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    A Friend of the Earth
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    A Friend of the Earth
    Unavailable
    A Friend of the Earth
    Audiobook12 hours

    A Friend of the Earth

    Written by T.C. Boyle

    Narrated by Scott Brick

    3.5/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this audiobook

    A Friend of the Earth opens in the year 2025, as Tyrone O'Shaughnessy Tidewater ekes out a bleak living in southern California, managing a rock star's private menagerie. Global warming is a reality. The biosphere has collapsed and most of the major mammalian species are extinct. Once Ty was so seriously committed to environmental causes that he became an ecoterrorist and convicted felon. Once he unwittingly endangered both his daughter, Sierra, and his wife, Andrea. Now when he's just trying to survive, Andrea comes back into his life. What happens as the two slip into a reborn involvement makes for a gripping and topical story told in Boyle's uniquely funny and serious voice.

    "America's most imaginative contemporary novelist blends idealism and satire in a story that addresses the ultimate question of human love and the survival of the species."-Newsweek

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPenguin Random House Audio
    Release dateAug 18, 2000
    ISBN9781415910757
    Unavailable
    A Friend of the Earth
    Author

    T.C. Boyle

    T.C. Boyle is an American novelist and short-story writer. Since the mid-1970s, he has published eighteen novels and twelve collections of short stories. He won the PEN/Faulkner Award in 1988 for his third novel, World’s End, and the Prix Médicis étranger (France) in 1995 for The Tortilla Curtain. His novel Drop City was a finalist for the 2003 National Book Award. Most recently, he has been the recipient of the Mark Twain American Voice in Literature Award, the Henry David Thoreau Prize, and the Jonathan Swift Prize for satire. He is a Distinguished Professor of English Emeritus at the University of Southern California and lives in Santa Barbara.

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    Reviews for A Friend of the Earth

