Here's the truth: I HATE the cover of this book. As in, HATE, to the point where it was tempting to tear it off and throw it away, and I rather wish I had, but for the fact that that would have made the book difficult to give away. And I don't always pay attention to covers. I've never hated one, certainly. But this one? Yeah--I hate it. Maybe that shouldn't matter--it probably shouldn't, I suppose--but it does. This book literally sat on my shelf, traveling with me for five or six moves over the course of about a decade because, as much as it sounded like something that I would love... I kept on putting it back on the shelf when I thought about the prospect of seeing its cover, day in and day out, for however long I'd be reading it. And while reading it, over the past week and a half, I did my best to keep it facing down so that I could do my best to ignore the cover One way or another, it influences me, and seeing it in the corner of the page as I write this review makes it impossible to ignore.

So, does that edge down my review? It might. Did that make me skeptical or set my sights higher as I entered the book? Maybe so. Probably so. But the book was a gift, and the person who gave it to me was right in thinking I'd enjoy the story. If it were up to me, the cover would have kept me from buying it.

Why am I harping on this? Well, because it colors how I feel about the book, unavoidably.

I did enjoy Boyle's writing here, and I enjoyed the story, once I got into it (which took quite a while, I have to admit). The jumping from past to present, and back again, is effective, even if it doesn't necessarily add suspense. I'm anxious to read more of his work, truth be told. But at the same time, there's a really certain cynicism here that turned me off, and the cover is just a sign of it. The main character's voice is so cynical, in fact, that I found it almost impossible to engage with him--I was interested, on some level, but more out of curiosity than sympathy. And this was a character that, truly, I should have loved and been heartbroken by. But I wasn't. And the pessimism compelling the book forward, soaking the paragraphs, made it a less than enjoyable read. As a result, I'm not actually sure who I'd recommend this to, short of English students or academics looking for a particular type of read. Even now, I'm not really sure how I feel about it. And I probably could have walked away from it for weeks on end... if I hadn't been desperate to finish it so that I could never look at the cover again.

All told, I'm anxious to read more of Boyle's work. I'm not sure that reading this one, though, was worth dealing with the cover.

ich glaube, das ist mein Lieblingsbuch. jedenfalls eins davon.

Survived one chapter. Nothing in it made me want to read more.

Still my favourite T.C. Boyle book. Just devastating, odd, funny, superbly written. his people are so... perfectly people, if that makes sense. Highly recommended.

I tried reading this book multiple times over the years and couldn’t get into it. Recently I picked it back up and started over. This could almost be a horror book because it feels to real as to what could happen to our Earth. It’s a frustrating, relatable and at times down right depressing but he finds humor among the flooded world. It was a great read. His writing is unique, he really paints a picture for you, not always a pretty one but a detailed one! Would read again.

ok so, this is supposed to be an eco thriller but to be completely honest, it was everything and nothing all at once.

This novel is set in the future of the year 2025 (barely now but T.C. Boyle has written this book in 2000) and mentions Earth Forever! (real organisation is a ecocritic organisation called Earth Now! but this fun fact unfortunately did not add any fun to my reading enjoyment) for which Ty Tierwater and his sometimes-wife Andrea works. He is passionate about this organisation, vandalises Cats (the construction machine not the animal) and is generally a well-rounded human being. He is also veeery conceited, takes no responsibility when he gets into jail for his vandalising actions and occasionally throws in a sexist remark regarding his wife Andrea.

To round things out and to end on a singular high note - I liked the mentioning of a Patagonian fox Andrea and Ty take on - the last of her kind in this kind of apocalyptic future in 2025. Her name is Petunia, an endearing name and my favourite character in the book.

This is one weird novel, but it sticks in your mind because of that. The apocalyptic future that is painted in the western US is very real with climate gone awry and floods and droughts everywhere. The protagonist takes care of animals that are being "saved" by a famous performer. His daughter died by falling from a tree she was in to protest deforestation.

Originally published in 2000, A Friend of the Earth by T. C. Boyle is a gripping, humorous and emotional novel which charts the life of committed eco-activist Ty Tierwater and his battles to confront humanity’s destruction of nature. I first encountered an excerpt from this book several years ago when reading the anthology I’m With The Bears: Short Stories From a Damaged Planet. The chapter ‘The Siskiyou, July 1989’ was something of a revelation for me then, a powerful, slow-reveal vignette in which a man, his wife, young daughter and another set out under cover of night on an arduous and forlorn protest against the logging of the virgin Oregon forest. The horror builds as you realise not only of the protestors’ helplessness when confronted by the loggers and the local police, but also in the love of a father for his daughter as they endure the physical and psychological torment of their protest. Boyle captures both the comedy and torment of a father torn between the love of his daughter and his attempts to fight against humanity’s rampant ecocide. As I started to read A Friend of the Earth this last fortnight, I recalled this tale and realised that this was a novel that speaks directly to one of the key dilemmas of our time: how one makes sense of the destruction of the natural world.

