John Reed (2)Besprekingen

I never received my copy that I won in a GOODREADS giveaway back on December 07, 2016. I've reached out with no response. Sadly, I need to clear my reading queue & shall assign a 1 star rating. I was excited to have won and looked forward to reading. If I ever receive it, I'll read & post corrected review.

‘All the World’s a Grave’ is a mashup of five Shakespearean tragedies, Hamlet, Othello, Macbeth, King Lear, Romeo and Juliet, with some incidental offcuts from Henry V. The principal characters are Hamlet, Prince of Bohemia and Juliet, her father, King Lear of Aquitaine, Romeo, Macbeth and his Queen, the mother of Prince Hamlet. Rosenkranz and Guildenstern frolic in supporting roles. In a substantial Afterword, ‘Outro: Gist and Gybe’, John Reed justifies his travesty. Elizabethan dramatists were unconstrained by copyright: their inventions and innovations alternated with the cut and paste of old stock. ‘Shakespeare’s plays were monsters assembled from other monsters [so] that a fresh monstrosity can be assembled from Shakespeare. And, because of Shakespeare’s use of stock players and storylines, a new Shakespearian narrative is equally possible.’
Shakespeare’s texts constrain Reed's newly created monstrosity. He constructs his mashup by rearrangement and reattribution of the original texts. Apart from necessary name changes, altered pronouns, minor grammatical adjustments and occasional impudent asides Reed adds nothing to the texts. Prince Hamlet fights a war with Lear, captures Juliet as his bride and on his return to Bohemia discovers that his mother has murdered his father and married Macbeth. His father’s Ghost commands him to take vengeance on Macbeth but Hamlet is distracted by his groundless apprehension, stoked by Iago, that Juliet is playing false to him with Romeo. Hamlet goes mad. Everyone ends up dying, either murdered or by their own hand. The play ends when Lear, mourning his daughter Juliet, stabs himself – ‘O happy dagger! There is no evil lost. This is thy sheath’. Lear’s last words here are of course Juliet’s own quietus in the original.
What’s the point of reading ‘All the World’s a Grave?’ I found stimulation and enjoyment in the way familiar lines take on renewed intensity and psychedelic colour when transplanted to this new plot in the Shakespearean terrain. Hamlet compounded with Othello, believing himself twice betrayed, is an even more formidable madman: ‘How stand I that have a father killed, A mother stained, and a harlot for a wife? What sense had I of her stolen hours of lust? I saw it not…’ Hamlet's madness has its apotheosis in the brutal horror of his last command to Romeo, uttered in the false belief that Romeo has seduced Juliet, Hamlet's wife. Romeo says, ‘Sir, what you will command me will I do. Hamlet: ‘Romeo, kill Juliet; kill her dead’. [Romeo reaches for his sword]. Romeo: ‘What I can do, I will’. Hamlet: ‘Do it not by the sword; strangle her’ [he does so] Hamlet: ‘Good; good: the justice of it pleases’.
It’s not serious of course. It’s an exercise in travesty and enjoyable As such. Hamlet meets his own end at the hands of his old school-fellow, who also accounts for Iago. Hamlet's last words To his murderer are transposed, with felicitous impudence from another tragedy: ‘Et tu, Guildenstern?’
The reconstructed play is seriously disorienting. I would advise anyone taking it on to read the afterword, which contains the ’Gist’ of the play, first. Otherwise the magnetic pull of one’s existing knowledge of the characters and plots of the original plays will impede understanding of what’s going on. The Kindle version would be preferable to the printed version for its ready internet access to the originals but for a maddening defect. The electronic Kindle version takes no account of line lengths in the original verse with a consequent loss of fluent sense in reading the play.

I really had high expectations...I loved the time period and the setting. Alma was a sweet likeable character from the very beginning. Highly descriptive and attention to small historical details, it started out very charming. Midway it became very slow and there was little to look forward to with what seemed this "puppy love" relationship Alma finds herself in. I would have loved more about the Cleveland estate or perhaps it jumping forward a bit faster for a more mature Alma and her relationships. The small sketches are so delightful and I had to smile when I scanned through the book when I first picked it up.

