Rating: 
Summary: Dark Mockery of Environmentalists
Review: "To be a friend of the earth is to be an enemy to people" proclaims the narrator of Boyle's pointed new novel. He is Ty Tierwater, a self-proclaimed monkey-wrencher and follower of an Earth First!-inspired extreme environmental group. He relates his tragicomic life story in the year 2026; global warming has devastated the weather and led to the extinction of most of the species on earth. But Ty is only partially motivated by concern for the planet; is is also driven by savage misanthropy. Rage, born of early tragedies, fills his mind. Ty Tierwater is seduced by the environmentalist vision and then betrayed and destroyed by the people in the movement; he becomes a victim of fashionable elitists like the Japanese kid in Boyle's "East is East." His portrait of the greens is truly disturbing; he sees them as manipulative little '60's kids who never grew up and accepted adult respnsibilities. Ty's extremism costs him his teenage daughter, who is revered as a martyr to the cause but in fact died in the most meaningless way. That he and his comrades turn out to be right about the coming global catastrophes only lends a further measure of bitter humor to Boyle's mix. What did they accomplish? The devasating last line of the last chapter before the epilogue will tell you in the starkest possible terms. If this book seems a little thinner than usual, it could be that Boyle was exhausted after writing the majestic "Riven Rock." It's still very worth reading, from perhaps the most entertaining author in America.
Rating: 
Summary: Out of sync with his talent
Review: An ardent reader and admirer of TC Boyle I grabbed this book as soon as it was released, prejudging it to be another great book. Wrong! Although Boyle's writing gifts are solid, this depressingly dreary story is neither innovative, clever, wise or entertaining. Reading this little book is like mistakenly walking through the door of one of the plethora of the current sci-fi Alien movies. They all BLEND into drab and gory hopelessness without a window of redemption.....except turning the final page, realizing you made it through it!
Rating:
Summary: No Friend of Mine (or Yours)
Review: As a long time fan of Mr. Boyle's, I am sorry to say that I found this book dreadful - probably should never have been published. There is not a single character in here worth caring about and the overall tone is meanspirited and humourless. An uninspired mistake from a very gifted writer. The one star is for the jacket by Marty Blake.
Rating:
Summary: Eco-science fiction
Review: At first look, this book reminded me of another book I read recently: Killing Time by Caleb Carr. Both were looks at near-future dystopias written by non-science fiction authors. However, while Carr's novel shows his inability to write sci-fi, Boyle has proven he can work comfortably in this genre.Switching back and forth between the 1990s and 2020s, A Friend of the Earth is a tale of environmental horror filled with ironic humor. Although in one sense it is an ecological gloom-and-doom story, it also mocks the far edge of the environmental movement. There is a theme that even these eco-terrorists are ineffective. By leaving a twenty-plus year gap between the two narratives, Boyle even leaves it unclear what has happened to make nature go amok; this brings into question whether the environmental disasters are even man-made. Certainly, there is an almost wrathfully intelligent version of Nature in this story; many of the characters die of strange accidents; the more the enviromentalists try to save the world, the more the world goes out of its way to make their lives miserable. Like other environmental horror novels I've read, including such classics as John Brunner's The Sheep Look Up and Harry Harrison's Make Room, Make Room, this story offers little hope to the modern reader. Unlike these other novels, which serve as warnings of a future that can be averted by wise acts, this story says that Nature is a force that we cannot control, for good or for ill. This hopelessness makes this a sometimes difficult novel to read, but the good writing and ironic humor makes it enjoyable nonetheless.
Rating: 
Summary: Science Fiction / Fantasy worth reading
Review: Boyle wrote a well thoughtout book regarding the series of events that could destroy the earth to a pithy mass of nothingness. I normally avoid Science Fiction / Fantasy stories due to the unbelieveable storylines that drag the reader through pages of muck about fairies, aliens, or unicorns. Boyle has the gift of storytelling and is able to roundout all of his characters' idiosyncracies--not an easy task. Flashback storytelling is dangerous for most authors to try. Boyle succeeds with believeable events and ascerbic wit. The ending is rather weak. Kind of like: "I'm sick of writing this book and need to end it." I would have enjoyed the ending to be as well thoughtout as all of the events leading to it.
