Rating: 
Summary: Lifting Up Both Our Humanity and Our Inhumanity
Review: I just finished listening to the booksontape presentation of this novel. Rarely have I been as moved by what I heard. The ending asks where we now go as a society and forces us to think about options. Are we the land and people we once were? Can we learn from even illegal immigrants how it is for them and the homeless in our society to live? What would we do in the place of these people? Could our values remain the same or would we fall to our baser instincts of self-preservation? Boyle leads us to deal with the uncomfortable. How we would choose is a life and death issue for both the poor and the rich in our country today.
Rating:
Summary: Powerful book
Review: At times this book was almost painful to read, but I couldn't stop. I have known illegal immigrants who hiked for days after crossing the Rio Grande to get to Austin so they could work and send money to their families. After reading The Tortilla Curtain I have a better idea of what they may have experienced along the way. Boyle's ability to depict two couples living in two very different yet parallel worlds and to use them as vehicles for exploring many of the difficult socio/economic/political immigration-related issues this country is grappling with is a thought-provoking triumph. His book is a powerful read, down to the very last line.
Rating:
Summary: In your face fantastic!
Review: If you can take the spot light off yourself and point it at our human behavior this book will change your life. The author lets the reader judge the circumstances and people in this story. The story is very harsh and I felt I had to get a feeling of the writers position of the characters. I got annoyed when it wasn't clear what I "should" feel according to the authors influence. However, when I finished the book I was aware that it is MY desion how to inturpet this book. I loved this book because I learned that an author doesn't have to hold your hand through a journey...the best is when you go though the story independent and come out a better person. GREAT!
Rating: 
Summary: What does it all really say?
Review: Although the details were vivid, the book's ending was very sudden with an unnecessary twist. It was never clear to me whether author was trying to show the hard times imigrants are put through in The Land of Opportunity, which seems to be owned by assimilated white Irish descendants that have lost all ties to their past culture. Or perhaps Boyle is against illegal immigration, discouraging it by making it look very unpleasant. Perhaps, he even discourages American aid to illegal immigrants. Hence the phrase "don't feed the coyotes" often spoken by the liberal main character, Delaney. It seems to me that the coyotes are the illegal immigrants. The book shows that they come uninvited and expect to be welcomed, and the plan fails them.
Rating:
Summary: a powerful depiction- and yes, with moral impact...
Review: I read this book while living in Honduras and when I finished it I felt so sad for the country I was returning to where gated communities are the new american dream and immigrants fight for dignity in a country that spits on them. The Tortilla Curtain probes these issues in a Steinbeck-esque manner, and TCB deserves applause for pointing out the losing of the grip the american white male in the face of a changing country.
Rating: 
Summary: Opportunistic
Review: The potential to execute a work of high intellegence with this subject matter in this day and age is limitless. However, dispite the fact that these ethnically-oriented 'tragic' realism plot lines are in ample supply, TC fails at offering us with any new direction. His unwillingness to assert ANY position on this theme speaks to his inability to create any new or original perspective on this bordering-on-tiring literary genre. He merely capitalizes on the popularity of such works and gets away with cranking out the same old Same Old.
Rating:
Summary: Activating fiction at its best
Review: What do we call the opposite of escapist fiction? I don't think we have a term for it, so I'll humbly offer "activating fiction", and suggest Boyle's "Tortilla Curtain" represents the genre at its best.The book provides an extremely penetrating look into the dysfunction at both ends of the class and cultural chasm that is contemporary Los Angeles. This book will challenge a lot of smug conceits. With any luck it will also cause some of those "angry white males" we hear about to reconsider where their rage should be directed.
Rating:
Summary: Oh so true! Right on the mark.
Review: This is a wonderful book. T. C. Boyle has captured the lives of 2 vastly different cultures and the complex manner in which the cultures crash headlong into one another.
Rating: 
Summary: Tactics and Didactics
Review: At its better moments, this novel reminds me of Upton Sinclair and the great naturalists and socially conscious American novelists of the early 20th century. Of course Boyle walks a fine line in having such an obvious "moral" in this tale, but I think it's an important enough message to rescue <The Tortilla Curtain> from being dismissed as overt didacticism. What happened to novelists wanting to say something? Boyle responds to this question seriously, innovatively, and with a lyricism rare in the 90's. He shows the jaded 90's yuppie what it's like to be on the outside looking in and explores the responsibility that goes along with prosperity and progress.
Rating:
Summary: Some needed guilt and compassion
Review: I think the characters could have used a little more depth, and some of the author's choices were over the top (naming the woman America - please!). However, this book made me think about the daily lives of immigrants in a way I never had before. It taught me to have a little more compassion and not be so judgmental of those not fortunate enough to be born in a wealthy country. I liked the ending a lot.
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