses one member of the founding generation as the central figure with whom to engage...
Read more
Image
 Talk About Books meets every third Wednesday of the month at 6:30 at Guilford Free Library. It's 1932, a time of hardship, adversity, and despair. Especially at the Lincoln Indian Training School, formerly a military outpost called Fort Sibley. It's a place where Indian children who have been taken from their families are sent so they can be educated in the ways of the white world. But it's really a place meant to obliterate every trace of their Indianness, by force if necessary. Odie O'Banion and his older brother Albert, orphans, are the only two white boys in the school. The opening pages describe their time in the school's quiet room, what used to be the military's solitary confinement cell. Odie tells the story from the viewpoint of his younger self: "The night was moonless, the tiny cell as black as pitch, our bed a thin matting of straw laid on the dirt floor, the door a great rectangle of rusted iron with a slot at the bottom for the de...
Read more