A Friend of the Earth

T. C. Boyle

Paperback

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NATIONAL BESTSELLER - From the award-winning author of The Tortilla Curtain comes an "entertaining and informative" (Chicago Tribune) novel about global warming and ecological collapse.

"Funny and touching, antic and affecting . . . while Boyle's humor is as black as ever, he demonstrates that satire can coexist with psychological realism, comedy with compassion."--Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times

It is the year 2025. Global warming is a reality. The biosphere has collapsed, and most mammals--not to mention fish, birds, and frogs--are extinct. Tyrone Tierwater is eking out a bleak living in southern California, managing a pop star's private menagerie that "only a mother could love"--scruffy hyenas, jackals, warthogs, and three down-at-the-mouth lions.

It wasn't always like this for Ty. Once he was a passionate environmentalist, so committed to saving the earth that he became an eco-terrorist and, ultimately, a convicted felon. As a member of the radical group Earth Forever!, he unwittingly endangered both his daughter, Sierra, and his wife, Andrea. Now, just when he's trying to survive in a world torn by obdurate storms and winnowing drought, Andrea comes back into his life.

Blending idealism and satire, A Friend of the Earth addresses the ultimate questions of human love and the survival of the species.

Book Details

Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Publish Date: Sep 1st, 2001
Pages: 368
Language: English
Edition: undefined - undefined
Dimensions: 7.60in - 5.00in - 0.90in - 0.60lb
EAN: 9780141002057
Recommended age: 18-UP
Categories: • Satire• Literary• Humorous - General

About the Author

T. C. Boyle is a novelist and regular contributor to The New Yorker. His novels include World's End and The Tortilla Curtain, and he has also published numerous collections of short stories. A Distinguished Professor of English Emeritus at the University of Southern California, he lives in Santa Barbara.

Praise for this book

"As disaster tales go, this is a sly, hip one. . . . Boyle has always liked to play circus barker for life's extremes and what better freak show than the environmental apocalypse itself?"--The Washington Post

"Fiction about ecological disaster tends to be written in a tragic key. Boyle, by contrast, favors the darkly comic."--Elizabeth Kolbert, author of The Sixth Extinction

"Both entertaining and informative . . . hits like a warning shot from twenty-five years into the future."--Chicago Tribune

"A Friend of the Earth is about people and nature coming to terms with each other. In many ways it is a far more convincing argument for sustainable living in nature than any nonfiction environmental tract."--San Francisco Chronicle

"Boyle gives us a vivid, grim, hilarious portrait of our world . . . he has a marvelous gift for translating large-scale environmental scenarios into immediate, palpable terms . . . What gives A Friend of the Earth's comically dismal future its bite is how profoundly it is embedded in the present . . . Boyle's energetic prose achieves a fine balance between wacky comedy and serious reflection."--The San Diego Union-Tribune

"Ripped from tomorrow's headlines, the ecobiography of Tyrone Tierwater--failed monkeywrencher, ex-husband, ex-con, ex-zookeeper of the last Patagonian fox, and still-grieving father of the tree-dwelling Sierra, a twenty-first-century martyr to the redwoods."--Outside

"The story careens along with the breathless authority of a roller coaster . . . In A Friend of the Earth, Boyle sets himself a new challenge, swinging a leg wide to plant a foot solidly on new ground. Part antic comedy, part ecological intelligencer, part heartfelt plaint, it is a comic novel on grievous themes, a serious exploration of tragic truths. It not only marks Boyle's progress as a literary talent but demonstrates his consistent ability to entertain."--Los Angeles Times

"Boyle is still one of the most inventive and exhilerating novelists around, showing how you can drive a narrative and still have fun with language."--The Philadelphia Inquirer

"Boyle's wonderful writing is simultaneously wild, talky, and charming. If A Friend of the Earth is a provoker of conscience, it is also--and foremost--rich entertainment."--The Cleveland Plain Dealer