Available:*
Library | Call Number | Status |
|---|---|---|
Searching... Bayport Public Library | FICTION BOY | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... R.H. Stafford Library (Woodbury) | FICTION BOY | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... Stillwater Public Library | FICTION BOY | Searching... Unknown |
Bound With These Titles
On Order
Summary
Summary
From the bestselling author of The Women comes an action- packed adventure about endangered animals and those who protect them.
Principally set on the wild and sparsely inhabited Channel Islands off the coast of Santa Barbara, T.C. Boyle's powerful new novel combines pulse-pounding adventure with a socially conscious, richly humane tale regarding the dominion we attempt to exert, for better or worse, over the natural world. Alma Boyd Takesue is a National Park Service biologist who is spearheading the efforts to save the island's endangered native creatures from invasive species like rats and feral pigs, which, in her view, must be eliminated. Her antagonist, Dave LaJoy, is a dreadlocked local businessman who, along with his lover, the folksinger Anise Reed, is fiercely opposed to the killing of any species whatsoever and will go to any lengths to subvert the plans of Alma and her colleagues.
Their confrontation plays out in a series of escalating scenes in which these characters violently confront one another, and tempt the awesome destructive power of nature itself. Boyle deepens his story by going back in time to relate the harrowing tale of Alma's grandmother Beverly, who was the sole survivor of a 1946 shipwreck in the channel, as well as the tragic story of Anise's mother, Rita, who in the late 1970s lived and worked on a sheep ranch on Santa Cruz Island. In dramatizing this collision between protectors of the environment and animal rights' activists, Boyle is, in his characteristic fashion, examining one of the essential questions of our time: Who has the right of possession of the land, the waters, the very lives of all the creatures who share this planet with us? When the Killing's Done will offer no transparent answers, but like The Tortilla Curtain , Boyle's classic take on illegal immigration, it will touch you deeply and put you in a position to decide.
Author Notes
T. C. Boyle was born Thomas John Boyle in Peekskill, New York on December 2, 1948. He received a B.A. in English and history from SUNY Potsdam in 1968, a MFA from the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop in 1974, and a Ph.D. degree in nineteenth century British literature from the University of Iowa in 1977. He has been a member of the English department at the University of Southern California since 1978.
He has written over 20 books including After the Plague, Drop City, The Inner Circle, Tooth and Claw, The Human Fly, Talk Talk, The Women, Wild Child, and When the Killing's Done. He has received numerous awards including the PEN/Faulkner Award for best novel of the year for World's End; the PEN/Malamud Prize in the short story for T. C. Boyle Stories; and the Prix Médicis Étranger for best foreign novel in France for The Tortilla Curtain. His title's Sam Miguel and The Harder They Caome made The New York Times Best Seller List.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (6)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Boyle (The Women) spins a grand environmental and family drama revolving around the Channel Islands off Santa Barbara in his fiery latest. Alma Boyd Takesue is an unassuming National Park Service biologist and the public face of a project to eradicate invasive species, such as rats and pigs, from the islands. Antagonizing her is Dave LaJoy, a short-tempered local business owner and founder of an organization called For the Protection of Animals. What begins as the disruption of public meetings and protests outside Alma's office escalates as Dave realizes he must take matters into his own hands to stop what he considers to be an unconscionable slaughter. Dave and Alma are at the center of a web of characters-among them Alma's grandmother, who lost her husband and nearly drowned herself in the channel, and Dave's girlfriend's mother, who lived on a sheep ranch on one of the islands-who provide a perspective that man's history on the islands is a flash compared to nature's evolution there. Boyle's animating conflict is tense and nuanced, and his sleek prose yields a tale that is complex, thought-provoking, and darkly funny-everything we have come to expect from him. (Feb.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Boyle's great subject is humankind's blundering relationship with the rest of the living world. In his thirteenth novel, he transports us to California's Galapagos, the surprisingly wild Northern Channel Islands off the coast of Santa Barbara. There a stormy, cliff-hanging tale of foolhardy and treacherous journeys unfolds, anchored to the tough women in two indomitable matriarchal lines. A 1946 pleasure cruise gone wrong shipwrecks Beverly on the island of Anacapa. Decades later, her ambitious biologist granddaughter, Alma, oversees the National Park Service's hubristic efforts to rid Anacapa, and neighboring Santa Cruz Island, of invasive animal species in organized killing sprees. Dreadlocked businessman Dave LaJoy, a man of rage and aberrance, along with his lover, Anise, the last child raised on Santa Cruz, where her mother worked on a doomed sheep ranch, incites reckless protests with chain-reaction consequences. Incisive and caustically witty, Boyle is fluent in evolutionary biology and island biogeography, cognizant of the shared emotions of all sentient beings, in awe over nature's crushing power, and, by turns, bemused and appalled by human perversity. Boyle brings all these powers and concerns to bear as he creates magnetic characters and high suspense, culminating in a piercing vision of our needy, confused, and destructive species thrashing about in the great web of life. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Famous for his avidly attended public appearances, Boyle has seen his readership multiply following the huge success of The Women (2009).--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2010 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
