From Publishers Weekly
In Baruth's (The Dream of the White Village; The Millennium Shows) imaginative novel, the year is 2055, and Bill Clinton-still hearty at 109 and referred to here as BC-has screwed everything up. As a result of two independent and reasonable actions in BC's presidency-expanding NATO and encouraging the (fictitious) Anti-Tobacco accord, which pushed Big Tobacco into foreign markets-the world has been thrust into the brutal, endless Cigarette Wars. Terrorist bombings are a matter of course, as is constant and invasive government surveillance; everywhere there's a sense of impending doom. BC, whose life has been prolonged by biotechnology, has not been treated kindly by history, and so he recruits loner Sal Hayden to write his definitive biography. Enter "James" (for Carville), "George" (for Stephanopoulos) and "Virginia," code-named members of the National Security Council, who have a much grander plan for historical revisionism. Kidnapping Sal, the group travels to 1963 and then to 1995, beginning a series of maneuvers to rewrite history. The mission is not without its snags, Sal's occasionally abrasive personality being one, and the weirdness of it all-a teenaged BC ("yBC") being seduced by an NSC operative and slowly being manipulated into changing the future BC's decisions-makes for page-turning reading. Baruth's facility for leaking and withholding information helps sustain interest, although the story is almost too neat at times. A disappointingly vague ending mars this interesting blend of satire and sci-fi.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Booklist
*Starred Review* The year: 2055. Sal Hayden is writing the biography of a 109-year-old former U.S. president known as BC. Meanwhile, the U.S. is taking a pummeling in the Tobacco Wars, a massive international conflict that resulted from antitobacco legislation BC signed when he was president in the 1990s. When Sal is recruited by the government to participate in an audacious plan to rewrite history so that the Tobacco Wars never happened, she finds herself on a journey so fantastic she would never have imagined it possible. At its heart, this is a novel about American politics, but it's also a story about the nature of history: just because an event has already taken place, does that mean we can't change what happened? It's a comic road trip, too, as Sal and her mismatched trio of associates (a beautiful special-ops expert who calls herself Victoria, a hard-nosed military man code-named James Carville, and a brilliant civilian code-named George Stephanopoulos) set out to find a 16-year-old Arkansas boy who holds the key to America's salvation. Oh, and there is a small, touching, love story in there somewhere. Baruth is especially good at manipulating his narrative, surprising us with sudden twists that leave heroine and reader alike first confused and then forced to reconsider recent history in ways that, oddly, make perfect sense. Students of politics will enjoy picking apart the characters' arguments, alternate-history buffs will be delighted with the author's world building, and comic thriller fans will love the wild ride. Face it: anyone who picks this book up will be thoroughly entertained. David Pitt
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
