' PERSONAL DATA ' : BOOK REVIEW SNIPPET

' CLOUDTHIEF '. By Nathaniel Rich. Author Nathaniel Rich has been authoritative voice on the climate beat for more than a decade, publishing books and magazine stories that document our radically changing planet and the ways humans respond to it.

His 2013 novel, '' Odds Against Tomorrow '' envisioned - in a way that felt cutting edge at the time - a cataclysmic hurricane that floods New York City.

In '' Losing Earth '' [ 2019 ], Rich chronicled the crucial years when we first grasped humankind's destructive impacts but failed to contain them while we still could.

Tim, the bumbling protagonist of Rich's fourth novel, '' Cloudthief, '' is a climate journalist who writes magazine pieces that sound a lot like Rich's. But He's markedly less successful.

Unlike Rich, Tim has no prizes or books to his name, and he barely scrapes by on freelance checks.

When Virginia, an alluring, privacy obsessed woman he meets by chance proposes they work together to steal servers from a data center and use the information they contain for profit, he's almost instantly game.

Maybe the plan will work, and Tim will be freed from the crumbling magazine industry. Maybe it won't, but he will somehow [ he tells himself ] spin it all into some truly great copy.

What follows is a road trip that culminates in a heist caper. Rich inhabits both of these familiar forms with brisk effectiveness - he's especially good with snappy dialogue - and sprinkles them with heft dusting of contemporary topicality.

There are frequent passages about climate change and digital surveillance that, with slight adjustments, would not be out of place in Rich's nonfiction. Most of this material would be familiar to his readers.

UNDERNEATH the topical coating, though, '' Cloudthief '' isn't really about data centers, privacy or climate change.

The book's main subject seems to be Tim's malaise - and perhaps, a broader contemporary malaise for which Tim's is meant to be a stand-in.

He's not just tired of climate journalists and the freelance life; he's tired of his life, Period.

" I guess you could say I had burned out [ or sunk into a hole ]. I couldn't go on.

But I couldn't afford to stop.......... I needed money or I wouldn't have an apartment.

Yes, I might have applied for a comms job, regurgitating the same press releases I received daily, but I'd rather roughneck on a rig in the Gulf. I needed ....... what, exactly? Glory? Love? Fulfillment?

Ye,. much of these things, along with a hundred inscrutable feelings threaded together in a mysterious totality, the shape and heft of which I had only begun to sense. '' 

!WOW! thanks Peter C. Baker.