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TRUMP SKY ALPHA

An acid satire that might have been funnier in sunnier times.

After the world ends, a widowed reporter is assigned to investigate whether the internet—and, by extension, human civilization—meant anything at all.

This pitch-dark satire by Doten (The Infernal, 2015) takes all the author’s previously demonstrated predilections for skewing popular culture and dials it up to 11, at least in the horrifying prelude to everything that comes after. The opening sequence is charitably meant to be an absurd and garish caricature of the American presidency, but it might well serve as a trigger to those disgusted by the lies and disinformation that emerge from the White House daily: A diseased and rambling leader, isolated on his titular airship, drops his ridiculous tweets even as he uses the military’s “wonderful codes” to rain nuclear fire down on the world. By comparison, the rest of the novel is relatively benign despite launching with a fragment of text, alone on a page, that reads in total: “the sheriff of sucking u off is made of fire.” Rachel is a horrified survivor first, former journalist second, who takes refuge in the Twin Cities Metro Containment Zone. She only wants to find out what happened to her presumably deceased wife and daughter and so reluctantly takes an assignment from a revived New York Times Magazine to write “a piece on internet humor at the end of the world.” From here, Doten serves up an underground-flavored conspiracy thriller involving an obscure novel that inspires a true-life hacktivist group called the Aviary to take down the world that’s left. The main narrative is seeded with fragments, memes, and pop-culture narratives, but the story that emerges is horrifying. The hunt for a password to unlock what’s left of the internet takes Rachel to a sadistic cult leader who mutilates her in grotesque fashion and spends what’s left of the novel confessing his crimes. The end result is imaginatively political and experientially gross.

An acid satire that might have been funnier in sunnier times.

Pub Date: Feb. 19, 2019

ISBN: 978-1-55597-828-0

Page Count: 192

Publisher: Graywolf

Review Posted Online: Oct. 27, 2018

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2018

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THE HANDMAID'S TALE

Tinny perhaps, but still a minutely rendered and impressively steady feminist vision of apocalypse.

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The time is the not-so-distant future, when the US's spiraling social freedoms have finally called down a reaction, an Iranian-style repressive "monotheocracy" calling itself the Republic of Gilead—a Bible-thumping, racist, capital-punishing, and misogynistic rule that would do away with pleasure altogether were it not for one thing: that the Gileadan women, pure and true (as opposed to all the nonbelieving women, those who've ever been adulterous or married more than once), are found rarely fertile.

Thus are drafted a whole class of "handmaids," whose function is to bear the children of the elite, to be fecund or else (else being certain death, sent out to be toxic-waste removers on outlying islands). The narrative frame for Atwood's dystopian vision is the hopeless private testimony of one of these surrogate mothers, Offred ("of" plus the name of her male protector). Lying cradled by the body of the barren wife, being meanwhile serviced by the husband, Offred's "ceremony" must be successful—if she does not want to join the ranks of the other disappeared (which include her mother, her husband—dead—and small daughter, all taken away during the years of revolt). One Of her only human conduits is a gradually developing affair with her master's chauffeur—something that's balanced more than offset, though, by the master's hypocritically un-Puritan use of her as a kind of B-girl at private parties held by the ruling men in a spirit of nostalgia and lust. This latter relationship, edging into real need (the master's), is very effectively done; it highlights the handmaid's (read Everywoman's) eternal exploitation, profane or sacred ("We are two-legged wombs, that's all: sacred vessels, ambulatory chalices"). Atwood, to her credit, creates a chillingly specific, imaginable night-mare. The book is short on characterization—this is Atwood, never a warm writer, at her steeliest—and long on cynicism—it's got none of the human credibility of a work such as Walker Percy's Love In The Ruins. But the scariness is visceral, a world that's like a dangerous and even fatal grid, an electrified fence.

Tinny perhaps, but still a minutely rendered and impressively steady feminist vision of apocalypse.

Pub Date: Feb. 17, 1985

ISBN: 038549081X

Page Count: -

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin

Review Posted Online: Sept. 16, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1985

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THINGS FALL APART

This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.

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Written with quiet dignity that builds to a climax of tragic force, this book about the dissolution of an African tribe, its traditions, and values, represents a welcome departure from the familiar "Me, white brother" genre.

Written by a Nigerian African trained in missionary schools, this novel tells quietly the story of a brave man, Okonkwo, whose life has absolute validity in terms of his culture, and who exercises his prerogative as a warrior, father, and husband with unflinching single mindedness. But into the complex Nigerian village filters the teachings of strangers, teachings so alien to the tribe, that resistance is impossible. One must distinguish a force to be able to oppose it, and to most, the talk of Christian salvation is no more than the babbling of incoherent children. Still, with his guns and persistence, the white man, amoeba-like, gradually absorbs the native culture and in despair, Okonkwo, unable to withstand the corrosion of what he, alone, understands to be the life force of his people, hangs himself. In the formlessness of the dying culture, it is the missionary who takes note of the event, reminding himself to give Okonkwo's gesture a line or two in his work, The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger.

This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.

Pub Date: Jan. 23, 1958

ISBN: 0385474547

Page Count: 207

Publisher: McDowell, Obolensky

Review Posted Online: April 23, 2013

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1958

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