Eastern standard tribe

Review by 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

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.

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Review by 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

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

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Review by 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.

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

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1 I once had a Tai Chi instructor who explained the difference between Chinese and Western medicine thus: "Western medicine is based on corpses, things that you discover by cutting up dead bodies and pulling them apart. Chinese medicine is based on living flesh, things observed from vital, moving humans." The explanation, like all good propaganda, is stirring and stilted, and not particularly accurate, and gummy as the hook from a top-40 song, sticky in your mind in the sleep-deprived noontime when the world takes on a hallucinatory hyperreal clarity. Like now as I sit here in my underwear on the roof of a sanatorium in the backwoods off Route 128, far enough from the perpetual construction of Boston that it's merely a cloud of dust like a herd of distant buffalo charging the plains. Like now as I sit here with a pencil up my nose, thinking about homebrew lobotomies and wouldn't it be nice if I gave myself one. Deep breath. The difference between Chinese medicine and Western medicine is the dissection versus the observation of the thing in motion. The difference between reading a story and studying a story is the difference between living the story and killing the story and looking at its guts. School! We sat in English class and we dissected the stories that I'd escaped into, laid open their abdomens and tagged their organs, covered their genitals with polite, sterile drapes, recorded dutiful notes en masse that told us what the story was about, but never what the story was . Stories are propaganda, virii that slide past your critical immune system and insert themselves directly into your emotions. Kill them and cut them open and they're as naked as a nightclub in daylight. The theme. The first step in dissecting a story is euthanizing it: "What is the theme of this story?" Let me kill my story before I start it, so that I can dissect it and understand it. The theme of this story is: "Would you rather be smart or happy?" This is a work of propaganda. It's a story about choosing smarts over happiness. Except if I give the pencil a push: then it's a story about choosing happiness over smarts. It's a morality play, and the first character is about to take the stage. He's a foil for the theme, so he's drawn in simple lines. Here he is: Copyright © 2004 by Cory Doctorow Excerpted from Eastern Standard Tribe by Cory Doctorow All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

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