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Book Reviewed by:Winner of the prestigious PEN/Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction, And West Is West is an inspired novel about two young people who learn, the hard way, about the devastating power of new technology to isolate us from the consequences of our actions.
When Jessica, a young Air Force drone pilot in Nevada, is tasked with launching a missile against a suspected terrorist halfway across the world, she realizes that though women and children are in the crosshairs of her screen, she has no choice but to follow orders. Ethan, a young Wall Street quant, is involved in a more bloodless connection to war when he develops an algorithm that enables his company's clients to profit by exploiting the international financial instability caused by exactly this kind of antiterrorist strike. These two are only minor players, but their actions have global implications that tear lives apart - including their own. When Jessica finds herself discharged from the service and Ethan makes an error that costs him his job, both find themselves adrift, cast out by a corrupt system and forced to take the blame for decisions they did not make.
In And West Is West, Ron Childress has crafted a powerful, politically charged, and terrifyingly real scenario that takes readers into the lives of characters living in different worlds yet bound together by forces beyond their control.
PEN/Bellwether Prize
2014
Novels with a strong social message – much like vegan food – tend to come in two types: blatantly good for you with little attempt to dress up the flavor, or deceptively healthy, so tasty you don't even realize you are consuming something that's beneficial. The former tend to favor theme over plot or characterization. The latter category is harder to pull off, requiring embedding a social agenda within a compelling, organic story. These differing approaches kept coming to mind as I read Ron Childress' And West is West, a novel that addresses some serious, even urgent, social questions but which seems at times more interested in scoring quick points for being socially conscious than really exploring the issues it raises in a thoughtful and thorough way...continued
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(Reviewed by James Broderick).
Societal awareness of PTSD – post-traumatic stress disorder – has certainly increased over the past several years. What was once a term familiar mostly to combat veterans and survivors of abuse, and their therapists, is now much more widely recognized. For most people outside the military and medical communities, the term probably calls to mind a chaotic, frightening image of combat: military patrols amid firefights and ambushes, soldiers dodging sniper fire, and roaring artillery shells maiming soldiers and civilians.
But as war has changed so too have some of the casualties of war-related stress. With a huge uptick in militarized drone strikes over the past several years, the U.S. military is now facing a problem in the loss ...
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Barbara Kingsolver
Impressive and keenly relevant to our time, And West Is West weaves seamlessly between drone strikes and high-speed trading on Wall Street. I devoured it in forty-eight hours, and during the hours I wasn't reading it, I was thinking about it. I still am.
