Whiskey tango foxtrot

David Shafer

Book - 2014

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FICTION/Shafer, David
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Subjects
Genres
Suspense fiction
Published
New York : Mulholland Books 2014.
Language
English
Main Author
David Shafer (-)
Edition
First edition
Physical Description
425 pages ; 25 cm
ISBN
9780316252638
Contents unavailable.
Review by New York Times Review

ELEPHANT COMPANY: The Inspiring Story of an Unlikely Hero and the Animals Who Helped Him Save Lives in World War II, by Vicki Constantine Croke. (Random House, $17.) In 1920, Billy Williams arrived in colonial Burma to work for a British teak company, and quickly discovered a preternatural kinship with elephants. When World War II reached Asia, Williams harnessed the animals' power and joined the effort, transporting refugees and supplies across dangerous boundaries. Croke's tale is a bright spot of compassion amid the brutality of war. THE ORCHARD OF LOST SOULS, by Nadifa Mohamed. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $17.) This novel details the Somali dictatorship of the late 1980s, a government, Mohamed writes, that "needs women to make it seem human." She adds nuance to Somalia's bleak political realities through the interwoven lives of three female characters: Kawsar, a wealthy widow; Deqo, a girl born in a refugee camp and abandoned by her mother; and Filsan, a soldier deeply loyal to the regime. PROOF: The Science of Booze, by Adam Rogers. (Mariner/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $15.95.) Rogers, an editor at Wired, makes sense of the chemistry of alcohol, from fermentation and aging processes to the science of hangovers. His enthusiastic account, which sprang from his own "perfect bar moments," takes readers into distilleries and genesequencing labs, and untangles the psychology of drinking. PAPER LANTERN: Love Stories, by Stuart Dybek. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $14.) Dybek writes nimbly about all aspects of love in this collection. In the title story, after a fire destroys a lab's prototype for a time machine, the narrative jogs back to revisit a relationship that came to an explosive end. SCALIA: A Court of One, by Bruce Allen Murphy. (Simon & Schuster, $20.) Few Supreme Court judges have shared the public profile of Justice Antonin Scalia, a veteran of the court's right. This biography by Murphy (above) is a thorough consideration of Scalia's development, gathering insight from interviews, dissents and speeches. Despite his tremendous intellectual and persuasive capacities, Murphy argues, Scalia's greatest handicap is his history of alienating would-be allies. LOVE ME BACK, by Merritt Tierce. (Anchor, $15.95.) This debut novel follows Marie, a young waitress at an upscale restaurant with potent self-destructive impulses. A single mother but alienated from her child, she pursues degrading sexual relationships and other outlets for her self-loathing. Through Marie's story, Tierce probes "the great mystery of our species' immense propensity for cruelty and suffering," our reviewer, Paula Bomer, wrote.

Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [July 12, 2015]
Review by Booklist Review

Three disparate persons briefly tagged Whiskey, Tango, and Foxtrot are drawn together to thwart an electronic coup aimed at controlling all of the world's information. Leila Majnoun is working for an NGO in Myanmar when she e-mails her network about seeing fishy activity in a remote area; soon her school-principal father is the victim of a vicious smear attack. Leo Crane, a child of privilege prone to addiction and mental illness, is thought delusional when he blogs about the evil work of digital-search-and-storage conglomerate SineCo. Mark Deveraux, author of a vacuous self-help management book (containing allusions to Leo, his close friend from college days), advises James Straw, SineCo founder and a key member of the Committee, the cabal planning the coup. This intriguing debut tells a frighteningly plausible story, but does so with a good bit of humor. A writer to watch.--Leber, Michele Copyright 2014 Booklist

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

Journalist Shafer hits all the right buttons in his debut as he mixes crime fiction, espionage, and SF in a darkly comic novel about paranoia and big business. A battle for control over all the information in the world has begun. The Committee, an international organization comprising industry and media leaders, has plans to privatize the news, the publishing industry, and all other social media. Dear Diary, an online movement, has set itself up as a formidable enemy of the Committee, using politics, spy craft, and technology to thwart its initiatives. Caught up in this war are Leila Majnoun, a disaffected nonprofit worker; Leo Crane, an unorthodox kindergarten teacher who lives off a modest trust fund; and Mark Deveraux, a drug addict who inadvertently becomes a bogus self-help guru and appears to work for the Committee. At times convoluted but never slack, the plot thrives on a realistic approach while seamlessly switching between such locales as Myanmar, London, and Oregon. The Committee's takeover of the Internet, its ability to change words as they are being typed, and its targeting of enemies' family members evokes a chilling, Orwellian society. Agent: Grainne Fox, Fletcher & Co. (Aug.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review

While working in Burma, Leila stumbles upon a secret that leads a quasigovernmental agency to target her job, her family, and her freedom. She seeks the help of an underground network to help sort out the tangled mess but gets drawn deeper into a stranger world than she ever imagined. Leo, suffering the deepest manic-depressive bout of his life, has allowed his paranoia to run wild. Concerned for his well-being, Leo's sisters stage an intervention, but he quickly discovers that in his case, the paranoia might be well founded. Mark is baffled to find himself a famous self-help guru after his hastily written manifesto becomes an international best seller. Now the personal life coach to one of the most powerful men in the world, Mark soon learns that the seedy underbelly of conspiracy lies nearer than he thought. As their paths converge, Leila, Leo, and Mark join the Dear Diary network to combat "The Committee," and fight a secret coup seeking to privatize all information, worldwide. VERDICT Fast paced, fascinating, suspenseful, and paranoid, this is a darkly funny debut. Aptly named, the novel leads each of the characters, as well as the reader, even as they race ahead to the final climax, to wonder "wtf?" [See "Summer Best Debuts," First Novels, LJ 7/14, p. 32. Ed.] Jennifer Beach, Cumberland Cty. P.L., VA (c) Copyright 2014. 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.
Review by Kirkus Book Review

A droll, all-too-plausible contemporary thriller pulls a mismatched trio of stressed-out 30-somethings into underground guerilla warfare against a sinister conspiracy to own the information superhighway.On one side of the world, you have Leila Majnoun, an increasingly jaded operative for a global nonprofit agency struggling to do good deeds despite the brutal, stonewalling autocrats who run Myanmar (Burma). On another side is Mark Deveraux, a self-loathing self-improvement guru living a glamorous and debt-ridden lifestyle in the promised land of Brooklyn. Somewhere in the middle (Portland, Oregon, to be precise) is Marks old school chum Leo Crane, a misanthropic poor-little-rich-kid grown into a trouble-prone, substance-abusing and seedily paranoid adult. The destinies of these three lost souls are somehow yoked together by an international cabal of one-percenters who want to create something called New Alexandria, where all the information available (or even unavailable) online will be in their money-grubbing control, thereby making the recent real-life National Security Agency abuses of power seem like benign neglect. Shafers arch prose, comedic timing and deft feel for shadowy motives in high places are reminiscent of the late Richard Condon (The Manchurian Candidate), only with sweeter, deeper characterizations. At times, you wish hed move things along a wee bit faster and make his menace more tangibly scary than it is here. But its also possible that Shafer is remaking the international thriller into something more humane and thus more credible than what fans of the genre are accustomed to.An edgy, darkly comedic debut novel whose characters and premise are as up-to-the-minute as an online news feed but as classic as the counterculture rebellions once evoked by Edward Abbey and Ken Kesey. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.