The first time I have ever aborted a play. Usually I plunge on through no matter how boring, trite, or even revolting they might be, but this was the length of a full length book, and it had failed to capture my attention by Scene 5, and I couldn't face finishing it. Life's just too short to read bad books. It wasn't that it was bad...after all, it was using Shakespeare's own words...but it does show how trite and banal those words can be when put together in a different order and set in a different context. Mixing the characters might seem amusing, with King Lear's daughter, Juliet, marrying Romeo, who had just defeated Lear and won back Acquataine might seem interesting (it was interesting enough for me to buy the play), but it fell totally flat. Whether that is my own jaded worldview on re-writes of Shakespeare (frankly, if you really want to do that, why? Just write your own play, and ignore the bard if you think he's out of date or boring), or whether it is an author who failed to pull off what he was attempting to do, I have no idea. All I know is it really wasn't worth spending my time on.½

The author's interpretation of "Animal Farm" for the 9/11 era is brilliant. While the writing style is more detailed and storylike, it retains the biting criticism and allegory, if to a more deliberate level. This work explores the events, attitudes, and misinformation that led up to one of the most symbolic events in recent history.

Just as Orwell's "Animal Farm" explored the evils of Communism/Stalinism, Reed's "Snowball's Chance" explores the evils of Democracy. As soon as Snowball returns to the Farm, he champions many policies that create great change. The farm moves from the commandment of "All animals are equal, but some are more equal than others", to "All animals are born equal - what they become is their own affair". Issues of industrialization, consumerism, litigiousness, debt, citizenship/voting rights/immigration, taxation, nepotism/cronyism, oil dependence, civil rights, fear/stereotyping, police brutality, and religious extremism become prevalent. The allegory itself shifts from the relationship between the USSR and Nazi Germany/Allies to the relationship between the USA and the Native Americans/immigrants/Middle East.

Some of the characters from "Animal Farm" reappear in "Snowball's Chance", but there are many new characters as well. The number of years between the books is not explicitly stated, but it is long enough that most of the original animals from the previous book have died. Ones who remain are Benjamin the donkey, Moses the crow, Minimum the pig (Napoleon's food taster, now the farm's Leader), Brutus the dog, and Snowball. Existing characters remember those who have died, including Boxer the horse, but (as in "Animal Farm") those memories are corrupted by the propaganda of those in power. New characters include beavers, squirrels, porcupines, badgers, and hedgehogs -all from the Woodlands area beyond of the Farm, and the farm animals from Foxwood and Pinchfield - the two adjacent farms in Orwell's book.

The Woodland creatures play a very significant role in the events of the book, led by Diso the beaver. They live a conservative life, dictated by a set of rules called The Beaver Code, and seek to gain entrance to what Moses the Crow calls "The Sugarcandy Lodestar", instead of "The Sugarcandy Mountain" from Orwell's book. The Woodland creatures watch as the Animal Farm adds another windmill to its existing one, and refer to them as "The Twin Mills". Diso explains that the Twin Mills are a symbol of the evils of the Animal Farm. Diso encourages his followers to build explosive devices, and train diligently in using them to accomplish their goals. They are told that, if they perform their duties to glorify The Beaver Code and sacrifice themselves for it, they will reach The Sugarcandy Lodestar and be rewarded with 1600 virgin birch saplings.

As some of the Woodland creatures become disillusioned with The Beaver Code, as Diso is interpreting it, and they leave to join the Animal Farm. Because of the influx of creatures, the animals are segregated in their jobs and living arrangements. The most recent immigrants are given the most menial and physically demanding jobs, and are given the lowest amount of pay. Although their situation is not ideal, the other animals remind them that they are in a much better situation than they were in before. Meanwhile, the pigs and dogs (as well as those who have been voted/appointed into powerful positions) enjoy the spoils of power and wealth, indulging in foods and leisure activities not available to the lower classes of animal.

With the industrialism brought about through the Twin Mills, there is little need for agriculture. The animals reinvent the farm and re-brand it as Animal Fair, offering both human and animal visitors many recreational activities and food stalls on which to spend their money. Animals who misbehave or are otherwise deemed to be criminals are forced to perform as sideshow acts in the Fair. All of this comes to a violent end when a very 9/11-esque plan is carried out by the Woodland Creatures, forever altering the relationship between them and the farm animals.

Written shortly after the events of September 11th, 2001, "Snowball's Chance" offers a perspective that was (and still is, to a large extent) unpopular and subverted by many in the West. However, it is important to remember that history doesn't happen in a vacuum. Fifteen years later, we are still learning this lesson.

