Utterly distasteful - I hope Crichton was just channelling 90's male rage at the shifting power balance. But I'm afraid he was just simply a bitter man writing from his own fears and lack of insight.

An a-political, neutral review...

I first read this book over a quarter century ago when I was a mid-teen, when I regarded the world with a fairly cavalier attitude.

However, I feel like this may be one of the most important books of this generation. A quick note on Micheal Crichton. Mr. Crichton has long been a personal favorite of mine, and has a long history of being held high in public esteem in both his literary works and film adaptations. This is mainly because he poses a question... mostly one that is techno-philisophical, and is able to build a compelling storyline to maybe not answer the issue, but certainly prove it out by human experience.

Disclosure is certainly a profound example of this. Back in the early 1990's Crichton tackled the prickly issue of sexual discrimination from a reverse perspective. Quickly adapted into a movie that hyper-sensatiinalized the storyline, Disosure is a book that really speaks to inequality in all senses. Racial, Sexisit, Religion or Political, it shows that targeting any 'ism' is just a road to discrimination.

Again, this is an a-political, neutral review.

But I think it is safe to say that in 2008 we lost one of the most important Fiction writers of our day. I shudder to think of a what he would make of the state of the world today, but revel to imagine what his brilliant mind would have thought up for our future.

Probably a 4.5 for me, this is the pinnacle of literature taking political views and humanizing them. Before you 'protest', read this book.

The first thing I can say about this book is that it is dated. At one point there are several paragraphs explaining what CD-ROM is and how it is the up and coming technology. Also, they are developing virtual reality that, while it has as far as I know, gotten as far as it is described in the book, is still not very mind blowing with where modern technology is.

But, at the time, I know that this was cutting edge. So, when you read it you must try and read it with a mid-90s mindset. If you do that, you should be fine with the dated parts.

Sexual harassment is the main topic of this book, but I kind of feel like it was forced in to the main storyline and then became the primary focus. Crichton at the end says this book was based on a true story, so maybe it follows what really happened, but it feels like the harassment and main story lines are only loosely related.

As we are in an era where sexual harassment is in the limelight more than ever, I am not quite sure how this story will go over with people. Will people feel that justice was served? Will they think this book does a good job of detailing and investigating a harassment scenario? I cannot say. I will have to leave that up to the individual reader and, because of that, I am hesitant to recommend it (just in case).

Overall, it was okay. Not my favorite Crichton, but it was interesting. In the end, I would say that not a whole lot actually happens. If you are looking to pick up Crichton for the first time, try Jurassic Park. You only need to read this if you are a huge Crichton fan and want to make sure you read them all.

Michael Crichton is an excellent author, he really knows a lot about his technology. A business executive, Tom Sanders who works for a computer firm is expecting to become the new director of his company. But things change when a female employee named Meredith Johnson gets promoted, and Meredith happens to be Tom's former lover. One night Tom goes into Meredith's office, she tries to sexually assault him.

When word of it gets out, no one believes his story, and Meredith has everybody believing Tom is the villain. As Tom scrambles to defend himself, he finds an electronic trail into the company's secrets and discovers a scheme that could cost him his job. Anyone who likes Michael Crichton or techno-thrillers, I recommend this book.

This is an interesting read. I read this years ago and am basing my review off a recent re-read. It seems appropriate to average my opinions. When I was younger I thought the book was excellent. A realistic portrayal. I still think it's close to that. There are no good or evil stances here. Just. Well. I feel like everyone was to blame. The main character got away too easily for his actions in my opinion. It's odd. The older I get the more these books with long shadows from the past seem improbable. That's why the book is still an important read. More relevant than ever. People are selfish. Get with it.

Edit: after another re read I have to admit being more forgiving of the entire situation.. Though it is depressing how the same situations keep coming up

All I say is, it's much better than both Movies. (Yes, there a Hindi/Indian Version too)

Up and coming executive Tom Sanders is secure in his job and his line of work. He has a wife he loves, a child he adores, and a home on an island just off the coast of Washington. He ferries into work at DigiCom each day and oversees a group of techies working on a prototype of hardware that, for some reason, fails and no one knows why.

