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Checkpoint
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Editorial Reviews
From Bookmarks Magazine
If you don’t like George W., you might like Checkpoint—at least its uncontrolled rage against the administration. In his seventh novel, Baker focuses his trademark style of writing minutiae on a rambling conversation between two Bush detractors. “[It] makes Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 look like a work of Jamesian subtlety and nuance. There isn’t a graceful or interesting sentence in this blunt, plotless, obscenity-laden screed,” says Entertainment Weekly. The New York Times Book Review calls it a “scummy little book.” Other reviews did not improve the book’s (or political tirade’s?) standing. Checkpoint may be worth reading as a passionate analysis of the Iraq war, but, even with its heightened emotion, it’s not a very original or engaging one.
If you don’t like George W., you might like Checkpoint—at least its uncontrolled rage against the administration. In his seventh novel, Baker focuses his trademark style of writing minutiae on a rambling conversation between two Bush detractors. “[It] makes Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 look like a work of Jamesian subtlety and nuance. There isn’t a graceful or interesting sentence in this blunt, plotless, obscenity-laden screed,” says Entertainment Weekly. The New York Times Book Review calls it a “scummy little book.” Other reviews did not improve the book’s (or political tirade’s?) standing. Checkpoint may be worth reading as a passionate analysis of the Iraq war, but, even with its heightened emotion, it’s not a very original or engaging one.
Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc.
From Booklist
Jay and Ben are old friends who haven't seen each other in a few years. A former teacher who has fallen on hard times, Jay is very, very upset about the war in Iraq. He has expressed his objections by marching in an antiwar demonstration in the nation's capital, but the protest has had no effect. Now Jay has asked Ben, a writer currently working on a book about the cold war, to bring a tape recorder to a Washington, D.C., hotel room because Jay wants to talk about his decision to assassinate the president. Nervous and incredulous, Ben anxiously debates with his keyed-up buddy. He is also deeply distressed by the atrocities in Iraq and the immoral covert actions of Bush and Cheney and their cohorts, but he knows that murder is not the answer. Once again the chimerical and fearless Baker has written a work of provocative and razor-sharp fiction, this time crafting a nail-biting duet for two voices under duress that incisively charts the emotional turmoil generated by the horrors and conundrums of war, terrorism, dirty politics, and repression. Place this beside Barry Lopez's searing short-story collection Resistance [BKL My 1 04] and Philip Roth's towering novel The Plot against America [BKL Ag 04], and you have a triptych of lacerating works of the imagination that insightfully and cathartically confront the urgent issues of the day. Donna Seaman
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