A Hologram for the King by Dave Eggers

Author:Dave Eggers
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9781938073311
Publisher: McSweeney's
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

They walked through the jungle and she talked about the work she wanted to do, which sounded like saving the world.

—No, no! she said. That’s the opposite of what I mean. That’s what the flakes do and say. I’m talking about something far more serious.

She raged about people of great skill and empathy wasting their time on sideshows, on minor issues, trivial matters. She had a thing about animal rights. It wasn’t so much the pandas and whales that bothered her, but the cat-spaying people, the hamster-saving people.

—Fine, fine, treat them well, she fumed, meaning the animals. But all the money, all the lawyers and ad campaigns and protests for bunnies and rats in laboratories! If you could channel all that energy toward saving the lives of the world’s underfed!

Alan would nod. He didn’t know that there was a zero-sum equation at play. But this was exactly her point. The energy expended on nonessential issues was what was holding back any progress on the most pressing problems. Alan was in awe of her brilliance and energy, if not her anger. She was exasperated by the persistence of global crises that seemed to her imminently solvable. She wrote letters to senators, to governors, to people of influence at the IMF. She insisted he read each one, while she sat across the room, her look positively postcoital. She thought, each time, that she’d written the Magna Carta. Afterward, his job was to tell her that Senator Y or Z would be insane not to see the logic in her reasoning, all while trying to temper her expectations.

But this was impossible. There was no middle ground in what she wanted for the world, for herself, for a husband.

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