Rating:
(524 reviews)
Author: Visit Amazon's Dave Eggers Page
ISBN : 0385351399
New from $14.35
Format: PDF
Download electronic versions of selected books Epub The Circle Hardcover for everyone book mediafire, rapishare, and mirror link
Amazon.com Review
An Amazon Best Book of the Month, October 2013: As a fiction writer, indie publishing icon and education activist Dave Eggers neither suffers fools gladly nor treads lightly. With his signature mix of intelligence and highly literate snark, he dives headlong into contemporary crises--Hurricane Katrina, the Sudanese civil war--through the lens of a single character whose perspective we get to know intimately. In his new novel, Eggers tackles a modern problem that doesn't always seem like one: our near constant hunger for communication. When Mae Holland takes a job at the Circle, a tech giant with a utopian culture and cultlike following (Eggers didn't call it Schmoogle, but may as well have), she quickly loses sight of her friends, family, and sense of self in favor of professional success and social acceptance. As her Circle star rises, Mae succumbs to the corporate code of full disclosure, eventually agreeing to "go transparent" and let the public watch--and comment on--her every move. "Privacy is theft," decrees the company motto; "Secrets are lies." It's not subtle, but neither were "Harrison Bergeron" and 1984, and in its best moments The Circle is equally terrifying. Let's just hope it's not prescient. --Mia Lipman
From Booklist
*Starred Review* Most of us imagine totalitarianism as something imposed upon us—but what if we’re complicit in our own oppression? That’s the scenario in Eggers’ ambitious, terrifying, and eerily plausible new novel. When Mae gets a job at the Circle, a Bay Area tech company that’s cornered the world market on social media and e-commerce, she’s elated, and not just because of the platinum health-care package. The gleaming campus is a wonder, and it seems as though there isn’t anything the company can’t do (and won’t try). But she soon learns that participation in social media is mandatory, not voluntary, and that could soon apply to the general population as well. For a monopoly, it’s a short step from sharing to surveillance, to a world without privacy. This isn’t a perfect book—the good guys lecture true-believer Mae, and a key metaphor is laboriously explained—but it’s brave and important and will draw comparisons to Brave New World and 1984. Eggers brilliantly depicts the Internet binges, torrents of information, and endless loops of feedback that increasingly characterize modern life. But perhaps most chilling of all is his notion that our ultimate undoing could be something so petty as our desperate desire for affirmation. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Eggers’ reputation as a novelist continues to grow. Expect this title to be talked about, as it has an announced first printing of 200,000 and the New York Times Magazine has first serial rights. --Keir Graff
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Direct download links available for Epub The Circle
- Hardcover: 504 pages
- Publisher: Knopf (October 8, 2013)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0385351399
- ISBN-13: 978-0385351393
- Product Dimensions: 8.7 x 6.5 x 1.8 inches
- Shipping Weight: 1.7 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
Epub The Circle
1. If a social media corporation were to achieve a complete monopoly of all public and private information, we'd be in danger of becoming a totalitarian society.
2. People often willingly give up their privacy for convenience, societal benefit, or a needy and self-centered desire for affirmation.
If these premises seem facile to you, you might not enjoy Dave Egger's new novel, the Circle.
The writing is straight, mainstream, third-person limited narration. You won't find any of the layered themes, complex metaphor, formal experimentalism, stylistic prose or psychological lyricism common in modern literary fiction. Whether you'll consider this a bug or a feature is mainly a matter of taste; but it's worth mentioning, given Eggers' McSweeney's pedigree (this is the first book I've read by Eggers, so I wasn't sure what to expect).
The protagonist is Mae Holland, an enthusiastic, naive and downright submissive young woman (surprise) who gets a job in customer service at the Circle, a company which, having subsumed Google, Facebook and Twitter, is on the brink of achieving the complete monopoly mentioned above. Mae does not think deeply or critically about anything that happens to her, and her motivations are often inexplicable. These are qualities that serve Eggers' narrative goals more effectively than they do the reader's enjoyment.
Eggers' goals seem to ride directly on the surface of the narrative. Almost every scene reads like a mini-lesson on the deceptive utopianism of the huge dot-coms, the superficiality and false emotional appeal of online "sharing", or the creepiness of voluntary corporate surveillance.
"The Circle" by Dave Eggers is an exciting story that in many ways brings the memories of the cult novel "1984" by George Orwell.
The book's main character is young woman Mae who finished college and plan to start her career. With the help of her friend, she will start working at the company named "The Circle" that provides everything anyone can need for a comfortable and relaxed work.
Although she cannot believe how fortunate she was to start working there, she will quickly realize that the success on her work position is associated with activities that are anything but voluntary, like attending events and sharing everything with the Circle community, about each and every minute of her life, or just like company motto is saying: "Sharing is Caring".
Slowly she began to be obsessed with her job that leads to conflicts with her family and friends who can no longer recognize her.
And when "The Circle" will release some new programs in order to find out every detail of everyone's life, little by little it becomes clear that the company's objectives are far different and more serious than what can be seen on the surface...
"The Circle" is a book with a bit predictable plot but still it will keep you to turn the pages until its end that is probably the weakest (at least for me) or the best part of the book. But this is a matter of taste and I don't want you to spoil the thrill of reading by disclosing any details.
Nevertheless, it's exciting, fun to read although somehow creepy due to above-mentioned similarity to some other actual companies and their products. Similarity that can lead human society to the world of total transparency, where people don't have any secrets, but don't have any life and privacy either.
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