Alex_Halperin-small.jpgI picked up Christopher Buckley’s novel Boomsday at a train station sometime back but didn’t get around to reading it until last week. Coincidentally I was also on the Amtrak through the blizzard of 2010. Boomsday is a Washington satire. A foxy young blogger named Cassandra Devine concocts a modest proposal to encourage baby boomers to voluntarily “transition” to the afterlife when they turn seventy as a means of keeping social security solvent. Buckley takes this as an opportunity to tour a gallery of Washington types: pompous politicians, corrupt aides, venal lobbyists, venal and horny holy rollers. This is familiar territory, especially for Buckley, but it reads so smoothly you won’t notice the train’s been delayed another two hours.

Bio: Alex Halperin is an editor at Guernica. Read his last recommendation of the book State by State “here”:https://guernicamag.com/blog/1515/rec_room_alex_halperin_state_b/.

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