If it wasn't for LibraryThing's Early-Readers program, I'd never read this trash. It's a completely pointless and worthless book. Firstly, there's nothing enjoyable about it. And I'm not squeamish or one of those "you can't write something ugly or bad" or "everything needs a happy ending". This is just nothing more than grabbing horrific news stories and turning it into a book. And a poorly designed, badly written, with a few grammatical errors, bad unneeded disgusting artwork, and then calling it a "novel" and that its "Greek Catharsis" and that we should feel better afterwards for not being these people involved.

The writing is poor at best. Its tempted journalistic style, and where it is journalistic style, its because its just ripping straight from headlines, even using direct quotes already found in the news articles it mentions in the 'short stories'. Nearly every single 'short story' has some quote from an accompanying newspaper/newsite/etc, and in most cases it uses the same exact quote and same information these news articles, sites, and papers used. Making you wonder how much writing John Reed had to actually do, and what if any was the point of this, when if I just wanted to read horrific news stories.... I could do a simple google search or even read a regular newspaper?

There is plenty of tragedy, debauchery, ugliness, and disgusting behavior by humans all over the world. And it belongs in literature all the same. But this isn't literature, and it provides no point. Well written fiction showcasing tragedy, debauchery, ugliness, disgusting behavior, etc, is fine, admirable even, and does a far better job than this 'novel' ever could. It doesn't even come close to even decent 'non-fiction' writing, and has no style, no substance, nothing more than newspaper clipping style of horrific events tacked on with pointless artwork displaying the gratuity for its gratuitous sake. Its published by MTV Press (which isn't surprising at all) and seems to reflect the culture that MTV has become and represents, and seems aimed at the vacant brained Jersey Shore crowd that MTV now single-handedly created and thrives on.

If it wasn't free I'd never ever even begin to think to buy it and wouldn't even know why I'd be looking for something like this. Just flipping to the back of it now and seeing that the recommended price by the publisher is 20.00$ (flat US - 24$ flat Canada), I find it even more amusing trying to figure out who would pay 20$ for such pure rubbish.

If it wasn't for LibraryThing's Early-Readers program, I'd never read this trash. It's a completely pointless and worthless book. Firstly, there's nothing enjoyable about it. And I'm not squeamish or one of those "you can't write something ugly or bad" or "everything needs a happy ending". This is just nothing more than grabbing horrific news stories and turning it into a book. And a poorly designed, badly written, with a few grammatical errors, bad unneeded disgusting artwork, and then calling it a "novel" and that its "Greek Catharsis" and that we should feel better afterwards for not being these people involved.

The writing is poor at best. Its tempted journalistic style, and where it is journalistic style, its because its just ripping straight from headlines, even using direct quotes already found in the news articles it mentions in the 'short stories'. Nearly every single 'short story' has some quote from an accompanying newspaper/newsite/etc, and in most cases it uses the same exact quote and same information these news articles, sites, and papers used. Making you wonder how much writing John Reed had to actually do, and what if any was the point of this, when if I just wanted to read horrific news stories.... I could do a simple google search or even read a regular newspaper?

There is plenty of tragedy, debauchery, ugliness, and disgusting behavior by humans all over the world. And it belongs in literature all the same. But this isn't literature, and it provides no point. Well written fiction showcasing tragedy, debauchery, ugliness, disgusting behavior, etc, is fine, admirable even, and does a far better job than this 'novel' ever could. It doesn't even come close to even decent 'non-fiction' writing, and has no style, no substance, nothing more than newspaper clipping style of horrific events tacked on with pointless artwork displaying the gratuity for its gratuitous sake. Its published by MTV Press (which isn't surprising at all) and seems to reflect the culture that MTV has become and represents, and seems aimed at the vacant brained Jersey Shore crowd that MTV now single-handedly created and thrives on.

If it wasn't free I'd never ever even begin to think to buy it and wouldn't even know why I'd be looking for something like this. Just flipping to the back of it now and seeing that the recommended price by the publisher is 20.00$ (flat US - 24$ flat Canada), I find it even more amusing trying to figure out who would pay 20$ for such pure rubbish.

