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A Novel
by Christopher Buckley
Book Reviewed by:One of America’s most hilarious novelists and the bestselling author of Thank You For Smoking returns with a biting comedy about generational warfare.
Outraged over the mounting Social Security debt, Cassandra Devine, a charismatic 29-year-old blogger and member of Generation Whatever, incites massive cultural warfare when she politely suggests that Baby Boomers be given government incentives to kill themselves by age 75. Her modest proposal catches fire with millions of citizens, chief among them an ambitious senator seeking the presidency. With the help of Washington’s greatest spin doctor, the blogger and the politician try to ride the issue of euthanasia for Boomers (called “transitioning”) all the way to the White House, over the objections of the Religious Right, and of course, the Baby Boomers, who are deeply offended by demonstrations on the golf courses of their retirement resorts.
Chapter 1
Cassandra Devine was not yet thirty, but she was already tired.
“Media training,” they called it. She’d been doing it for years, but it still had the ring of “potty training.”
Today’s media trainee was the chief executive officer of a company that administered hospitals, twenty-eight of them throughout the southeastern United States. In the previous year, it had lost $285 million and one-third of its stock market value. During that same period, the client had been paid $3.8 million in salary, plus a $1.4 million “performance bonus.”
Corporate Crime Scene, the prime-time investigative television program, was doing an exposé and had requested an interview. In her negotiations with the show’s producers, Cass had learned that they had footage of him boarding the company jet ($35 mil) wearing a spectacularly loud Hawaiian shirt and clenching a torpedo-shaped—indeed, torpedo-size—cigar in his teeth while hefting a ...
After a slightly slow start during which Buckley introduces his characters, provides them with motive and generally lays the groundwork, Boomsday develops into a mischievously farcical tangled-web of generational warfare and political backstabbing, set against the background of the failing Social Security system and the general collapse of the American economy...continued
Full Review
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