    3.5/5

    201 ratings13 reviews

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    • 3/5
      Bleak and strange. Boyle hammers his message a lot more than usual in this book. Probably because environmental disaster is one of his hobby horses. I didn't understand what the payoff was supposed to be for this one since from the start things have a foregone conclusion. The story takes place in a near future "present" where global warming as killed off pretty much everything and most areas of the world are uninhabitable. That's the given. Then it flashes back to the 80s and 90s, but there really isn't a moment when everything changes. We aren't privy to the disaster just its lead up and aftermath. All the characters are hapless, doomed or both and it wasn't a good time.
    • 4/5
      A great read. And as time passes, the more accurate Boyle's vision of the future becomes!
    • 3/5
      Here's the truth: I HATE the cover of this book. As in, HATE, to the point where it was tempting to tear it off and throw it away, and I rather wish I had, but for the fact that that would have made the book difficult to give away. And I don't always pay attention to covers. I've never hated one, certainly. But this one? Yeah--I hate it. Maybe that shouldn't matter--it probably shouldn't, I suppose--but it does. This book literally sat on my shelf, traveling with me for five or six moves over the course of about a decade because, as much as it sounded like something that I would love... I kept on putting it back on the shelf when I thought about the prospect of seeing its cover, day in and day out, for however long I'd be reading it. And while reading it, over the past week and a half, I did my best to keep it facing down so that I could do my best to ignore the cover One way or another, it influences me, and seeing it in the corner of the page as I write this review makes it impossible to ignore.So, does that edge down my review? It might. Did that make me skeptical or set my sights higher as I entered the book? Maybe so. Probably so. But the book was a gift, and the person who gave it to me was right in thinking I'd enjoy the story. If it were up to me, the cover would have kept me from buying it.Why am I harping on this? Well, because it colors how I feel about the book, unavoidably.I did enjoy Boyle's writing here, and I enjoyed the story, once I got into it (which took quite a while, I have to admit). The jumping from past to present, and back again, is effective, even if it doesn't necessarily add suspense. I'm anxious to read more of his work, truth be told. But at the same time, there's a really certain cynicism here that turned me off, and the cover is just a sign of it. The main character's voice is so cynical, in fact, that I found it almost impossible to engage with him--I was interested, on some level, but more out of curiosity than sympathy. And this was a character that, truly, I should have loved and been heartbroken by. But I wasn't. And the pessimism compelling the book forward, soaking the paragraphs, made it a less than enjoyable read. As a result, I'm not actually sure who I'd recommend this to, short of English students or academics looking for a particular type of read. Even now, I'm not really sure how I feel about it. And I probably could have walked away from it for weeks on end... if I hadn't been desperate to finish it so that I could never look at the cover again.All told, I'm anxious to read more of Boyle's work. I'm not sure that reading this one, though, was worth dealing with the cover.
    • 4/5
      Written in 2000, and set alternately in the prior decade and in a moderately dystopian 2025, this seems classic Boyle, having read Drop City. The colorful, eco-terroristic Ty Tierwater is our protagonist, and we relive his increasingly vengeful acts of sabotage, aimed as much at authority in general as toward the loggers and exploiters that his environmental group targets. Despite frequent jail time, he keeps a loving relationship with his daughter, whose own fanaticism leads to her death in later years. The future setting has Tierwater managing a Michael Jackson-like animal sanctuary on the central California coast, as the climate has gone haywire (torrential blowing rains, extreme heat), and lions and hyenas are herded into the pop king's mansion to escape an especially dire flood. Mayhem ensues, of course. In the end, the "young-old" Tierwater and his reunited ex-wife seek refuge in an abandoned old friend's cabin in the tree-scoured Sierra, Petunia the Patagonian fox in tow. Fun, maybe a bit depressing.
    • 3/5
      "A Friend of the Earth" is a novel that alternates in time between the near-present and about twenty-five years in the future, when the worst nightmares of the environmental movement have come to pass. Global warming has turned Southern California into a terrible place to live; violent storms alternate with 130 degree days. The central character, an "eco-terrorist", works to maintain a menagerie that includes the last examples of some of the exotic species of the world, including the last lions. He spends his off-hours sabotaging logging activities and development projects. Some parts of the book are amusing if savage satires, but I found the overall effect to be rather depressing. Boyle reminds us that, while it is possible to find a bright spot here and there in the battle for the environment, the bigger picture includes the pressure of populations and the growing certainty that we will have to cope with the effects of global warming. I became familiar with Boyle when I read his "Road To Wellville", a fictionalization of the bizarre diets and health manias of the early 20th century.
    • 3/5
      Please don't read unless you want to become bonecrushingly depressed. There is an apocalypse because of global warming. Terrible.
    • 4/5
      Boyle again succeeds with a fast-paced ecological nightmare of a novel. In the globally warmed ruined near future Ty Tierwater is one of the "young old" trying to save the last of the animals and remembering his eventful (and jinxed!) life as an eco-terrorist. -very cool and often heartbreaking
    • 5/5
      Boyle's prose rings like poetry. Reading it was like savoring a piece of candy, each word brought something new. Its rare to find writing like this anymore. The story itself was engaging about a family of eco-saboteurs on a renegade mission to save the planet. Or at least as much of it as they possibly could. Highly recommended.
    • 4/5
      It is 2025 and Ty Tierwater is the manager of a private menagerie of some of the last surviving animals in the world. The world has been devastated global warming, floods and winds. Out of the blue, Ty’s ex-wife Andrea turns up and Ty tells the story of his previous life as a notorious eco-warrior.The story moves between 2025 written in the first person from Ty’s perspectives, to the past (late 80s and 90s) told in the third person. This changing perspective is a technique Boyle does well and here was no exception.Some reviews have criticised it for being too preachy, but I didn't find that at all. The actions of the environmentalists are shown to have been pointless and their motivations at times questionable. It is also as much a story about loss and family, which was much more moving than the environmental aspect.Rather a bleak depiction of the future, but a good read nonetheless.
    • 5/5
      Read this before Drop City and thought it would have been a better follow up. I loved the characters in this, as well as who/what they represented to me as I was reading this. Hopefully this is not what we are looking forward to, but in the end, Ty perseveres with a here and now attitude that can be describes as a cross between acceptance and buddhism.
    • 5/5
      Semi-dark and satirical humor, but maybe with a message, maybe not. Boyle's typical will shoot their own leg off--all the while you and ever other character in the book can see it coming from a mile away--and yet somehow these characters are sympathetic.
    • 5/5
      If I could I'd give this book six stars! I was blown away by this novel. It's dark depiction of our future living on an environmentally devastated planet - where the rain is persistent, an image not easily forgotten - is frightening and I'm afraid not that far off the mark. The language is rich and the plot is engaging. This is the first T.C. Boyle book I have read, but it most certainly won't be the last.
    • 2/5
      One of his disappointing books. A short-story stretched.