Dave Eggers's 'The Circle' Takes Vengeance on Google, Facebook | Hacker News Reader

Dave Eggers's 'The Circle' Takes Vengeance on Google, Facebook

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45 pointsRockyMcNuts29 comments

Upton Sinclair wrote the The Jungle as a call for socialist action, and it was only because of the public's disgust at the very unsanitary conditions of food production that the FDA and food purity laws were created. This novel seems to be depicting a totally fictional and exaggerated environment for satire. Not the same thing as The Jungle at all.

The irony is that Sinclair was advocating for worker's rights. He wanted a Department of Labor and workplace safety. The public saw tainted food and demanded improvements. They got an FDA.

I believe the line goes something like, "Sinclair aimed for the public's heart, but instead hit its stomach."

Quite.

Though didn't Sinclair admit to embellishing the conditions in the meat packing industry to stir up emotions in his readers. The stories of workers falling in rendering vats and being included in the final product were almost certainly apocryphal.

It's worth noting that Sinclair invented his stories of "very unsanitary conditions of food production". They had very little basis in reality. Rather, Sinclair took any disgusting story or allegation he could find, assumed them true and typical, exaggerated for dramatic effect and invented new additional allegations. It was a work of fiction, not a report. It is true that new federal inspection laws were passed in response, but Upton himself opposed the new law, recognizing it as the boondoggle it was. (The meatpackers wanted it as a way to get federal taxpayers to fund inspection/certification that the packing companies otherwise had had to pay for themselves.)

http://www.fee.org/the_freeman/detail/ideas-and-consequences...

Apropos theft, Eggers may have "appropriated" the work - and life - of Kate Losse for his book: https://medium.com/p/bf1a7c77873b.

http://www.theatlanticwire.com/technology/2013/09/did-dave-e...

Can we stop listening to her after she admits she didn't read his book? That's pretty ballsy to libel Eggers without even cracking the spine.

Did you read her book? Her point is not that Eggers plagiarized her wholesale, rather that the themes, characters, and plot are uncannily similar to those of her book. But his work receives buzz and hers is passed over. Somehow a hyperbolized book of fiction written by a famous white man is worthy of attention and lofty comparisons while a memoir by a woman who experienced 'boy kings' firsthand, dealing with identical themes, is overlooked.

"If you say 'Mae Holland; out loud it sounds like the same phonetic structure as my name,"

Kate Losse, May Holland, Kate Losse, May Holland... hmm.. is not particularly close.

Also, one is fiction, one isn't. Last time I checked it was completely normal to write fiction based on amalgamations of real situations. And given that it is satire, this would also seem to be a prerequisite in this case.

Now while there is certainly sexism in the world, in the world of books we are long past the days where female authors had to change their names to be successful. If her book did not do well, perhaps she should look to the form and content rather than her gender. If you look at the bestseller lists, women are solidly represented and are commonly the majority. The main disparity is not gender, but fiction vs non-fiction. Fiction sells much better.

Source on fiction selling better than non-fiction?

I can't think of any explanation for a book written by an early female employee at Facebook receiving little attention other than a clear judgment about the value of the author's voice.

> Source on fiction selling better than non-fiction?

I'm not the OP, but I think the claim is ambiguous at best:

http://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/fi...

	                   2010	           2011	         % Change
    Adult Nonfiction	271,518,000	263,030,000	-3.1%
    Adult Fiction	194,775,000	160,336,000	-17.7
    Juvenile Nonfiction	36,931,000	35,799,000	-3.0
    Juvenile Fiction	151,116,000	143,316,000	-5.2

Based on that statistic, nonfiction outsells fiction among adults, but among juveniles it's the other way around.

Those figures are only for print books, on ebooks fiction massively outsells non-fiction, which is where the 17.7 percent drop in adult fiction sales in print are coming from in your figures. http://goodereader.com/blog/electronic-readers/e-book-fans-d...

It is hard to get good figures overall, but if you include both print and ebook, it seems to be about 60% fiction and 40% non fiction.

Reading her Medium essay does not induce me to give her the benefit of the doubt.

I just pre-purchased this book and used the Amazon feature to "share this purchase on facebook."

I read "A Heart Breaking Work of Staggering Genius", a book partly about the death of his parents, after my mom died as a recommendation--it was fairly insufferable to say the least. I couldn't empathize with it at all. I'm very interested in social commentary on tech and social, especially given my trade, but I doubt it will be anything but hype. The Amazon comments are pretty funny.

Do you have to empathize in order to like it? Have you read "Lolita?"

No, but i would have expected empathy given the proximity to my moms death. It was so self absorbed even that wasn't enough for me to like it.

I'm struggling with how we can have any real commentary on a book which has not yet been published.

The accolades the writer of the article gives makes me wonder: Was 'The Jungle' hyped up by the media before or after its release?

I don't mean to take away from the subject at hand, but If people haven't changed their behavior after NSA's doings went mainstream, what makes one think a book will be the straw that breaks the camels back, and do people need to be prodded into doing the Right Thing™? That would seem no more sincere than muse of the book…

In today's culture I don't think a book will do it. People don't read books for pleasure or information like they did when The Jungle was published.

People don't read books for pleasure or information like they did when The Jungle was published.

Of course they still do.

If anything, a larger percentage of people read books than they did in 1906. Around ten percent of the population of the USA was illiterate back then.

"Can read" is different from "do read".

"Overall, the number of book readers in late 2012 was 75% of the population ages 16 and older, a small and statistically insignificant decline from 78% in late 2011."

http://libraries.pewinternet.org/2012/12/27/e-book-reading-j...

"Privacy is theft," that is a good one, really.

i guess in sinclair's time it would have been the letter pages of the press where people would say how the work was nothing but hype, or plagiarism, or something much less important than whatever it was being compared to.

you've come so far, hn.

Paid plug.

You think so? How about this quote from the article:

> As it is, "The Circle" is not great literature.

Personally, I wouldn't pay for such a plug.

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