WHO could love a rat? And what could possess a man to sail to an uninhabited island, in defiance of law, and throw out vitamin K pellets as an antidote to a government-sponsored rat-poisoning program? Therapists and law-enforcement officers might come up blank on that one, but no motive is beyond the grasp of an imaginative fiction writer. In his new novel, "When the Killing's Done," T. Coraghessan Boyle proves his mettle by grafting a page from the strange-crime annals into a life-and-death story of evolution, shipwrecks and dominion over the earth. Above all else, "When the Killing's Done" is an impassioned portrait of a real place, the Channel Islands of California, where human strategies of exploitation and protection have run every course conceivable. The rocky string of islands and their waters host some 2,000 animal and plant species, including many that live nowhere else, in an isolated cradle of diversity that attracts modern biologists for the same reasons the Galápagos once enraptured Charles Darwin. They have also inspired more mercenary agendas: ranching, military outposts, fishing camps dating back to the time of the Chumash. Farmers brought pigs and sheep; rats hitched a ride. Each arrival created its particular havoc, devouring native vegetation or gobbling the eggs of groundnesting birds, bringing a unique ecosystem to the doorsill of extinction. In 1980 the Channel Islands were declared a national park, whose isolation from the mainland gave its custodians a rare opportunity to restore the prehuman Eden by removing every member of our messy entourage. The quality of this mercy has occasionally been dramatic, involving helicopter-drops of rat poison on one island and sharpshooters hired to track down feral pigs on another. The exhaustively researched program has saved endangered ecosystems but angered activists who oppose the killing of any creature in favor of another. Their ire has taken many forms, including the aforementioned rat-rescue operation by a Santa Barbara man in 2001. It's interesting enough as a news item, but fiction may distinguish itself from the daily papers by scrutinizing events and asking what they mean. Characters invested with histories can lead a reader backward through chaos toward sense. Fiction is not fact, as Thomas Wolfe observed, but "fact arranged and charged with purpose." Boyle, a reliable artisan of the purpose-charged tale, chose to personify the opposition between animal-lover and habitat-restorer in a pair of fictional characters who despise each other unconditionally. These opponents could easily be cut to type: Alma Takesue is the cool-headed National Park Service spokesperson with a Ph.D. and a mission to protect endangered biotic communities; her nemesis is Dave LaJoy, the emotional animal rights fanatic decked out in dreadlocks and vegetarian zeal. But both characters have enough personal baggage to carry them far beyond stereotype. The activist LaJoy owns a chain of electronics stores, a Beemer, a yacht, a supersized ego and not the remotest inclination to give peace a chance. He just happens to like animals more than people, whom he detests. In a narrative fueled by high-octane symbolism, we first get to know LaJoy as he is gobbling eggs delivered by a dodo-like waitress, prior to loading up the vitamin K and heading to the islands for a hard day of rat salvation. More dangerous high jinks ensue as he drags feckless accomplices into his plan to save rats, pigs and anything else that lies in the Park Service cross hairs. It's not life's preciousness that moves LaJoy, but an attraction to the dramatics of sabotage and his resentment of government rangers who presume to control creation. The Park Service employee Takesue is rattled by LaJoy's invective, but patiently believes a well-educated public will support restoring habitats for the endangered foxes and murrelets, even when the methods are not pretty. She is plainly the saner half of this moral face-off, but she too has her prejudices and symbolic connection to the rats she wants to exterminate. Like them, she owes her existence to a single, pregnant survivor - her grandmother - who long ago clung to the flotsam of a shipwreck and washed ashore on the Channel Islands. That wreck opens the book, soon followed by the story of the 1853 steamer disaster that probably brought the rats. Collisions of nature and human caprice continue to pile up, bearing titanic consequences for a place where the evolutionary deck is stacked with wild cards. Boyle is a writer who chooses a large canvas and fills it to the edges. History and controversy are familiar elements in a 22-book oeuvre that includes fictional portraits of Frank Lloyd Wright, Dr. Alfred Kinsey and John Harvey Kellogg, alongside Mexican immigrants and eco-warriors. His disparate characters inevitably get twisted, often grotesquely, around a persistent longing for a reconstructed world. "When the Killing's Done" is a forthright examination of that desire, in which the remodelers of earthly creation have to measure the worth of a healthy ecosystem against the lives of damaging invaders. The dilemma is so rarely discussed that animal lovers and environmentalists are routinely lumped into the same political camp. One of the novel's many merits is its well-informed framing of the moral difference between them. Assigning worth to lives and ecosystems is tricky business, obviously, for a species that can't seem to share well with others even to save our own hides. The fascinating terrain of this novel is the question of how and why people decide to care as they do. While the rivalry escalates between