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.

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