In the midst of the mystery, Sanders discovers the company is about to be bought out and a new boss is taking over the position Sanders once thought was for himself. Problem is, she's an ex-girlfriend he hasn't seen for years. While disappointed, he accepts the condolences of his peers and adjusts his thinking taking into consideration that no one had ever formerly offered him the job.

When the new boss suggests a 6 pm meeting in her office, he reluctantly agrees. Thinking he is there to discuss the hardware failure he is surprised to find two bottles of wine and a boss ready for pleasure. Sanders' is happy with his life. He has what he wants and he fights off her advances, ending up leaving her half naked on the couch.

Without warning, she accuses him of sexual harassment which is a strictly female dominated HR issue. When word gets out Sanders seeks out an attorney on whose advice he tells his wife and rethinks the issue of sexual harassment.

Sanders comes up with a scheme that will turn Digicom and its merger upside down. With the truth behind him, he will prove that men are no longer the predators, but have become the prey.

Comments

OK, so Disclosure isn't Jurassic Park, or the Andromeda Strain, or the Congo or Sphere. BUT it is a book that makes you think instead of run away in fear. As a woman it was really hard to see and accept that a female boss would act like that, but I am sure it is possible and has more than likely happened on some level. The writing is good, but it does take a little effort to get through the first 100 pages. After that things start to get interesting. Overall, I gave Disclosure a 3 because it did not equal his other books, but Disclosure is still a good enough read to keep it above a 2.

3.2

5 star - Perfect
4 star - i would recommend
3 star - good
2 star - struggled to complete
1 star - could not finish

An interesting read
read it sometimes in 2001
you won't regret paying for it.

Excellent! Highly recommend!

Gets really technical at the beginning and the end with all the technical jargon and corporate politics. Kinda takes away the thrill of reading and diverts from the main plot of the book, i.e., sexual harassment. However, this book raises an interesting perspective that harassment isn’t about male or female but about power(the undue exercise of power by superior over a subordinate).

P.S : The 2004 movie Aitraaz was just a Bollywood-ified version of this book.

It’s getting tough to defend Crichton. I assumed Disclosure fell within his generally stellar early period, so I had high expectations. The lame plotting, cardboard characters, and clueless male victimhood message killed those hopes within the first few chapters. Here’s my breakdown:



Plot:

* For a high-performing executive, Tom’s inability to decipher any clue is pathetic. There are at least 7 major hints that are dropped into the text over and over before Tom figures out that they happened or what they mean: (1) An answering machine recording the key sex scene, (2) Meridith’s reference to having sex with the guy in glasses, (3) the stained glass window memory, (4) the people in the car memory, (5) “afriend” telling him to look into the other company, (6) Max telling him to solve his other problem, (7) the easy access to the corporate database. Tom's "I keep thinking of this thing but I can't figure out what it means" device is tiresome long before its 20th iteration. Having the protagonist be clueless and forgetful is a poor way to build suspense, especially when everything else we know about him makes such forgetfulness unlikely.

* Having his two “allies” try to help him by dropping cryptic clues is nonsensical. Max could have just told him to focus on the chip issue. Stephanie could have just told him which company to look into. Having them instead communicate in riddles that he couldn’t decipher were a goofy device and feels more like a murder mystery game than real life.

* Tom's answers finally come via a ridiculous and unnecessary series of deux ex machina. Tom overhears his greatest enemies discussing their plan to take him down, which never happens in real life. He gets into the critical room with two entire corporations worth of sensitive information using a special passcard that someone just happened to drop on the ground and then not miss for a week. And he just happens to enter the database at the exact same moment that not one but TWO critical people enter, which doesn’t seem to have any reasonable explanation. Beyond being unrealistic, all of those turns were just silly because if he had half a brain he could have figured out their plot, found a way into the room, and uncovered the affair through other more realistic paths.