Rating: 
Summary: Savage, hilarious satire
Review: Boyle's boisterous, blackly comic view of the near future satirizes nearly everyone and everything in a story about love and the struggle for survival in a collapsing Eco-system. Narrator and protagonist Ty Tierwater is 75 in 2025. An artificial kidney makes him one of the "young old" facing a long, slow decline in a California where months of violent storms alternate with months of baking heat. A former radical environmentalist, he now runs a menagerie of endangered species for a pop star, a reservoir for zoo-cloning in a world where mammals - save burgeoning populations of rats and humans, are rapidly going extinct. Into this bleak, resigned existence comes a blast from the past - his ex-wife Andrea, a former star of the environmental movement, out of his life for 20 years. "I'm out feeding the hyena her kibble and chicken backs and doing what I can to clean up after the latest storm, when the call comes through.... there are trees down everywhere and the muck is tugging at my gum boots like a greedy sucking mouth, a mouth that's going to pull me all the way down eventually, but not yet." They celebrate their reunion with the last can of extinct Alaskan crab. But Andrea, still sexy at 67, has an agenda. She wants Ty to help put a book together on his martyred daughter, Sierra. The memories flood back, beginning with the 1989 fiasco which introduced 13-year-old Sierra to radical environmentalism - the time he and Andrea and Sierra plunged their feet into wet cement at the top of a logging road to protest the cutting of old growth forests. The story alternates between third person accounts of love and strife and frustration in the late 20th century and Ty's present-tense 2025 narration of shoring up against imminent collapse. This near-future narration is manic. Sentences tumble and run, the language flows vivid and tactile, the world impinges urgently and viciously on daily life. The past emerges in a more conventional, anecdotal style. Bringing up Sierra, making his marriage work, miring himself deeper in a movement not really his own. Ty's remembrance of his life is anything but heroic. Ty came to environmentalism through his sexual attraction to Andrea. Lonely, his beloved first wife dead of a bee sting (all his loved ones, it seems, are felled by nature) Ty adopted Andrea's causes as his own. But when things go wrong, anger, helplessness, and desire for revenge fuel his increasingly radical actions. Clueless Ty, trying to make his mark in the world, longs to be a strong father, a good husband, a principled man, but anger and boredom and opportunistic, scheming Andrea, goad him. Meanwhile, Sierra has the makings of a true idealist. As a child she starved herself for days rather than eat the meat her father placed in front of her. Energized by her father's predicaments, she stops wearing make-up (animal testing), becomes a vegan and wholly embraces non-violent activism, becoming, literally, a tree hugger. In Ty's day environmentalism was a passion for such idealists, or a fashionable avocation for dilettantes. The dangers were distant, intellectual, the demands of suburban life more urgent. But now, in 2025, floods collapse the condos and the animals' pens. Mangy lions and hyenas and warthogs are herded desperately indoors to shelter in the pop star's mansion and feed on a freezer of prized meat, the last in the world. Boyle spares no one in this savagely hilarious portrait. Not the BMW-driving, manipulative, well-dressed environmentalists (Ty and Andrea, as a publicity stunt, shed their clothes and plunge into the woods to live naked off the land for a month - you'll fall off your chair laughing). Not the sneering, smug sheriffs and deputies or the celebrities hyped on the latest cause or the baying packs of journalists. Even gentle, serious Sierra is not spared. But amid the hilarity and savaging, there is genuine affection for his flawed characters who never give up hope no matter how black things get. Boyle gives us an imaginative, exuberant wake-up call which will make you shiver while you laugh.
