I don’t write reviews. There was no reason for me to suspect this would be a supernatural tale, but I did, and it wasn’t. No worries. Barry’s stories are always weird enough for me. He has a singular charm which is always a pleasure to meet. Corporate society is so vile and abhorrent to nature. I enjoy to see it thoroughly satirized and lampooned. Imagine a world without structured jobs. We used to live that way. Now we enjoy a new style of indentured servitude. It was important for me to find a...

COMPANY, Max Barry’s brilliant piece of satire, takes us inside Zephyr Holdings, a corporate monolith whose employees are so deeply buried in office politics and the day-to-day struggle to meet quotas and adjust to constant reorgs that none of them has a clear picture of just what the company does. New hire, Stephen Jones, is so excited by his job prospects that he dares to go in to see the CEO and find out. It’s far more Machiavellian than anyone could ever imagine. Zephyr Holdings, apparently ...

For the first 100 pages, I was thinking to myself, "Genius! This is a rip-roaring, laugh-out-loud (in the literal sense of the phrase), spot-on scalding satire of corporate culture. Each of author Max Barry's initial poison-tipped arrows hit the corporate bulls-eye...the use of the elevator buttons to visualize the corporate hierarchy; the inanity of corporate voice-mail; the over-confidence of MBAs; the invisibility of the CEO; the meaninglessness of the company mission statement; or the aimles...

I really enjoy corporate cubicle fiction, for some reason. Books like Then We Came to the End by Joshua Ferris, and I’ll even include Last Night at the Brain Thieves Ball by Scott Spencer. Company is sort of a mix of these, in as much as there’s the petty politics of working in a cube farm, and a deeper conspiracy fueling the intrigue. Don’t read Company if you feel good about the corporation you work for and don’t want that feeling challenged. Calling Max Barry "cynical" is like calling Microso...

If you've ever worked in a large corporate environment, you'll recognize the characters in the book. And you'll laugh about it. Or you'll smirk. You've read another big corporation satire, and maybe you'll give it to someone else who works in a large corporation, as if to say, "Look, corporate life IS stupid. Just because we buy into it every day doesn't mean that we're a part of it." Maybe you'll add a "LOL" to the end. Or say L-O-L, which you'll (hopefully) regret saying later. And that's it. ...

Anyone who has worked in corporate bureaucracy would find something to laugh about in this book; which tells the story of a company that exists only as a research lab for the authors of the "Omega Management System". This should give you a good idea of the book's tone: There are stories — legends, really — of the “steady job.” Old-timers gather graduates around the flickering light of a computer monitor and tell stories of how the company used to be, back when a job was for life, not just for th...

Max Barry's Company is a corporate satire for those that might find Douglas Coupland a bit too challenging. One of the many problems with humorous satires (oh there are many, the number one problem being tied between them not being very astute and not being funny) is that once the premise (joke, social observation) is set up then the author has to make a book out of it. Like just about every movie made that is based on a Saturday Night Live skit, there is painful a realization, which comes about...

I wanted to like this book, just like I wanted to like Jennifer Government but ultimately it fails and for the same reasons. There's just no depth here. Maybe I shouldn't look for any, just accept it as light-hearted satire. Still, the entire story line feels contrived, existing only to point out truths that we all know anyway: big corporations don't care about their employees. Maybe if just one senior manager was given a small amount of depth, rising above the expensive suit-wearing, golf-playi...

This book could have been so good - but wasn't. Anyone who has worked anywhere in the last 20 years will recognise, with some pain, stuff written here - the nightmares of quality improvement plans, the language mangling this is ‘mission statements’ and the feeling that work has become an experiment performed on us by our less than benevolent overlords – all of this ought to have made for a very funny book. You know, in the all-too-uncomfortable sense that we laugh and cry about the same things. ...

This is based upon the audio download from [http://www.Audible.com]Narrated by: William DufrisThere have been various comments about this reader…either love him or hate him. I happily align with the former. Since there are many other sources for a review of the book, I’ll comment only what makes this different, the reader. With so many characters in the story, I found different voices the reader used for each helpful and delightful in the reading of this very clever story. I rate William Dufris ...