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Sto caricando le informazioni... Lightning Rods (2011)di Helen DeWitt
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Iscriviti per consentire a LibraryThing di scoprire se ti piacerà questo libro. Attualmente non vi sono conversazioni su questo libro. Disappointing. It's a satirical work about an entrepreneur's perverse business scheme to enhance the productivity of the high testosterone cowboys in the corporate America but the book just didn't add up to be that enjoyable. ( ) Interesting premise--"ideas man" sells service to businesses of providing staffing of female temps for anonymous deluxe glory-hole sex to relieve excess testosterone and lessen sexual harassment--very dryly realized. Mostly focused on corporate culture and marketing. Nice that the author delves into the logistics and details of arranging such a service in contemporary workplaces, but for every question or obstacle she addresses there are dozens more that come to mind that are ignored or dealt with glancingly. I listened to the audio book. I'm not sure how to sum up the experience. I think the author wrote a funny book that includes slews of salesman (sic) self improvement tropes. It is provoking and pointed particularly now during the Me Too era. It's also significantly dated - office workers, office jobs and office technology are all in different places thank the gods.
Lightning Rods [is] a grim commentary on how America’s vast intellectual capital is largely misspent enabling and correcting corporate excesses, and suggests a warning to would-be corporate caricaturists: with the headlines growing ever more absurd in a post-Enron, post-TARP era, satirists need a very long blade to outdo corporate America’s ability to inflict indignity upon itself. DeWitt has given us a worthy satire of this logic and an interesting exploration of gender, but one feels that she did not go quite far enough. DeWitt, whose interest in languages was apparent in “The Last Samurai,” has adopted here the idiom of America’s pragmatic temper, and the story of Joe and his business plan shows how a fetish for common sense can make for silly, sleazy extremes. The basic premise for “Lightning Rods” is so audacious that it might be hard to get past its general conceit, but its true brilliance lies in DeWitt’s careful deployment of language so common that we no longer see it. As any million-dollar litigation lawyer or two-cent literary critic will tell you, the devil is in the details. Lightning Rods is no more “about” sexual tension in the workplace than A Tale of a Tub is about the tub. But if Joe’s “Lightning Rods” are the vehicle, what is the tenor? What, exactly, is being skewered? By the end of the book, the answer, wonderfully, seems to be “everything”: bureaucracy, sexual politics, the objectification of the female body, the sanctification of same, political correctness, political incorrectness, etiquette, boorishness, ambition, laziness, late capitalism, and even logic itself.... It is, by design, a minor work.... But it so emphatically aces the tasks it sets for itself, and delivers such a jolt of pleasure along the way, that it reminds me of just how major a minor work can be. I wish the other leading American novelists would produce more books in this vein. Appartiene alle Collane EditorialiPremi e riconoscimenti
Joe fails to sell a single Electrolux and must eat hundreds of pieces of homemade pie, served up by his would-be customers who feel so sorry for him. Holed up in his trailer, Joe finds an outlet his for frustrations in a series of ingenious sexual fantasies, and at last strikes gold. His brain storm, Lightning Rods, Inc., will take Joe to the very top, and to the very heart of corporate insanity, with an outrageous solution to the specter of sexual harassment in the modern office. Non sono state trovate descrizioni di biblioteche |
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Google Books — Sto caricando le informazioni... GeneriSistema Decimale Melvil (DDC)813.54Literature English (North America) American fiction 20th Century 1945-1999Classificazione LCVotoMedia:
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