Rating:
Summary: A saga of eco-catastrophe that sadly, rings true
Review: For those concerned over global warming, ozone depletion, mass extinction, endocrine disruption, worldwide pandemics, and on and on, this saga of imminent ecocatastrophe will prove irresistible but hardly comforting. No, the vision of the not-so-distant future presented here by T. Coraghessan Boyle is dark, indeed, and yet it seems plausible enough in its broad outlines to ring true (though surely its trajectory of future events is compressed a bit). Employing novelistic techniques reminscent of Kurt Vonnegut (in fact, the overall tone and philosophy resemble Vonnegut) Boyle jumps back and forth through time in telling the story of Tyrone O'Shaughnessey Tierwater, eco-warrior extraordinaire. Along with his wife Andrea and ultimately his daughter Sierra, Tierwater fights to save the Earth through "direct action," i.e., "monkeywrenching" acts of sabotage against lumber companies, electrical utilities, and other promulgators of environmental destruction. In weaving his tale, Boyle focuses much of his narrative upon the justifications and consequences of such acts of property destruction, including the all-important issue of whether, in fact, they accomplish the goals that motivate them. Some readers might despair of Boyle's self-evidently cynical view of humanity and its prospects. May I offer, however, that cynicism and idealism are usually two sides of the same attitudinal coin. Boyle wrote the story, I suspect, at least in part out of hope that his portrayal of an apocalyptic future might motivate some people to work to prevent this eventuality from occurring. Overall, I found the book impressively well written, thought-provoking, and a terrific read. The one nagging point that bothered me, however, was Boyle's apparent unwillingness to explore critically his assertion that in order to be a friend of the earth one must be "an enemy of the people." Certainly many environmentalists sooner or later exhibit a bitterly misanthropic world-view, but anyone who has followed the ongoing protests against the World Trade Organization should see that many militants maintain that the global corporate forces that pillage the earth's ecosystems are the same ones that oppress millions of human beings currently sentenced to impoverished, marginal lives. The enemy is not necessarily "people," but a governing set of political economic structures that render short-term corporate profitability the highest priority in all global investment decisions, and hence almost all corresponding political decisions. I'm not one to force a political perspective upon Boyle, but he might have at least included more debate among his characters regarding this very important philosophical point. In closing, I will compliment Boyle on his overall accurate presentation of geographical and scientific facts. However, as a geographer, I must correct one error he commits, which is to place the "state prison at Calpatria" [sic] in the "Mohave Desert," when actually, Calipatria is located in the Salton basin, part of the Colorado Desert.
Rating:
Summary: José Bové would like it
Review: Funny to see these reviews of A Friend of the Earth... We've had had a great time discussing it on the author's site ..,. OK, we're all true seasoned fans and compulsive readers of Tom. Hence, our view is maybe rather biaised. Nonetheless, it's the best book (fiction) you can read on global warming and what it could imply for human relationships since James G. Ballard's books... José Bové would surely love (and hate) to read "Un Ami de la terre"...
Rating:
Summary: More great prose from T.C. Boyle
Review: Having read all of T.C. Boyle's previous novels, I knew when I picked up A Friend of the Earth that I would be treated to this author's elegant and poetic writing style. I was not disappointed. This man can truly turn a phrase: a girl has "hair the color of midnight in a cave." Wildflowers are "on fire in the fields." And that's what kept me going until the end of the novel. I didn't find the plot particularly riveting andI wasn't drawn to any of the characters. But the pure poetry of T.C. Boyle's prose carried me along as if I were floating down a clear mountain stream. If you're concerned about global-warming, the rape of the forests by the timber industry, and the struggle to save the Earth from the clutches of humanity--a species that insists on reproducing and using up every last vestige of the Earth's resources, then read this book. If not, you may enjoy it anyway, if only for the beautiful writing contained herein.
Rating:
Summary: Abbey's Legacy
Review: I can only guess as to Mr. Boyle's intent in this book, but I came away with the feeling that it pays great homage to Ed Abbey. The Monkey Wrench Gang fortold of Earth First! and the like; and then near his death, Abbey wrote Hayduke Lives in which you can see the beginnings of his outrage at where things had gone nad his seeming displeasure with where things were going with our planet. Mr. Boyle now takes it one step further with "A Friend of the Earth." Told in two time frames - one essentially the present with a group much like Earth First! called Earth Forever!; and the other set in the near future of 2025 where we meet Ty Tierwater retired eco-warrior at 75 when his life comes back around full circle and we learn of his daughter, who martyred herself for the trees. Ty tells of the now where Super El Nino-like weather is ravaging the planet and much of the wildlife has gone extinct. He also tells of the events of his life in the 1990s that led him to be a warrior for the environment and eventually to where he is in the here and now... struggling to save the "ugly animals," as his employer Mac - a Rich Rock Star - puts it, before they are all gone. The story is set in motion when Ty's ex-wife resurfaces in his life seeking to start anew their efforts to save the planet - and ourselves - from man.
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