CHARACTERS

* Every character is a stereotype - the young irreverent computer geek, the stylish design guy, the mousy financials woman, the swarmy lawyer you can’t trust, the gorgeous saleswoman who sleeps her way up the corporate ladder, the professional wife who can’t handle her domestic responsibilities, the evil feminist journalist who is just out to hurt good people, the reckless company heir who has been made VP too early, the cryptic business guru who speaks in riddles, and on and on. The protagonist represents the purely good and noble man with zero faults (outside of his naivety and forgetfulness), while the antagonist represents the purely evil woman with no redeeming characteristics. Because they’re such cardboard, stereotypical characters, the dialogue consistently falls flat and fails to resemble how real people speak.

* The two most evil characters in the book are his former best friend and his former long-term girlfriend. It's never explained how he had previously been so close to two people who are so single-mindedly evil.

* The two most unnecessary characters are the nagging wife and the evil feminist journalist, as neither does anything to advance the main plot. However, they DO advance Crichton’s agenda, which is the next issue.


MALE VICTIMHOOD PREACHINESS

Crichton claims he used a case of a woman sexually harassing a man in order to “subvert expectations” and make people look at the issue in a new way. That would be an interesting device if the book played out that way. Instead, the book reads like a Men’s Rights Movement fever dream, populated with the most cartoonishly evil women who make the most laughably ignorant “feminist” speeches only to be called out every time by insightful and unfairly burdened men. Lets give some examples:

* The top female executive in the story knows nothing about the industry but makes up for it with her looks: “She didn't really have any deep knowledge, but she didn't need to. She was good-looking, sexy, and smart”. Crichton refers to her as “beautiful” and focuses on her body in almost every single scene she appears.

* The owner/CEO of the company gives numerous cringey speeches about how mistreated women are and how even a woman who sexually harasses a man and falsely accuses him of rape deserves another chance. Some of the worst lines:

“I keep coming back to the idea that we have to make allowances for women. We have to cut them a little slack."

“And of course, she's a woman. That's a real limitation, being a woman."

"All right. Let's say she did. An error of judgment, let's call it. An overstepping of bounds. The point is, Tom, faced with a situation like this, I still strongly support her."

"Why?"

"Because she's a woman."

* When the head of design finds out their new boss will be a woman, he launches into a speech that not only goes into men’s oppression but also supposed anti-White oppression in the tech world (in the early 1990s!). He strongly implies that minorities who are hired are incompetent.

"Pale males eat it again. I tell you. Sometimes I get so sick of the constant pressure to appoint women. I mean, look at this design group. We've got forty percent women here, better than any other division, but they always say, why don't you have more. More women, more-"

"Mark," he said, interrupting. "It's a different world now."

"And not a better one," Lewyn said. "It's hurting everybody. Look: when I started in DigiCom, there was only one question. Are you good? If you were good, you got hired. If you could cut it, you stayed. No more. Now, ability is only one of the priorities. There's also the question of whether you're the right sex and skin color to fill out the company's HR profiles. And if you turn out to be incompetent, we can't fire you. Pretty soon, we start to get junk like this Twinkle drive. Because no one's accountable anymore. No one is responsible. You can't build products on a theory. Because the product you're making is real. And if it stinks, it stinks. And no one will buy it."

* When a fellow executive asks the head of programming to stop sexualizing female executives during their meeting, he responds,

“Wait a minute. Coming over here to this meeting, I pass the women at the espresso bar, and what are they talking about? Whether Richard Gere has better buns than Mel Gibson. They're talking about the crack in the ass, lift and separate, all that stuff. I don't see why they can talk about-".

He proceeds to continue to sexualize his boss and any other worthy female coworker repeatedly throughout the book.

* At the manufacturing plant, the women demand the men remove pinups from their locker room even though the women never enter it and hypocritically have pinups in their own locker room.

