Review by Booklist Review
Professor Maxine Sayers is having a hard time. Her husband has died. The Institute of Future Studies, which she founded to study the impact of technology on culture and life, is in danger of losing its funding. The male faculty members of the institute have no respect for her. There's more: her son, Zach, has vanished after quitting his job in Silicon Valley; her mother is suffering from Parkinson's disease; and a terrorist called the Technobomber may be a former student who was a friend of Zach's. Maxine needs to find Zach to make sure that he is not an accomplice or a victim of the Technobomber. She knows that she should contact the FBI, but her maternal instincts are overpowering. Juggling her work issues with the more pressing concern of finding her son will lead Maxine to danger, but may also rekindle her enthusiasm for life. The author uses the Unibomber case and social issues, such as caring for the elderly and for gender equality in academia, to craft an intriguing mystery.--Barbara Bibel Copyright 2010 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Pollack (Breaking and Entering) adds a hearty dose of maternal fretting to her solid fictionalization of the Unabomber case. Maxine Sayers wrangles the diverse scholars who study the cultural impacts of theoretical extended life spans at her moribund Institute for Future Studies at the University of Michigan in 2012. She still struggles to cope with the death of her husband, a humanitarian who was killed eight years prior. When newspapers give in to the demands of an antitechnological mail bomb terrorist and print his manifesto, Maxine recognizes the unusual phrases of her former student, Tadeusz "Thaddy" Rapaczynski. Concerned that Thaddy has lured Maxine's idealistic 24-year-old son, Zach, who recently quit his Silicon Valley job and disappeared, into his crusade, Maxine rushes to search for them at her cabin in Michigan's Upper Peninsula. Instead, she finds a situation that's something else entirely. The narrative flags as it turns from mystery into manhunt, and the drawn-out conclusion relies heavily on Maxine's overwrought emotional turmoil. Pollack blends crime thriller and family drama into a provocative, if not wholly satisfying, novel. Agent: Jenni Ferrari-Adler, Union Literary. (Oct.)
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
Adrift in her personal life and career, a professor of future studies discovers that an ex-student might be a homegrown terroristand that she too might have skin in the game.In 1996, the FBI ended one of the longest manhunts in its history by arresting Theodore Kaczynski, a Harvard-educated math genius, who railed against the ill effects of technology and systematically mailed bombs to select targets across the United States to underscore his point. More than two decades on, the drumbeat about the perceived dark side of technology has only become louder. It makes sense then that Pollack (The Bible of Dirty Jokes, 2018, etc.) uses the Unabomber as the scaffolding for this novel, which unfolds primarily through the lens of Maxine Sayers, Director of the Institute of Future Studies at the University of Michigan. Max has lost her husband (and fellow professor), Sam, who has been dead for eight years, and her engineer son, Zach, who once worked for a Silicon Valley startup and has gone off the grid and cut off contact with Mom. What's worse, funding for the institute that Maxine Kickstarted is drying up. Against this backdrop, she reads a "Technobomber's" manifesto and worries that the author sounds like one of her former students. As Max unravels the various layers, she and her family get sucked into the maelstrom created by the Technobomber's sensationalism. Maxine too is ambivalent about technology, and the plot sags under the weight of her frequent expositions: "If intelligence meant an awareness of one's self, how could a machine become aware? Of what? That it had no self to be aware of?" Stilted similes"The eighteen-year-olds who make up the majority of Ann Arbor's population are like stem cells: put any two in a petri dish, squirt on nutrient solution, and each will take on the characteristics of the other"don't help the cause, either. The straitjacketed characters miss emerging into their true selves. Perhaps the narrative would have been better served as a short story than a full-fledged novel.An earnest if overzealous examination of the side effects of technology on humanity. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