If it wasn't for LibraryThing's Early-Readers program, I'd never read this trash. It's a completely pointless and worthless book. Firstly, there's nothing enjoyable about it. And I'm not squeamish or one of those "you can't write something ugly or bad" or "everything needs a happy ending". This is just nothing more than grabbing horrific news stories and turning it into a book. And a poorly designed, badly written, with a few grammatical errors, bad unneeded disgusting artwork, and then calling it a "novel" and that its "Greek Catharsis" and that we should feel better afterwards for not being these people involved.

The writing is poor at best. Its tempted journalistic style, and where it is journalistic style, its because its just ripping straight from headlines, even using direct quotes already found in the news articles it mentions in the 'short stories'. Nearly every single 'short story' has some quote from an accompanying newspaper/newsite/etc, and in most cases it uses the same exact quote and same information these news articles, sites, and papers used. Making you wonder how much writing John Reed had to actually do, and what if any was the point of this, when if I just wanted to read horrific news stories.... I could do a simple google search or even read a regular newspaper?

There is plenty of tragedy, debauchery, ugliness, and disgusting behavior by humans all over the world. And it belongs in literature all the same. But this isn't literature, and it provides no point. Well written fiction showcasing tragedy, debauchery, ugliness, disgusting behavior, etc, is fine, admirable even, and does a far better job than this 'novel' ever could. It doesn't even come close to even decent 'non-fiction' writing, and has no style, no substance, nothing more than newspaper clipping style of horrific events tacked on with pointless artwork displaying the gratuity for its gratuitous sake. Its published by MTV Press (which isn't surprising at all) and seems to reflect the culture that MTV has become and represents, and seems aimed at the vacant brained Jersey Shore crowd that MTV now single-handedly created and thrives on.

If it wasn't free I'd never ever even begin to think to buy it and wouldn't even know why I'd be looking for something like this. Just flipping to the back of it now and seeing that the recommended price by the publisher is 20.00$ (flat US - 24$ flat Canada), I find it even more amusing trying to figure out who would pay 20$ for such pure rubbish.

I truly enjoyed this Shakespeare mash-up (a "new play by Shakespeare"). The afterword from the author was especially thought provoking (Down with the Canon!, Reed argues). The way Reed fit pieces of the original plots together was fascinating and resourceful (for example, Hamlet's love interest is Juliet, whose father is Lear, etc.). At times it was clearly overkill, packing so many great leading characters into one play, but it was always very interesting.

But best of all, his lightly edited/updated treatment of Shakespeare's language brought the work to life for me in a way I haven't enjoyed much since school, when I had great teachers to help me appreciate the texts. Check out the endnotes.

I would love to see this play performed! It deserves a lot more attention and discussion.

I'm not really sure what I just read. A vapid character encounters supernatural phenomena and it's all the plan of an alien race. Except it doesn't come off nearly as clever as the author obviously intended. It sounds more like he resurrected his childhood dreams (nightmares?) and attempted to make it a coherant story.

i like the idea of the book. but too much like reading shakespear so i could not get through it. if you like shakespear english than this might be for you. but over my head of understanding.

A Still Small Voice follows the life of a recently orphaned girl name Alma from the point at which she's whisked away from the orphanage to live with her aunt until the very deserved ending of her particular chronicle. Caught in the war torn years surrounding the Civil War, Alma finds her true love in her best friend, John Warren, only to lose him countless times.

Meanwhile, she and her aunt make a living as herbalists, their wealthy neighbors lose their fortune, and their tiny town of Cotterpin undergoes a facelift as the years go by.

Beautifully and tenderly written, Reed manages to capture the voice of an elderly woman writing down her life for the sake of her children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren. This is definitely an impressive feat, being that it is his first novel.

While the book doesn't really go anywhere, it's all about the journey. We see the fringes that the war has on the tiny town, caught between the North and the South in more ways than one.

Recommended for readers of Civil War-era literature and anybody else looking for a good first novel.½

This book is the story of a woman writing about her childhood which took place before, during, and after the Civil War in Kentucky. Alma was an orphan who goes to live with her elderly aunt in the country and makes friends whose family has slaves where her and aunt do not. Alma must grow up somewhat early, but that is only part of the story.

Sometimes the story kind of wanders into descriptions of remedies and gardens, but if you think about it it only adds credibility to the old lady reminiscing about her memories.

There is even some mystery thrown into the mix, and the end is very satisfying, which is something every good book must have.

