I’ve spent a lot of time working with and fearing for young people. As a teacher, I slept very poorly on prom nights and usually chaperoned the school’s alcohol-free, all-night graduation parties and cruises. I introduced them to lockdown drills and showed them how to hide under their desks and turn out the lights in the face of an armed intruder. It grieves me that we, The Olders, have ensured that these kids’ futures will be pretty bleak and continue to be far too glib with their present days. We threw a lot of them into those illegal, Middle Eastern wars, and we didn’t do a great job helping them out when they came back.
I wrote...
Twenty-Five to Life
By
R.W.W. Greene
What is my book about?
Julie Riley is two years too young to get out from under her mother's thumb, and what does it matter? She's over-educated, under-employed, and kept mostly numb by her pharma emplant. Her best friend, who she's mostly been interacting with via virtual reality for the past decade, is part of the colony mission to Proxima Centauri. Plus, the world is coming to an end. So, there's that.
When Julie's mother decides it's time to let go of the family home in a failing suburb and move to the city to be closer to work and her new beau, Julie decides to take matters into her own hands. She runs, illegally, hoping to find and hide with the Volksgeist, a loose-knit culture of tramps, hoboes, senior citizens, artists, and never-do-wells who have elected to ride out the end of the world in their campers and converted vans, constantly on the move over the back roads of America.
When you buy a book we may earn a small commission.
The Books I Picked & Why
The Ministry for the Future
By
Kim Stanley Robinson
Why this book?
Something very bad and highly possible happens in the first chapter of this well-researched work of science fiction, and the year it ‘happens’ is a scant four years away. Climate change is not just a problem for the future, friends, and this tome puts it front and center, drawing on recent (2020) events, such as the Atlantic hurricane season and the Australian wildfires to make its case. But that’s not the part that will keep you up all night. The terrifying bit is the fact that the very bad thing that happens is still not enough to light a fire under the people who can actually save the human race. Shudder.
When you buy a book we may earn a small commission.
The Road
By
Cormac McCarthy
Why this book?
A meteorite hits the Earth sometime before the book begins, and all that remains is gray with ash and burning. A father and son push a shopping cart across the devastated landscape looking for supplies and refuge, following the death by suicide of their wife/mother. Everything is horrible. There’s a baby on a spit, cannibals, a decided lack of community norms and support, and the gun Dad carries only has two bullets. The meteor, as it turns out, is not the worst that could happen. Hell is other people. Pick your neighbors carefully.
When you buy a book we may earn a small commission.
The Circle
By
Dave Eggers
Why this book?
Forget the crappy reality TV show on Netflix, I’m talking about the book in which an intelligent young woman is slowly indoctrinated by a cultish social-media company and becomes the spokeswoman and chief advocate of life in a voluntary panopticon (a prison wherein everything you do may or not be watched all day, all the time), destroying any concept of freedom and privacy. “Secrets are lies, sharing is caring, privacy is theft.”
When you buy a book we may earn a small commission.
All American Boys
By
Jason Reynolds,
Brendan Kiely
Why this book?
This is the first book in a long, long time to give me big, choking emotions. Sixteen-year-old Rashad Butler’s only crime is to be Black in the wrong place at the wrong time and nets a beatdown from a young, hard-assed beat cop. Rashad’s classmate, Quinn, is white, a witness, and one of the cop’s mentees and close family friends. The book is fiction, but things like this are happening even as you read this sentence. The thought that we have to do better than this kept me twisting in the sheets for weeks.
When you buy a book we may earn a small commission.
Johnny Got His Gun
By
Dalton Trumbo
Why this book?
A novel by the dude who wrote the screenplay for Spartacus, among many other films. Blacklisted during the Red Scare of the Fifties, he was indeed a communist. ‘Johnny’ is about a young man, eager for war, who gets his wish. Then he gets his arms and legs blown off, his eyes, ears, nose, and mouth destroyed, in an artillery blast, and becomes a prisoner in his own body. When he does learn to communicate, he tells his CO that he wants to go on tour as a warning against war. What follows is pretty sickening. I gave my copy to a student who was considering enlistment. I wish I had more copies.