The novel opens in the surreal Californian countryside of 2025; a land wracked by drenching storms and stifling heat – a climate in meltdown and a society fast unravelling. At this late stage in his life, Ty Tierwater is a cynical caretaker for a bizarre menagerie of exotic animals owned by a reclusive ex-pop star. Ty’s former wife Andrea re-enters his life as the zoo’s animals escape, and the novel then oscillates between defining moments in his life and his climate-shocked ‘present’.

A rollicking, satirical read, Boyle cleverly develops Ty’s life story around his growing disgust at humanity’s relentless destruction of nature. Initially a reluctant environmentalist, through Andrea’s influence he becomes a committed eco-warrior and under the weight of his failed protests and subsequent jail-time, his resolve hardens and his methods become more extreme. As Ty declares ‘to be a friend of the earth you have to be an enemy of the people’. Modelled loosely on the example of eco-activist groups such as Earth First!, Boyle skilfully invests the story with the details and events of Ty’s mission; the species of owls, amphibians and trees that are endemic to the Oregon and Californian forests; the traffic jams and chaos of American suburban sprawl; the detailed process of ‘monkeywrenching’ the logging trucks and other machinery that Ty is at war with. The various defeats and humiliations he endures fail to dim his determination to change things, even if this means saving one small piece of the whole. As a result, Boyle creates a sympathetic anti-hero; an outsider reminiscent of the misanthropes in a Kurt Vonnegut or Carl Hiaasen novel.

Nor is this a simple morality tale. From Ty’s perspective, society is a consumerist nightmare, and the loggers, police and investigators are thugs and hypocrites. Yet, as in life, there are no neat happy endings, and Boyle emphasises the compromises and contradictions that underlie environmentalism. For instance, the co-option of increasingly corporatized environmental organisations is also neatly skewered, paralleling Naomi Klein’s more recent critique of ‘Big Green’.

While published seventeen years ago, A Friend of the Earth is more timely today than ever. In an era of climate crisis, the continued expansion of the fossil fuel industry, and the election of a US President hell-bent on destroying what piecemeal environmental protections currently exist, there is much about this novel that resonates deeply. As Aldo Leopold (1949: 183) noted nearly seventy years ago: ‘one of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds…[an ecologist] sees the marks of death in a community that believes itself well and does not want to be told otherwise.’

In the unequal battle of the economy versus the environment, A Friend of the Earth captures many of the dilemmas faced by those aware of the harm we are unleashing on this planet; the lonely and often futile fight to try and limit our own creative self-destruction.

Written in the year 2000, the story looks ahead to 2025, when most of the animals on the earth are extinct, vegetation is disappearing, and the weather alternates between flood-making rain and spirit-sapping heat. Ty Tierwater is in his 70s, working for an obscenely rich rock star as caretaker of his group of animals that no one else cares about. The other side of the story takes place in the 1980s when Ty was an environmental advocate following the lead of his wife, Andrea, in protesting forest destruction in Oregon. With a teenage daughter involved, his anger at the authorities who respond to their protests turns Ty into more of an eco-terrorist than Andrea could have foreseen. We alternate between the two time periods until the story is more or less continuous. I appreciated the focus on ecology, but also the irony and satire. The protesters were right, but could their actions have made any difference?

Damn, TCB is a good writer. Every sentence is chock-full of description that sends the reader to the writer's imagined setting. I don't usually read or enjoy futuristic novels, but found this tale very entertaining, perhaps because I am a CA resident. I can easily imagine this all happening sooner than later, and I actually find the characters somewhat believable. 2025 isn't far off, as every few years the wildfires become more and more catastrophic, the El nino winters get crazier, and species continue dying off every second. This entertaining novel (unfortunately) reads like prophecy if we don't get our lawmakers and citizens to see the value of taking science serious in terms of global climate change. Note: this is by no means a political book; it's just a fictional story.

Man sollte in dem Buch wohl nicht vor dem Schlafen lesen und auch nicht, wenn man schlechte Laune hat. Es ist erschreckend und deprimierend und der flapsige Sarkasmus vermag mich nicht zu täuschen. Es ist gut und gut geschrieben, aber auch beinahe unerträglich.

I do not recommend reading this during a pandemic! I had to put it aside because it was too depressing. Mucosa virus and masks? Eek! I'm not even sure why I pressed on to get through this book, truth be told. Perhaps I did it for the animals. I certainly didn't find the humour people keep mentioning in reviews here. Maybe it's there and too close to home at the moment so I couldn't see it? I'm waffling between giving this 2 or 3 stars. I'll leave it at 3 because animals. And now I need to read something very fluffy and funny to get my head out of this bleak future.