Top positive review
5.0 out of 5 starsFrightening and gut wrenching; writing style, meh
Reviewed in the United States on June 2, 2011
If you're looking for a fun, exciting, dystopian future story, you might be disappointed. If you're into great character development and great, engaging writing, you also might be disappointed. If you have any sense of what's really happening with the global economy, the debt crisis, the idea that we might not just be in a protracted recession, but in a 50-year debt supercycle, that our national debt won't just "go away", that Medicare will be bankrupt in 20 years, etc., etc., then this book is required reading. 20 pages into it and my heart was pounding and I had real trouble falling asleep - my mind was racing. As a way of understanding the challenges that we'll face by 2030, and what "they" mean when they say that our children will be the first generation that has a worse quality of life than their parents, then this book is relatively exciting. Yes, the writing is a little basic, and the character development is pretty flat and inexpertly done, but it's fascinating. As a necessary education we should all have, it's hardly something that has to be slogged through - it's a good read.
In other words, compared to a classic sci-fi dystopian future story (say, The Hunger Games), this is a little dull and basic. There are no evil, dictatorial governments, no corporations running the world and making us into Soilent Green, no subterranean slave species, no roving gangs of nomads killing and fighting for water/land/gas (pick your movie). Just frustrated people living in a world where the expense of college isn't worth it, where medical costs are beyond imagining and therefore medical care is prohibitive, where the government can't afford to do anything but stay afloat, where a career track is nothing more than trying to keep from taking lower and lower-end jobs over time, where everyone is middle class. (If anything in this list sounds unlikely, then you haven't been paying attention for the past three years.)
As a very long essay about how our current economic realities will inevitably play out over the next two decades, this is an absolute page-turner. It's one thing to hear murmurs about how our national debt will soon = 100% of GDP, how eventually the majority of the federal budget will merely pay off the INTEREST on our debt (like only having enough $ to pay off the minimum on your credit card each month), how Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid are underfunded, how the Chinese hold 25% of our debt - it's another thing to read a character-driven story about what all that would "look like" 19 years from now. As I said, required reading if you want to put all of today's esoteric economic commentary into a concrete understanding. Brrr.
I mean, really, it's freaking me out, even after all of the non-fiction reading that I do about the economy, the debt, our future.
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UPDATE: I just finished reading the book. Blech. Pretty much all of the disturbing revelations/"education" I mentioned above happen in the first third of the book. The rest is whatever adjective is right below "amateurish", and just digresses off into 4 or so other dully developed personal plotlines. Here's an example of what to expect from the rest of the book (which sort of reads like a parent telling a child a really long bedtime story): The story essentially follows four different characters (including the President); each of these four characters find love in the book, and in each case, they meet and fall in love in pretty much a single meeting (or a single page to put it more bluntly). In each case, Brooks lazily writes something worthy of high school creative writing, to the effect of "he (or she) never felt this way about another person, didn't understand how he (or she) could feel this way so quickly, blah blah". So much for character development - I suppose this kind of writing makes for a shorter book and gets you off the hook to actually have to craft any kind of evolving relationships. By the end I was almost just skimming for the broad strokes so I could move on to another book. There also appears to be no political, partisan dissent in this story - everything large-scale that involves a vote or Congressional approval or something gets almost unanimous support. Again, this is the socio-political version of the stupid "love at first sight" development of the characters. By saying "everyone in the country was so happy with they way such-and-such was going that the vote was almost unanimous", or "never before has an amendment to the Constitution been so quickly and happily approved by almost all fifty states", he gets out of having to explore the complexity or depth of any of the major plotlines. He can get earth-shattering policies or multinational agreements reviewed, decided on and approved in about three pages. It's more laziness, and why it has the cadence of a bedtime story. I remember once finding a stack of creative writing assignments from freshman year in college, and rolling my eyes in retroactive embarrassment at the dorky plot devices and phrasing I used in my stories. This book eventually made me feel the same way. It's like, if you're going to write about what is essentially a kind of "Armageddon-lite" (and dare to give it such a sweeping title), don't make it a read worthy of one long plane ride. Either make a real book out of it or give the outline to someone else to flesh out. If you had the itch to write but only had this much energy, then just write your version of Paul Reiser's "Parenthood" or something.