( 5 reviews )
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( 0 of 1 found this review helpful ) Posted: Sep 25 2005
A dismal read. No wonder the book is a financial flop. I got it for 75 cents but I should have waited, I see some places have it for a penny. A penny! Now THAT would've been a deal!
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( 0 of 4 found this review helpful ) Posted: Sep 15 2004
A slightly off kilter book about how the media is the message. Our hero Greg Bender is impossible to like as is all the characters. Their vulgarity has become so integrated in their personalities, that they think they are normal. Sometimes Blinn goes off on his own surveillance mission, trying to define what is real, and if it stays real and truthful after it's processed through the media, and its transmission devices. This occurs every ten pages or so. Of course, in reality, nothing really changes unless the humans who handle the media and its devices intentionally distort the story, creating lies to sell copy. Contrary to Blinn's view it is not the machines that are the culprit, but as always, man. I also find it difficult to believe that an enlisted person, with only a high school education waxing so philosophical, reaching out to Baudrillard, Sartre or Chomsky; trying to "find meaning in the chaos of life," that's just too much. There are a few funny musings, that give you a "ha!." The book was purchased from the extreme discount area of the bookstore.
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( 1 of 7 found this review helpful ) Posted: May 14 2001
Though it is not as good as "Catch-22", this novel sparkles with sassy dialogue, military argot and flashy gadgets, becoming, in the process, an authentic account of the technologised conflict which was the Gulf War. It implies how, in the light of how life today is dominated by digital satellite technology, camcorders and computers, everyone has assumed the role of voyeur. The anonymous narrator is a recruit enlisted to fight in the "hyperral" Gulf War crisis, in which, by virtue of the hi-tech surveillance equipment employed, the perception of a thing becomes a way of "manipulating" it. The book is stuffed with borrowings from such postmodern epigones as Baudrillard, and is far more philosophically complex than one might expect, though redeemed also by its irreverent humour.