the Park Service and animal defenders, the narrative also reaches back across two centuries of malefactors and fortune-seekers, disclosing each modern character's distinct connection to the Channel Islands' webs of life and singularly hazardous shipping lanes. Cartoonish extremists are gradually redrawn as nuanced products of history, and every position becomes comprehensible. LaJoy's partner in crime Anise, for example, grew up on an island sheep farm before it was declared wilderness and relieved of its livestock. As a girl on Scorpion Ranch she developed an allegiance to increasing the flock, one life at a time, guarding newborn lambs from the eviscerating beaks of native ravens. Thus her adult commitment to the island's feral livestock comes into focus, offering a lesson for educators: partisanships bred through life experience are unlikely to be budged by a public lecture series. Character, science and history co-evolve marvelously here in a tale of fanaticism gone literally overboard. Boyle's devotees will find everything they expect in the way of manic plotlines, flamboyant obsessions and cool comeuppance outlandishly delivered. (No spoilers here, but fair warning: Boyle has elsewhere dispatched characters by the likes of meteor strike and bear consumption.) LaJoy calls his boat the Paladin and fancies himself quite the storybook hero; suffice it to say, the reader will not. In this particular contest between ecosystem restorer and animal defender, it's pointless to expect "fair and balanced" when one of the players is deeply unbalanced and refuses to take his Xanax. But fictional characters are by no means obliged to represent a profession or creed, only to take the helm of a tale and steer for uncharted country. This is a smart and rollicking novel, with suspense and shipwrecks galore, in which no character ever quite understands the stakes and no challenge is perfectly answered. Except for one, suggested by LaJoy's fist-shaking vow that he'll be civil "when the killing's done and not a minute before." When will the killing be finished? Never. Remodelers of earthly creation weigh the worth of a healthy ecosystem against the lives of invasive species. Barbara Kingsolver is the author of 13 books of fiction and nonfiction. Her most recent novel, "The Lacuna," won the 2010 Orange Prize.
Guardian Review
California was an island in the earliest, fanciful maps. Ecologically, the maps were right. Dozens of species unknown elsewhere flourished in the benign climate, until the white men came. Boyle is well aware that Americans like to see everything as a war against something and this is a civil war, the worst kind, because the opponents are close kin and they both want desperately to save the island's wild creatures. Government agents believe salvation lies in control, in careful, scientific stewardship. Animal rights advocates believe human interference does more harm than good and is morally wrong. Beginning with a splendidly described shipwreck-and-castaway-survival scene, the story weaves among several generations and on both sides of the environmental issues. But for all its energy and urgency, its historical accuracy and sweep, the novel is heart-chillingly bleak. And in that, it is an honest reflection of the mood of most people who look at what we have done to our world and seek to take responsibility for it. - Ursula K Le Guin California was an island in the earliest, fanciful maps. Ecologically, the maps were right. Dozens of species unknown elsewhere flourished in the benign climate, until the white men came. - Ursula K Le Guin.
Kirkus Review
A provocative premise delivers considerable literary dividends.In one of his richest and most engaging novels, Boyle(The Women,2009, etc.) characteristically combines a dark sense of humor and a subversive streak as he illuminates the dark underbelly of all-American idealism. The focus is California environmentalism, the idealization of the natural world, which is more often dangerous, even deadly, than idyllic. The novel puts two characters on a collision course, with each discovering in the process the complexities and ambiguities of their polarized opposite positions. Dr. Alma Boyd Takesue, a native Californian of mixed American and Japanese descent, spearheads a program for the National Park Service aimed at eliminating various species that have been imported to the Channel Islands, near Santa Barbara, to preserve the ecosystem and allow indigenous species to survive. Her antagonist is Dave LaJoy, head of the PETA-like FPA (For the Protection of Animals), who is both a dreadlocked hipster and a successful businessman. He is also a dislikable loudmouthravaging restaurant personnel, throwing his weight around, bullying Alma, whom he once dated. But he has a point: "He believes in something, the simplest clearest primary moral principle: thou shalt not kill." And his activism has spurred plenty of press coverage that demonizes the National Park Service's initiative, accusing Alma of trying to "manipulate nature and make a theme park out of the islands." Nature being nature, it refuses to obey the dictates of either Alma or Dave, as their battles escalate over rats, feral pigs and rattlesnakes, and the plot naturally comes to encompass human death (and birth) as well. A richly detailed back story provides additional context, as Boyle nimbly plays chronological hopscotch, showing how both these islands and these people came to be how they are. The novel never reduces its narrative to polemicsthere are no heroes herewhile underscoring the difficult decisions that those who consider themselves on the side of the angels must face.Narrative propulsion is laced with delicious irony in this winning novel.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
Boyle's follow-up to The Women (2009); simultaneous release with the Viking hc (75,000-copy first printing); Anthony Heald reads. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
