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Library | Collection | Collection | Call Number | Status |
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Searching... Beale Memorial Library (Kern Co.) | Searching... Unknown | Science Fiction | SCI FIC DOCTOROW COR | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... Fresno Central Library (Fresno Co.) | Searching... Unknown | Science Fiction Area | D6591co-ea | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... Porterville Public Library (Porterville) | Searching... Unknown | Science Fiction Area | DOCTOROW | Searching... Unknown |
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Summary
Summary
Art is a member of the Eastern Standard Tribe, a secret society bound together by a sleep schedule. Around the world, those who wake and sleep on East Coast time find common cause with one another, cooperating, conspiring, to help each other out, coordinated by a global network of Wi-Fi, instant messaging, ubiquitous computing, and a shared love of Manhattan-style bagels.
Or perhaps not. Art is, after all, in the nuthouse. He was put there by a conspiracy of his friends and loved ones, fellow travelers from EST hidden in the bowels of Greenwich Mean Time, spies masquerading as management consultants who strive to mire Europe in oatmeal-thick bureaucracy.
Eastern Standard Tribe is a story of madness and betrayal, of society after the End of Geography, of the intangible factors that define us as a species, as a tribe, as individuals. Scathing, bitter, and funny, EST examines the immutable truths of time, of sunrise and sunset of societies smashed and rebuilt in the storm of instant, ubiquitous communication.
Author Notes
Writer and activist Cory Doctorow was born in Toronto, Canada on July 17, 1971. In 1999 he co-founded a free software company called Opencola and served as Canadian Regional Director of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America. For four years he worked as European Affairs Coordinator for the Electronic Frontier Foundation and in 2007 won its Pioneer Award. His first novel, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, won a Locus Award for Best First Novel. His short story collection A Place So Foreign and Eight More won a Sunburst Award, and his bestselling novel Little Brother received the 2009 Prometheus Award, a Sunburst Award, and the John W. Campbell Memorial Award. Doctorow also writes nonfiction books and articles, and he co-edits the blog Boing Boing.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (3)
Publisher's Weekly Review
John W. Campbell Award-winner Doctorow lives up to the promise of his first novel, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom (2003), with this near-future, far-out blast against human duplicity and smothering bureaucracy. Even though it takes a while for the reader to grasp postcyberpunk Art Berry's dizzying leaps between his "now," a scathing 2012 urban nuthouse, and his "then," the slightly earlier events that got him incarcerated there, this short novel's occasionally bitter, sometimes hilarious and always whackily appealing protagonist consistently skewers those evils of modern culture he holds most pernicious. A born-to-argue misfit like all kids who live online, Art has found peers in cyber space who share his unpopular views specifically his preference for living on Eastern Standard Time no matter where he happens to live and work. In this unsettling world, e-mails filled with arcane in-jokes bind competitive "tribes" that choose to function in one arbitrary time or another. Swinging from intense highs (his innovative marketing scheme promises to impress his tribe and make him rich) to maudlin lows (isolation in a scarily credible loony bin), Art gradually learns that his girl, Linda, and his friend Fede are up to no good. In the first chapter, Doctorow's authorial voice calls this book a work of propaganda, a morality play about the fearful choice everybody makes sooner or later between smarts and happiness. He may be more right than we'd like to think. (Mar. 9) Forecast: A blurb from William Gibson, plus Doctorow's position as co-editor of the Web log "Boing Boing" at www.boingboing.net, will help fuel the word of mouth. (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Booklist Review
Art belongs to the Eastern Standard Tribe, which is linked by its members' circadian rhythms to a time zone in a world in which human loyalties are no longer contingent to physical proximity. Art and his friend Fede are EST agents in Greenwich Mean Time, working for Virgin/Deutsche Telecom and thinking up ways to mire Europe in ridiculous bureaucratic tangles. Art also has something clever to sell to Newersey: a way to siphon profits from music pirates on the toll roads. Fede, and Art's lover, Pacific time-zone transplant Linda, double-cross him, though, upsetting everything he thought he knew about tribal loyalty. Declared insane and locked safely away from Fede and Linda's machinations in an asylum on Route 128 in Massachusetts, Art tells us his story. Doctorow's fast, bizarre follow-up to Down and Out in the Magicingdom BKLa 1 & 15 03 is a reaction to the impact of instant global communication in which it is hard to tell whether the phenomena being reacted to have actually been observed or are the consequences of his imagination. --Regina Schroeder Copyright 2004 Booklist
Library Journal Review
As a member of the Eastern Standard Tribe, Art Berry keeps in touch with others who live by the same timetable, regardless of their physical location. When his best friend and lover conspire to steal his business ideas, he finds himself committed to a mental institution with only his belief in himself and his "tribe" to rely upon for rescue. Doctorow's easy-going storytelling belies the rapid-fire pacing of his tale of one man caught in a nightmare of time zones and technology. Combining near-future suspense with magical realism, the author of Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom crafts a surrealistic parable of progress gone wrong that belongs in most sf collections. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.