Before I begin reviewing the book, I offer you a warning. I was told (by fellow blogger Dan) that this was not a good book, not even in the "so bad it's good" sense - just a plain bad book. I believed him to an extent, but I started reading it anyhow. And once I started, I just couldn't stop. I read it all the way through, and consider every moment of doing so to be wasted time. So I'm telling you the same thing - it's just simply not a good book. Please listen to the warning much more than I did.
Description of The Futurist, as found on back cover.
He once fired a man on Take Your Daughter to Work Day. He once was asked by the New York Times to write an Op-Ed piece on the death of literacy in America and had his assisstant ghostwrite it. He once began his week ringing the bell at the New York Stock Exchange and ended it giving a speech about the future of greed to a group of seminary students. He once took batting practice with the New York Mets, pretending not to notice the eight-year-old boy with leukemia from the Make-A-Wish Foundation whom the PR director let him cut in front of because he had a plane to catch. He once gave a rousing motivational talk at the base of a spouting fountain before the West Coast sales force of an erectile-dysfunction pharmaceutical maker.
Yates is a Futurist. Which is a fancy way of saying he flies around the world, lecturing various conferences, confabs, and conglomerates; dispensing prepackaged bullshit in an attempt to stay just ahead of the latest trend and claim he saw it first. But now Yates has lost faith in the very future that he's paid to sell and gives what should be a career-ending rant. Instead, a mysterious governmental group hires him to travel the globe and discover why the wotld seems to hate America.
From Middle Eastern war zones to Polynesian superluxe corporate retreats, James P. Othmer takes us on a mordantly hilarious journey through corporate double-speak and global unrest to find out the truth beneath the buzz.
Based solely on that description, it doesn't sound all that bad. Sure, Othmer is defying all conventional rules of grammar, but so am I. Obviously, "why the rest of the world hates America" should be at least fairly interesting to any Laurier Brantford student - but this is in fact an extremely minor point of the book. Furthermore, the book is actually set in the not-too-distant future (next Sunday A.D.), so it's not dealing with why the rest of the world hates America as much as it is why the rest of the world would hate America if certain scenarios played out.
Okay, well, how about the world travels? The Middle East, Polynesia, that doesn't sound too bad, right? Get an opporunity to read about some far-flung corners of the world? Well, what it doesn't tell you is that Yates (the protaganist) only visits three other locales - Iceland, Milan, and rural Pennsylvania.
Oh, what about that first paragraph? A man who is so hypocritical, so much of a sellout, that he will speak to any group of people for any occasion, and be well-received no matter what? That part of Yates never really comes up, except for more blurbs like the first paragraph there, which are contained at the beginning of every chapter.
It is not a book about the future. It is not a book about corporate evil, or governmental evil. It is not a love story. It is not a Tom Clancy-esque thriller. It is not a satire, at least not an effective one. However, it tries to contain all these elements and more - and fails miserably. To me, it seems as if Othmer had a great idea for a book (which, to be fair, it is), and didn't realize just how long a book has to be until it was far too late, so he fleshed it out as much as he could - losing any charm, wit, or intellect it might have had in the process.
One of the reviews quoted on the cover refers to The Futurist as a 'modern-day Candide'. Having read Candide, I can see three similarities:
- The main character travels the globe.
- Several characters, thought to be in distant places, far too isolated to play any further part in the story, make recurring appearances.
- It does not hold up well when compared to modern books.
Candide can get away with this last point, because it remains a remarkable work by the standards of Voltaire's day. However, The Futurist was first published in 2006 - a time in which one can find far better corporate satire by simply watching an episode of The Office, for example.
Do not read this book.
--Ryan
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