So is this “fake news” or “fake fake news” or “fake fake fake news”?
2 Likes
Just checked on Amazon. You can get it on Kindle for $1.07 or you can buy the paperback for £1,101.89. Quite the collectors item today it seems.
1 Like
Of course, most progressives, had they encountered this book in 1981, would have dismissed it as a paranoid, Red-baiting, John Birch fantasy. Because the Russians, back then, were, if not exactly friends, at least not as much of an enemy as Ronnie Reagan was.
2 Likes
In 1981 the Soviet Union had fossilised into Brezhnev-era complete inertia. They didn’t know what to do, except that they kept spending a lot on education. As Gorbachev remarked, the peasants could grow plenty of food, but somehow the USSR was unable to make refrigerated trucks to get it to market before it went off.
It amazes me that they were suspected of being diabolically clever disrupters of the West when they could barely keep Ladas on the road.
3 Likes
Makes me think of Perestroika Christi
I’m waiting for the alt-right equivalent of this.
Pesonally, I think I’ll stick to the Bennite version (I haven’t actually read it, to be honest)
1 Like
I find that reading books can be very disappointing, so I just buy them for the designs on their spines.
Could you explain this?
In the real world:
Rather dated, and interesting principally for its fortuitous recent topicality.
By James Brydon TOP 1000 REVIEWER on 16 January 2017
Format: Kindle Edition|Verified Purchase
This novel has provoked considerable media interest recently, arising from its central premise of an American Presidential candidate who, between securing the election victory and being inaugurated, is investigated following suggestions that he might be subject to undue influence from the Russian government. Far-fetched or what! More intriguingly, the book was published as long ago as the early 1980s, when author Ted Allbeury was enjoying considerable success as a writer of spy thrillers.
In this instance, President-Elect Powell has been steered to election victory through the agency of his politically adroit right-hand man, Andrew Dempsey. Dempsey, however, has a past, and had been arrested during a violent anti-American demonstration in Paris during ‘les evenements’ in 1968., aliong with his beautiful Russian girlfriend. While most of those demonstrators who had been arrested were released within a couple of days, Dempsey and the girl were detained for two months, and only released following the intervention of a questionable American diamond dealer with shady connections to Soviet Eastern Europe. Now, twelve years later, Dempsey has re-emerged, steering the complicit but rather two dimensional Powell to election victory.
Less plausibly, no one in the American intelligence services seems aware of Dempsey’s past. It is left to James Mackay from MI5 to alert them unofficially, having recognised Dempsey from his own recollections of the riot as he had, himself, been a student in Paris in 1968. He flies over to America and works along with the CIA to investigate Powell and Dempsey urgently before the inauguration.
I think it is fair to say that the espionage novel has moved a long way since the early 1980s, and, fortuitous future topicality apart, it is not difficult to understand why Allbeury’s books have been out of print for so long. He writes clearly enough, but his characters are conspicuous for their emotional and psychological flimsiness, and plausibility is rare indeed. Still enjoyable, but perhaps principally as a curiosity.
2 Likes
Well that perfectly sums up the current administration.
3 Likes
I’m not in any rush to read a book denouncing liberals as commie pinko scum, just as thousands of others didn’t really want to read a book denouncing the academic left and identity politics. But at the time the coment was made I didn’t have time to listen to or read the podcast
1 Like
By the yard or by the metre?
4 Likes
The first rule of Book Club is, you do not talk about Book Club.
The second rule of Book Club is…
1 Like
Some of their best hotels had air conditioning available every winter!
My mother visited Russia in the mid 80’s. Her idea of high culture was all-you-can-eat-buffets. So…her standards weren’t so high. She thought the USSR mostly resembled the depression era 1930’s, which she was very familiar with. So yeah, not so much diabolical…as run down and pathetic. From her description, the collapse should have been obvious.
And now!!? They’re back to being diabolical!
We also are back to depression era roads and rail. Everything comes around that goes, oh so, around.
3 Likes
Can’t we have both? Instead of the current president, I mean.
2 Likes
This topic was automatically closed after 5 days. New replies are no longer allowed.
