Boyle writes about never-ordinary people and their places. The first book I read was "Drop City" and that along with the ones about Kinsey and Kellogg are my favorites, but all of them are fascinating trips.
The Road to Wellville "Set in Battle Creek, Mich., in the early years of the century, it evokes the days of C. W. Post and Will Kellogg, when fortunes were being made and lost in the national rage for the new breakfast cereals. Will's brother, John Harvey Kellogg, was an early diet devotee; to his hugely successful Battle Creek Spa came the flower of American business and society to trim their waistlines, work out and eat the kind of healthy, tasteless foods sadly recognizable to any weight watcher today. Kellogg, a showman par excellence, ran it like a small but ruthless dictatorship."
The Inner Circle "Released in the late 1940s and early '50s, the Kinsey Reports, the compilations of a scientific study that attempted to quantify male and female sexual behavior, shocked Americans with revelations about their sexuality. Indiana University professor Alfred Kinsey's obsessive belief that the human need for sex is little different from animal instinct, and his iconoclastic research methods (including voyeurism and personal interactions), make Kinsey (called "Prok" by students and intimates) a fitting subject for Boyle's irrepressible imagination."
Drop City"Set in the 1970s, Boyle entertains readers with the denizens of "Drop City," a counterculture California commune that welcomes anyone wanting to live off the grid, use drugs, and practice free love. Boyle sublimely captures the sociology of its rebellious members, who doubt the sincerity or beliefs of newcomers, express some insecurity about nonconformity, and chastise outsiders while remaining oblivious to their own hypocrisy. Marco, Pan, Star, and other "cats" and "chicks" live hassle-free until dissention and cries of racism mount amid increasing run-ins with the local government (a young girl is raped, installation of a sewage system is mandated, a mother lets her toddlers drink LSD-laced juice). Seeking refuge, the citizens move north, to Alaska, to reinvent their utopia, but soon learn the natural environment is more unforgiving of a lackadaisical lifestyle."
A Friend of the Earth"During the 1980s and '90s, Ty Tierwater had exchanged a sedately acquisitive existence--"the slow-rolling glacier of my old life, my criminal life, the life I led before I became a friend of the earth"--for a fairly ambivalent position on the front lines of an ecoterrorist posse called Earth Forever! The only complication is his dual penchant for empathy and ineptitude, exacerbated by a frustration that swells with accumulating incitements. After his daughter is taken from him, and his second wife, Andrea, becomes more committed to the cause than to their marriage, Ty finds solace in blind destruction. He serves his almost predictable terms in jail; he endures the eventual death--and martyrdom--of his activist daughter, Sierra. At 75, and a quarter of the way into the dismal and decayed 21st century, he unaccountably finds himself tending an eccentric rock star's private mini-zoo of ragged animals and wryly lamenting the collapse of his race. And then Andrea resurfaces--along with his long-fallow faith in love."
Riven Rock"In 1905, Stanley McCormick, heir to East Coast millions, is most definitely mad. Heredity and an early, horrifying glimpse of his naked sister have rendered him schizophrenic, incapable of being around women--right down to his wife, Katherine, "a newlywed who might as well have been a widow." Not even the dawn of modern psychiatry can save him. Instead, he's barred and carefully cosseted in Riven Rock, the California estate he helped design for his sister, the first of the McCormicks to crack. Will the 31-year-old patient be cured? His wife, the first female graduate of MIT, believes that he will. So, too, does his loyal head nurse, Eddie O'Kane, a preternaturally articulate, handsome Boston Irishman. Indeed, Eddie thinks himself blessed with good luck. Going to Montecito to care for Mr. McCormick will, he is convinced, enable him to take center stage in the drama of his own life."
