Customer Reviews

The Dinosaur Club

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

There is no easy way to resize a company and many execs take the easy way by combining the need with greed. The affected are helpless unless they reach into their guts to find determination, courage, craftyness and imagination.

When Jack Fallon's life falls apart at both ends of his commute, he finds the craftyness and courage to confront his probelms with work and wife. Anyone ever confronted with either can relate to what happens as Fallon leads his co-workers and himself out of desperation but it ain't easy to fight executive and wifely greed at the same time.

I've worked for thirteen companies at the executive level, in marketing and with legal staff and I can't believe Heffernan hasn't also - that's how real his stuff is as he touches all the bases of divorce, its impact on the kids, a new love, being over fifty in the workplace, shallow management, aging parents, product defects and insider manipulation. Can Fallon cope with all this? I read The Dinosaur Club in one saession to find out...and so will you.

The premise got me interested in this book -- an executive leads a group of his employees in thwarting the corporation's plan to push them out one way or another. In the first chapters, I realized this was a true male fantasy -- middle-age protagonist and Vietnam war hero can still lead others, take on the organization, and win the sexy brainy young colleague. Nothing wrong with a good fantasy -- if it's well-written. This one is cliched writing throughout, and the convenient plot details make it too farfetched (this sort of fantasy needs the element of possibility.) I kept reading only to see how the plot plays out (unbelievably). The best part, and also the truest, was the depiction of the corporate executive being humiliated by the company in order to encourage resignations from the group targeted to be downsized. Also good, and original, was the hilarious chapter in which we learn the strategy that the protagonist's mother uses to insure she won't be "downsized" from the retirement home for lack of funds. If only the rest of the story had had this ingenuity. Not the story I hoped it would be.

Little did I know this would be a good diversion from my usual mystery stories. This is about corporate America from which I happily retired over five years ago.

Jack Fallon's wife of twenty-four years is divorcing him, and his employer, Waters Cable, is trying to rid the payroll of the `older', high salaried employees. Charlie Waters hired Jack when the company was just starting up; Charlie is still the CEO and Chairman and has pretty much forgotten Jack's efforts the past twenty-some years. Carter Bennett (born to wealth and snobbery) is the CFO and a smarmy, self-righteous prick who Charlie has hired to get rid of the alleged dead weight, while covering up the blatant age discrimination as best he can. Jack's entire marketing division has been targeted, so his band of not-so-merry cohorts form The Dinosaur Club and put up a fight to expose Charlie and Carter's ulterior motives.

This book was written in 1997 when `workforce imbalance corrections' (a/k/a downsizing) was one of the many corporate games played. The tactics used by management are somewhat true and the targeted employees' reactions are real. If you've ever worked in a large corporation, you'll get a kick out of this story.

kinda fun still. pls read michael moore's two non-fictions 'downsize this', 'dude, where's my country?' and then read donald westlake's 'the ax', to get a more realistic picture of america's corporates downsizing process started from the 90s, then you have to read some other books about america's 'outsourcing' problem in 21st century. i just don't know how long america could survive the prosperity, if all the working class simply can't find jobs anymore in this country.

There is no easy way to resize a company and many execs find an easy way by combining the need with greed. The affected are helpless unless they reach into their guts to find determination, courage, craftyness and imagination.

When Jack Fallon's life falls apart at both ends of his commute, he finds the craftyness and courage to confront his probelms with work and wife. Anyone ever confronted with either can relate to what happens as Fallon leads his co-workers and himself out of desperation but it ain't easy to fight executive and wifely greed at the same time.

I've worked for thirteen companies at the executive level, in marketing and with legal staff and I can't believe Heffernan hasn't also - that's how real his stuff is as he touches all the bases of divorce, its impact on the kids, a new love, being over fifty in the workplace, shallow management, aging parents, product defects and insider manipulation. Can Fallon cope with all this? I read The Dinosaur Club in one saession to find out...and so will you.