I also enjoyed the cute little drawings of the different plants and animals that Alma seen growing up and added to her margins.

The idea of this book was appealing. Greek catharsis...reading terrible stories to make one appreciate what one has. This book was a disappointment though.
1) The illustrations cheapen the experience of the stories. The true stories are supposed to create emotion, but the images used seem to make fun of them. It would have been better without them. The human imagination is all one needs to see these stories.
2) A minor problem, but there were many editing mistakes. One or two are understandable, but there were missing letters, misspellings, and incorrect grammar. It just distracts from the writing.
3) One of the stories mentions others profiting from people's misfortunes and the unfortunate families having to see the lives and sometimes deaths of loved ones being entertainment for others. Good story, but the problem is that is exactly what this book is doing. I doubt that the proceeds are going to these families and if they were it should be mentioned.
I would not recommend this book.

NO STARS. I imagine the only audience who would appreciate this pathetic collection is a handful of 13 year old self-proclaimed "bad-ass" emo boys. Poorly written and laden with spelling and grammatical errors, I only read this because I had committed to do so. Don't waste your time with this one. Seeing that it was published by MTV Books, I don't suppose that I should be shocked. This book being published is a tale of woe.

sick

Reid had an interesting idea, even if the end result is a bit silly. He has composed a "new" play made up entirely of passages from Shakespeare's originals. The "All-Star Cast" will give you an inkling of what is to come:

HAMLET as the Prince of Bohemia
JULIET as the Princess of Aquitaine
IAGO as lieutenant to the prince
ROMEO as general to the prince
MACBETH as lover to the queen (and soon to be king)
THE QUEEN as wife to Old Hamlet, king of Bohemia
KING LEAR as king of Aquitaine and father to Juliet

With special appearances by:
Old Hamlet and his Ghost
Three weird sisters
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern
The senators of Bohemia
Polonius, speaker for the senate
A local pastor
Two armies of soldiers
The herald of Aquitaine
A troupe of actors
King Lear's cook
The queen's doctor

Well, you get the drift. Hamlet, with a lot of lines lifted from Henry V, wages war on Aquitaine in hopes of marrying the princess, Juliet. Upon his return, he finds that his mother has murdered his father and married . . . Macbeth! Iago is there to spur Hamlet's jealousy (a la Othello) to the brink of madness. It's all in good fun, even if it is touted as a tragedy. But you'd better know your Shakespeare, since half the fun is in identifying the original sources of lines and plotlines.

(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com].)

For those who don't know, I actually reprint CCLaP's reviews over at the three literary social networks I belong to as well, GoodReads.com and LibraryThing.com and Shelfari.com (although admittedly at GoodReads I can publish only the first couple of paragraphs, because of their insanely low word-count limits). And I have lots of friends of course who think this is crazy of me, that I should be doing everything possible instead to drive traffic towards the CCLaP site in particular, so as to drive up the total page hits here and impress the people who tend to be impressed by such things. But there are hidden benefits to doing what I do, not the least of which is the opportunity to become "friends" with a whole series of cutting-edge authors who are there themselves, and to get lots of review copies of books sent to you that you would normally otherwise not get to read (it's exactly how I came across my favorite book of the year so far, in fact, Michael FitzGerald's Radiant Days); and then another benefit that's not so obvious is that it inspires you to actually stick in there with a questionable book longer than you normally would, because of not wanting to let down that new acquaintance who you know went to a lot of trouble to send you a copy of their book. It's inspired me in a couple of cases already this year to eventually find a great story about halfway through a book, a story that you need to be patient with to eventually find but that ultimately is worth it.

I can think of no better example, in fact, than the latest novel by cutting-edge author John Reed, a highly experimental mind-bender called The Whole which believe it or not was put out by MTV Books, a division of the cable network I never even realized existed and that at first sounds like a bad intellectual joke. Because the fact is that this is a book that is difficult to get into; difficult to pick up the rhythm and pace and style that Reed ostentatiously displays here, difficult to understand where Reed is coming from thematically or emotionally, difficult even to understand the point of this book existing. All these things are thankfully answered as you get farther and farther along, or at least possibilities for explanations are offered up for your consideration; but without Reed being one of my formal "friends" over at one of these social networks I belong to, I admit that I would've given up on the book as a pretentious, artsy mess long before such answers came, and that the chances are most likely that I would've never written a review for this book at all.

