Rating: 
Summary: I¿m all right, Jack. Who cares about you?
Review: "City of Truth" is really two short stories, three if you count the brief final section. Each section is almost worth its own review, because they are so different.City I is a description of a society where people have perfect honesty literally burned into their brains. It's incredibly funny because it contrasts so completely with our own feel-good consumer society. Politicians candidly admit that they accepted kick-backs; a salesperson tells you where to buy an item more cheaply from a competitor; restaurants sell "murdered cow" sandwiches with "wilted lettuce." The odd thing is that the city is rather a flat, cold place. Parents critique their kids' drawings ("It's pretty ugly.") and romance is replaced by the brutal, hurtful truth. After a while, you long for someone to say "Have a nice day!" with a big smile, instead of truthfully expressing their complete indifference. City II describes a rebel group which teaches people to lie again. The treatment involves exposing disciples to genetically-engineered impossibilities: pigs that fly, dogs that talk. Why this is supposed to help isn't entirely clear, but it enables a father to tell "kind lies" to his terminally sick child. The problem is that the boy can see that his father is lying: This is one case where honesty would be the best policy. City II is a real tear-jerker. City III has the family leaving both the Truth Tellers and the Liars and settling for the kind of messy mix that we have: trying to tell the truth as far as possible, but making space for poetic license and white lies. That's fair enough, but there are no revelations here. Most of us feel this way already. Consider the five stars all for the first section and well worth them.
Rating:
Summary: Truly a Great Story
Review: A dark comedy to be sure. This book reminded me a lot of A Clockwork Orange, in the way that the people were conditioned to abhor untruthfullness to any degree. Unfortunately this includes any work of art, and fiction. Of course that's what makes this so absurdly funny. For a person to feel compelled to tell his boss -exactly- why he was late for work, or what you really think of a childs drawing, creates some very funny scenes indeed. If Veritas is funny in it's way of strict adherence to truth, than Satirev is funny for exactly the opposite reasons. When lies are brought to life you are bound for comical moments. This is a great book to read if you haven't read anything worthwhile for some time and just want a good quick fix.
Rating:
Summary: I?m all right, Jack. Who cares about you?
Review: Here is an initially sharp social satire set in a city where you must tell the truth and lies are against the law. The authorities have literally scared lying out of the population. The book starts hilariously with the citizens of Veritas telling it like it is - ending letters with "yours up to a point" and eating at a restaurant called Booze Before Breakfast. It turns out that Veritas is really obsessed with empiricism (based only on observation and rules) rather than the much deeper "truths" of life. Morrow brings up this point very briefly in chapter 5, but unfortunately fails to expand on this intriguing theme. After that brief insight, the book becomes nonsensical and melodramatic, as the main character escapes to the secret city of Satirev to deal with the real truth about his son's fatal illness. The city of Satirev, in which people are allowed to lie but ultimately are more truthful, is a ridiculous construct that is hard to take seriously, while the story devolves into sentimentality rather than the sharp social observation that was hinted at earlier. Morrow's examination of the real meaning of truth, even if lying is necessary to achieve it, ultimately does not materialize even though he was really onto something big for a while.
Rating:
Summary: Funny, sad, and thought provoking.
Review: I thoroughly enjoyed this book. The way Morrow described the city of Veritas made it seem almost possible. It is a place I'd love to spend some time in order to learn all the quirky and satiric names they've given things. If Veritas was weird, Satirev was surreal. Flying pigs, rivers of root beer, burning snow, money growing on trees...the oddities never stop. Sets a nice diversity of scene for the book...kind of like Shakespeare does in many of his plays (normal stuff happens in the home, magical stuff happens in the forest). But the greatest thing about this book is the characterization. The main character, Jack Sperry, is willing to do whatever it takes to save his son. He leaves his wife, goes against his tortuos conditioning in order to lie to his son about his condition and keep the kid's spirits up. Despite all the crazy scenery and funny truths in this story, it's really a novella about family and love and the bond between parents and children. Made me laugh and tugged my heart strings a little as well.
Rating:
Summary: Funny, sad, and thought provoking.
Review: I thoroughly enjoyed this book. The way Morrow described the city of Veritas made it seem almost possible. It is a place I'd love to spend some time in order to learn all the quirky and satiric names they've given things. If Veritas was weird, Satirev was surreal. Flying pigs, rivers of root beer, burning snow, money growing on trees...the oddities never stop. Sets a nice diversity of scene for the book...kind of like Shakespeare does in many of his plays (normal stuff happens in the home, magical stuff happens in the forest). But the greatest thing about this book is the characterization. The main character, Jack Sperry, is willing to do whatever it takes to save his son. He leaves his wife, goes against his tortuos conditioning in order to lie to his son about his condition and keep the kid's spirits up. Despite all the crazy scenery and funny truths in this story, it's really a novella about family and love and the bond between parents and children. Made me laugh and tugged my heart strings a little as well.