* The evil lawyer is a former civil rights attorney who was the “first to diversity.” The running theme throughout the book is that anyone who is interested in diversity, civil rights, or women's rights is probably evil. Crichton has him ignorantly demand that half the workers in the Malaysian plant be women and that workers not be segregated by gender "even though it’s a Muslim country".

* There's a ridiculous storyline where a female programmer continuously harrasses a guy to go out with her, and he turns her down, so she rams her car into his. The boss tells the head of programming to do nothing about it because the guy probably deserved it even though this record is spotless clean. The interaction (where the guy gets screwed and nothing happens to the woman) ends with the head of programming making a cryptic allusion to how women always get the benefit of the doubt.

* At least half-a-dozen times a character says that a sexy women can’t harass a man. The worst example comes in an absolute cringey speech by a young female lawyer who keeps claiming men and women are different when it comes to sex and thus women aren't capable of harassment.

* When the beautiful female antagonist gets her comeupance for her constant sexual harassment and false rape claims, she responds with the most cringey “feminist” line Crichton could come up with:

"The system," Johnson said. "That's the problem. I was raped by the fucking system."

* A feminist opinion columnist is inserted into the story, serving no purpose whatsoever except to introduce a peak “evil feminist”. Crichton’s attempt to write a feminist opinion column…does not go well. It reads like this:

“One man in particular, let's call him Mr. Piggy, has been especially vindictive. Mr. Piggy can't tolerate a woman supervisor, and for weeks he has been running a bitter campaign of innuendo inside the company to keep it from happening. When that failed, Mr. Piggy claimed that his new boss sexually assaulted him, and nearly raped him, in her offices. The blatant hostility of this claim is matched only by its absurdity. Some of you may wonder how a woman could rape a man. The answer is, of course, she can't. Rape is a crime of violence. It is exclusively a crime of males, who use rape with appalling frequency to keep women in their place. That is the deep truth of our society, and of all other societies before ours. For their part, women simply do not oppress men. Women are powerless in the hands of men."

Her personal conversation isn't any better. When she discovers that there's proof the man she's been attacking is actually the one who was sexually harassed, she responds:

"Even if there is, what can it show? That she pinched his butt a little? She made a couple of jokes? What's the big deal? Men have been doing that for hundreds of years. Give me a break. So this guy gets a little pinch, and he starts screaming bloody murder. That's not normal behavior in a man. This guy obviously hates and demeans women. That's clear, just to look at him.”

And then when the man's lawyer defends him, she runs with:

Walsh stepped back. "Look. Maybe you've got some kind of a technical legal case here, and maybe you don't. But as far as I'm concerned, you're just another minority woman trying to get ahead with the patriarchy by getting down on her knees. If you had any self-respect you wouldn't be doing their dirty work for them."

* Tom's wife always brings up gender out of nowhere in their fights, as if it's something no woman can help doing. Some eaxamples:

”Every woman I know works harder than any man.”

”Sure, make it my fault. I'm the one with the problem. Fucking men."

"This is because a woman got your job, isn't it."

"I mean, there must be a reason she accused you. You must have done something."

And especially this speech:

He felt suddenly strong, and got out of bed and started pacing. "What does being a man have to do with it? Am I going to hear how oppressed you are again now?"

"Listen," she said, sitting straighter. "Women are oppressed. It's a fact."

"Is it? How are you oppressed? You never wash a load of clothes. You never cook a meal. You never sweep a floor. Somebody does all that for you. You have somebody to do everything for you. You have somebody to take the kids to school and somebody to pick them up. You're a partner in a law firm, for Christ's sake. You're about as oppressed as Leona Helmsley."

She was staring at him in astonishment. He knew why: Susan had made her oppression speech many times before, and he had never contradicted her. Over time, with repetition it had become an accepted idea in their marriage. Now he was disagreeing. He was changing the rules.

* The taunting he endures from coworkers as well as employees of other firms during the sexual harassment row is nonsensical. It portrays him as being the constant victim of snide comments at work, harassing emails, and nasty comments while he’s out on town within days of he and his boss’s competing claims.