Because Reed, see, is one of those people who uses highly, highly stylized text to get his points across, not only words and phrases that deliberately call attention to themselves but also wrong words and phrases sometimes that even more cleverly call attention to themselves. ("The mystery is getting bigger...excrementally!") It is a world where Philip K. Dick, Hunter S. Thompson, William S. Burroughs and T.S. Eliot come crashing together; a story that is at once an absurdist comedy, a trippy science-fiction tale, a sad look at the people who inhabit celebrity culture, and a justification for why you're a freakin' nobody unless you have a Masters of Fine Arts and can be just as headache-inducingly clever too. You know, one of those books that you don't even want to bother trying to explain the plotline of, because of it being so ridiculous and surreal that it almost seems to not matter. ("See, and then the man-sized rabbit buys all these cocktails for the thong-wearing video journalist, but that's right before a giant hole opens in the ground and swallows up an entire suburban family, and...oh, never mind.")

Now let's be fair -- there are lots and lots of projects from my past that I love that are even stranger than this, a whole litany of Eraserheads and Naked Lunches and the like, and that I don't think The Whole should be dismissed out of hand just for being weird for the sake of being weird. But let's also admit that it's the strangest projects out there that are the hardest to critically judge, that in such cases there is not only a razor-thin line between genius and idiocy but that this line changes location with each individual audience member. One underground fan's masterpiece is another underground fan's trash, which is what leads underground fans to the underground to begin with; because it's a world not just filled with John-Grisham-style mediocrity, not just with an endless series of bland middle-of-the-road projects you are forced to pick from, but instead an entire rainbow of weirdness at your permanent disposal, with some projects that will literally only end up appealing to a couple of thousand people on the entire planet.

Cutting-edge novelists know this going into their cutting-edge novels, so let's not feel too terribly sorry for Reed for having a difficult, complex, hard-to-intepret book; I'm sure that's exactly what he wanted, in fact, and is ultimately pleased that so many different opinions exist out there now about The Whole. It does however make my job as a critic and reviewer a more difficult one, because it calls into question exactly what my proper role is here; because in many ways such experimental novels are almost critic-proof, in that people are ultimately just going to either love them or hate them on their own no matter what the critics in particular say. As someone who likes the underground, as someone who likes experimental projects, I guess then maybe the best thing I can do is simply bring such projects as much attention as I can; to warn you ahead of time that you will either naturally love or hate this novel, and that in this case you shouldn't put too much stock in what I thought about it to determine what you're going to think. It is certainly an original novel, one I'm glad to see getting a wide release through such a high-profile organization as MTV; all the more interesting, in fact, when you realize that the book itself in many ways is a damning criticism of MTV, and of what nefarious things the network has done to American culture in the couple of decades it's now been in existence. For all of you looking for something random and challenging to add to your reading list soon, something you may possibly adore by the end or that may make you want to burn the author in effigy for wasting your time so badly (and me for recommending it in the first place), The Whole is the one for you.

Out of 10:
Story: 6.5
Characters: 9.2
Style: 5.8
Overall: 7.0, or 9.0 for those who like to take chances

I don't know. I quite enjoyed the book, and its take on the present world catastrophe. I didn't see George Orwell as the target, which is commonly reported.

Quick and wry.

A beautifully written story, touchingly told. It has a strong sense of history; details are vivid and real. The writing is strong, passionate, and fluid.

Brilliantly written. It’s wise, funny, and sad. An animal farm that embraces capitalism. A pig that prefers to read Shakespeare, instead is forced into running the show. A disturbing look at society through the eyes of these animals, and their activities.

It's dark, tongue in cheek type of humor, pokes fun at society, honest, entertaining.

I was challenged to read it, basically, because I claim to be a huge orwell fan (which I am, he is the only author that "matters"), and I picked it up fully expecting to hate it, not only because it's an attack on sainted George, but because I think contemporary books rot, for the most part. And then all I could find was a first edition, which cost me nearly fifty bucks. I was fuming. But, alas, I really appreciated it. FYI: I don't think George would have disliked it. He would have loved it, especially as messed up as the world it today.

I absolutely love this book. It was kind of hard to get, but worth the effort. It's scary how well the author was able to paint a picture of the US post 9/11. It might take effort to get it, because apparently Orwell's estate is suing the author.