Rating: 
Summary: I found this to be a most enjoyable novel
Review: James Morrow has created a society in which all citizens have been painfully conditioned to tell only the absolute truth. The main character, Jack Sperry, a citizen of Veritas, the City of Truth, has lived his thirty-eight years in this controlled environment. He has attained his boyhood dream of being a critic through his present job as a deconstructionist, at which he spends his days destroying the art and literature left over from the Age of Lies. Jack is married to Helen and they have a seven year old son named Toby. All in all, Jack is reasonably happy with his life unttil Toby is bitten by a rabbit at Camp Ditch-the-Kids and contracts a fatal disease. In spite of his conditioning against sentimentality and feelings, saving Toby becomes the most important thing in Jack's life. He will do whatever he can to keep his son alive, even to the extent of giving up his own way of life. The concept of living in a society, which so highly prizes the truth, is refreshing. The truth in advertising product names are especially humorous e.g., Plymouth Adequate and Ford Sufficient. Personal relationships also operate on a totally different level as men and women speak candidly to each other even to discussing their sexual desires. With his creation of Veritas, Morrow is able to give us a realistic and humorous look at our commercially driven economy. He also uses his characters Jack and Toby to remind us of what is even more valuable than truth, namely, our love for each other.
Rating:
Summary: Audacious
Review: James Morrow is a writer after my own heart. In City of Truth, he takes an audacious idea--what if everyone always told the truth?--and uses it to show that there's something much deeper. We learn that while truth is beautiful, it can also be incredibly ugly. And that, while lies are despicable, they also have a place. And while we learn these things, we also get to laugh at some great imagination, as what would advertising be like if it had to be truthful (I especially enjoyed the "new" Surgeon General's warning on a pack of Canceroulettes, not to mention Camp Ditch-the-Kids). Morrow's got a way with this; his Full Spectrum story, "Daughter Earth," contained many of the same elements: a light, humorous tone encasing a serious, yet not dull, meaning.
Rating:
Summary: Pigs can fly!
Review: The above falsity(Pigs can fly!) could not be said in the City of Truth. For it is a lie. And lies are irreproachable in the City of Truth. Imagine being a politician in a city that won't allow it's citizens to lie. Imagine telling a pretty looking young woman you just met that you'd like to make love to her before you even had the chance to ask her name. In a city that does not lie nothing is sacred. James Morrow is an excellent storyteller to be sure. His novel is funny, touching, and often absurd. The first half was better than the second half, but overall I'd recommend this delightful little book. Give Morrow's book "Only Begotten Daughter" a shot too, it's quite good. He's funny, his characters are interesting, but more importantly he spins one heck of a good yarn.
Rating: 
Summary: Good, but too short
Review: This book is rather funny, kind of a humorous cross between 1984 and Fahrenheit 451. It is, however, not a novel. It is a novella. I am glad I checked it out of the library, because I could not justify spending money on what really is unoriginal and short. It has its place in a collection of short fiction or novellas, but not a stand-alone book. I need more volume and more originality for my money.
Rating:
Summary: The Funny Side of Truth
Review: This wry and gentle science fiction novella is mostly a parable about truth and its application. In the city of Veritas, eveyone goes through a coming of age rite which involves elctroshock conditioning (a la "One Flew Over the Cukoo's Nest" or "A Clockwork Orange") to both remove the ability to lie and the implant the need to tell the entire truth. This makes for a fairly amusing setting in which products bear truthful names such as "Ford Sufficient, " how-to books bear such itles as "You Can Have Somewhat Better Sex," and summer camp is "Camp Ditch-the-Kids." Personal conflict seems to be more or less non-existant as everyone tells the truth and no one gets offended by it. The actual story is about Jack Sperry, an art deconstructionist and his son Toby, who catches an incurable disease. Jack's job involves examining works of art and literature from the past, ie. the "Age of Lies," and physically destroying those that represent things that aren't true, such as winged angels. Jack has read of the "healing power of the positive thinking," and wants to try it with Toby. However, since such a course of treatment is not based on anything factual, and involves lying to Toby, he must find the secret communicty of "dissemblers," who have somehow overcome their conditioning and secretly live among the normal people. This eventually leads Jack to theliteral underground of Satirev (Veritas backward, get it?), where pigs do fly, money grows on trees, and soforth. The part spent in this phantasmagoria is decidely less amusing or interesting than the city of Veritas, which is richer territory for mockery. In the end, Morrow's tale comes to the somewhat mawkish conlusion that while eveyone should have the freedom to choose whether to lie or not, only the truth can really set you free.
| 