"Hey Mr. Piggy, Suwee! Suwee!"

"Couldn't get it up, huh?"

“Mr. Piggy speaks! Oink oink."

"If Meredith Johnson pulled off her pants for me, I sure wouldn't call the police about it. No way, Jose!"

"Service with a smile!"

"Hard charger!"

"Ladies first! Ka-jung! Ka-jung!"

"Because I used to fuck her, but it's all over now . . ."

“WHY DON'T YOU JUST ADMIT YOU ARE GAY?”

“SHE'S BETTER LOOKING THAN YOUR ASSISTANT, AND YOU DIDN'T SEEM TO MIND SCREWING HER.”

“YOU SLIMY WEASEL - GET OUT OF THIS COMPANY."

“LITTLE TOMMY HAD A PECKER HE PLAYED WITH EVERY DAY. BUT WHEN A LADY TRIED TO TOUCH IT LITTLE TOMMY SAID GO AWAY.”

“IF YOU WEREN'T FUCKING YOUR DAUGHTER SO MUCH YOU MIGHT BE ABLE TO”

“GUYS LIKE YOU GIVE MEN A BAD NAME YOU ASSHOLE.”

“YOU FILTHY LYING MALE PIG”

* There are CONSTANT references to how poor guys are all getting caught up in sexual harassment suits. Some examples:

"Since you asked," Cherry said, "I've got a small problem. It's delicate. Sexual harassment thing."

"Another one? It seems like that's all we have around here."

"Us and everybody else," Cherry said. "I hear UniCom's got fourteen suits going right now. Digital Graphics has even more. And MicroSym, look out. They're all pigs over there, anyway. But I'd like your read on this."

"Title VII, Federal Court. Client's a woman who worked at MicroTech, claimed she wasn't promoted because she was a female. Not a very strong case, to tell the truth. Because she drank, and so on. There were problems. But we have a gal in our firm, Louise Fernandez, a Hispanic gal, and she is just lethal on these discrimination cases. Lethal. Got the jury to award our client nearly half a million. That Fernandez can work the case law like nothing you've ever seen. She's won fourteen of her last sixteen cases. She acts so sweet and demure, and inside, she's just ice. I tell you, sometimes women scare the hell out of me."

An extended page-long story about a man unfairly accused of child molestation by an evil child psychologist who had ruined many men’s lives. The story has no relevance to the plot except to further establish male victimhood. It leads with “But there was another kind of fear that only men felt.” As if Crichton is unaware that women have also been the victims of false child molestation accusations?

At least 3 well-described cases of the antagonist sexually harassing other men and the implication that there are a half-dozen others.

* The book ends with a lame “where are they now?” brief where every evil feminist ends up winning in the end while all the poor men get caught up in more sexual harassment suits:

Constance Walsh [evil feminist] was fired by the Seattle Post-Intelligencer and sued the paper for wrongful termination and sexual discrimination under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The paper settled out of court.

Philip Blackburn [evil man who supports feminists] was named chief counsel at Silicon Holographics of Mountain View, California, a company twice as large as DigiCom. He was later elected Chairman of the Ethics Panel of the San Francisco Bar Association.

Meredith Johnson [evil female executive who uses her gender to get ahead] was named Vice President for Operations and Planning at IBM's Paris office. She subsequently married the United States Ambassador to France, Edward Harmon, following his divorce. She has since retired from business.

Mark Lewyn [good employee] was charged with sexual harassment under Title VII by an employee of the Design Group. Although Lewyn was cleared of the charge, his wife filed for divorce not long after the investigation was concluded.

Richard Jackson of Aldus [good employee] was charged with sexual harassment under Title VII by an employee of American DataHouse, a wholesale distributor for Aldus. After an investigation, Aldus fired Jackson.

This is a novel in the guise of a diatribe. I hear the movie's much better, which isn't hard to believe. It could have been a 3* novel just be removing the ridiculous agenda, forgetting the stupid clues, and making the main characters a bit more complex and multifaceted.