A jocose but pointed fable from Heffernan (Corsican Honor, 1992, etc.) pits aging executives against impatient young guns whose corporate strategies don't put people first. Jack Fallon's wife Trisha suddenly walks out on him after 24 years of more or less blissful wedlock. Badly jolted but stubbornly on the job as VP at Manhattan-based Waters Cable, the 49-year-old suburbanite learns through the grapevine that Carter Bennett, the company's unscrupulous young CFO, may be eyeing him, his senior associates, and their sizable pay packages as candidates for the big business equivalent of extinction. Instead of going quietly, Jack and his fellow targets resist the layoffs with preemptive strikes launched through a so-called Dinosaur Club they've organized. While their low-intensity revolt disrupts Carter's master plan to force as many older workers as possible from the payroll before instituting a mass dismissal, he presses on with a campaign of attrition. His presumed accomplice in this effort is Samantha Moore, a comely thirtysomething attorney who's been detailed to provide for a downsizing that won't result in a storm of discrimination suits. Increasingly disturbed by the nature of her big-chance assignment, Samantha eventually joins forces with the insurgents. In the meantime, Jack is being led a merry chase by the spouse from whom he's separated. The Vietnam vet nonetheless finds time to keep top management at bay and fall in love with clever Samantha, who returns his affections. The mechanics of how he and his over-the-hill gang turn the tables on their would-be tormentors will afford considerable comfort to those who believe age, experience, and cunning can overcome youth and enthusiasm almost every time. An enormously entertaining yarn that puts the concept of human resources in an arresting new perspective. (Film rights to Warner Bros.) -- Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Okay, the problem might be caused that the author did not have too much experience in making living in corporate jungle, he could only use imaginary thought-to-be or scenes he saw from the big screen to make up the make-belief story. If Fallon realized that he's gonna be a pink slip receiver and tried to fight back with his old bunch in his sales department, he should take the fight from an urban guerrilla war angle, since he indeed has some experience with the VietCong. But instead sneakily fought back for his own survial and those of the others, he did things so obviously and so stupidly by sending all of them a T shirt printed with dinosaurs and wore them in the gym publicly; giving plastic dinosaur toys digged out from his garage. What's going on? Was he stupid or something? His divorce lawyer warned him not to have new relationship during a vicious divorce process, but he could not help asking Samantha to stay over the weekend at his house. Was he stupid or what? I've never read anything so one-sided like Fallon's daughter who seemed to lack of any common sense and only trusted her mother. Was this a 7-year-old girl's IQ instead of a college student? If Fallon was a smart guy who was smart enough to win the corporate war, he should do everything subtlely but instead he threatened the dry clean guy if they refused to fix his shirts' lost buttons, he would break their shop's windows. A guy like Fallon would never be impossible to survive the VietNam war thirty years ago, and definitely would not survive the purge of the corporte war thirty years later. A very very stupid and totally focusless novel except Heffernan's writing style. Going-nowhere plots and scenarios, half-developed characters and happenings, ridiculous and superfluous corporate probes. All in all, I just don't know why WarnerBro would pay $1 million for this lousy and boring story instead of stealing stories from the French. If I were one of the Hollywood movie producers, I'd buy Donald Westlake's THE AX, a novel with mor! e sense of America's corporate downsizing culture and how a 50+-year old guy to deal with it desparately, or, I'd invest money in Michael Moore's war of fighting back the crazy and heartless Downsizing trend in American. END

This book was trash. Shallow, implausible, moronic plotlines and a writing style that is simulatiously glib and overwritten. The characters were heavy-handed and one-sided. A waste of three hours. And somebody please tell this guy to quit using the phrase "fait accompli"--once is enough.

The Dinosaur Club starts with its finger on the heartbeat of the nineties. Its tale of failed marriage and corporate greed will have most of its readers nodding their heads in acknowledgement as to how quickly things can unravel in this day and age. The novel takes us through the battlelines of a company's plan for downsizing and smacks of reality when it describes how the members of Jack Fallon's family react to his unexpected , and soon to get nasty, divorce. Unfortunately, reality takes a backseat when an elaborate, unbelievable plan is set up for revenge by the makeshift members of the Dinosaur Club. The book was a strong, interesting read, but I would have enjoyed it more if Heffernan would have ended it without straying far beyond the boundaries of fiction vs. fantasy

Warner Bros. reportedly paid a million bucks for this, and it will undoubtedly benefit from Harrison Ford in the tailor-made lead role of a still gorgeous and fit 50-something executive who takes on the snotty 30-something preppies (Xander Berkeley, Jay Mohr) who try to downsize a big company, bedding a younger female lawyer (Elizabeth Shue) along the way. As a thriller with something to say, though, it doesn't make a particularly satisfying experience-- that rock-hard hero is straight out of Tom Clancy, which only tends to remind you that this ISN'T how it would all work out in real life. And the humor is often crude (there's a fat foulmouthed yenta who really drives home the point that the author is NOT a woman), while the revenge the dinosaurs get on the yupposaurs is more vicious than ingenious. Still, none of these are problems that Hollywood won't be able to fix...