Boomsday by Christopher Buckley Summary and Reviews
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Book Reviews of Boomsday
Book Review: Funny. I am ready to see the movie.
Summary: 5 Stars
Easy to read. Took me about 2 hours. At least one laugh per page. I hope someone is writing the screen play as I am ready to see the movie.
All of Christopher's books are sarcastic laugh riots.
Book Review: Great Humor With A Serious Message
Summary: 5 Stars
If official DC is a royal court, then Chris Buckley is its chief jester because he is both funny and clever.
He's funny in Boomsday because of the ridiculous situations he puts his characters through in the book. There is something to chuckle or laugh out loud about on nearly every page.
But Buckley's more than a gag man. He's also clever because he makes some serious points, namely that Social Security will soon bankrupt this country without reform. That's no joke and Buckley handles both the comedy points and the policy points well here.
So, if you are interested, get this book. You will have a great time reading it. But afterward, it also will give you something to think about. Not a lot of humor books do that. Boomsday does.
Book Review: Great Premise, But Lacks Zing of Thank You for Smoking
Summary: 3 Stars
I'm a huge fan of Thank You for Smoking (five stars) and Boomsday has a great catchphrase title and a dynamite premise (the book is also well-marketed and nicely produced), so I went out and bought it immediately. Unfortunately, Boomsday doesn't maintain the level of shock and awe of its own premise, making reading the novel a letdown compared to reading about the novel. This letdown from admittedly high expectations comes from several things: (1) The prologue and first chapter are later in time than chapters 2 through 7 and, in essence, take the punch out of the punch line of the story; (2) The characters are too glib and facile and too unconflicted to be truly sympathetic; (3) There are too many plot conveniences and clearly non-credible occurrences, making the plot less believable than the premise, which has the effect of undercutting its message; and (4) The story rushes quite a bit at the end only to arrive at a quite lackluster conclusion. Yes, I know it's dark comedy and, therefore, non-realistic, but for dark comedy to have real zing and bite, there has to be enough credibility in the absurdity to scare you. While the premise/hook of this book has that, the machinations that make up the subsequent story arc seem a bit too silly and contrived to maintain the dark undertone. The result is a mildly entertaining book with a smattering of great bits, but not a great book. The overall story doesn't live up to the expectations created by the hype of the book's premise or marketing.Book Review: Great Topic for a Plot but I Don't Think Buckley Knew How to Finish it!
Summary: 3 Stars
The basic plot for Boomsday is a great idea and hats off to Christopher Buckley to be prepared to tackle this serious issue. One that's not just for America but any western country with a social security system and a declining birth rate. Currently in the news, we out here in Australia have the two opposing generation camps going at it as the old age pensioners complain they can't live on the, in their words only measly $280 a week government handout. Countering that argument are the younger generation (who won't even have a pension when they reach retirement age and are being forced to save part of their income in an untouchable until they get really old account known as Superannuation). The young generation point out that a lot of them don't even make $280 from paid employment and they will never be able to afford buy their own homes, whilst so the so called struggling retirees go home to their houses now worth at least three quarters of a million dollars that they paid less than a hundred grand for a few decades ago. So I eagerly looked forward to reading Boomsday just to see how Buckley's fictional generation representatives played this very relevant to today scenario out. I have to admit though, I was kind of disappointed.
Don't get wrong there are some great characters in here, none more so than Cassandra Devine a young girl whose dreams were cut short as her father gambled away her college fund on his dotcom business, so even though she got into Yale all she could hope for was that by serving in the military, they would pay her fees years down the track. Cassandra has an encounter with a dim witted politician in a minefield so is forced to take a spin doctor job in the real world. Obsessed with blogging she declares war on what she terms the "ungreatest generation" but who call themselves the babyboomers. She proposes a plan to give incentives for individuals from this generation to kill themselves and remove the burden that is them from society when they reach the age of seventy. What the story really missed though was some great eccentric old people like found in Dave Barry's Tricky Business. Most of the baby boomer characters such as the PR boss Terry and Senator Randolph Jepperson were on the youth viewpoint side. President Peacham although stupid didn't have any eccentric funny characteristics at all. The only babyboomer that did was TV priest Gideon Payne was too much of a loser for you to expect that side of the debate could win. The novel was lighter than other killing off old people novels such as P J Tracy's Live Bait. It did have a fair few funny moments in it but the main problem with Boomsday is that it doesn't have a satisfactory ending. The story is going along and then suddenly there's an epilogue. It's almost as if Buckley couldn't be bothered writing anymore or had no idea how his story was going to end. None of the important issues the book is about are resolved at all by the characters leaving the reader to wonder if the real world can do it all either.
If you like eccentric character fiction also check out authors Carl Hiaasen with his novels such as Stormy Weather. Bill Fitzhugh author of masterpieces such as Pest Control, author Christopher Moore, author of Lamb and other novels have all also mastered this genre.
Book Review: Great for anyone else, but average for the Great Christopher
Summary: 3 Stars
The White House Mess and Thank You for Smoking were so great that it would be hard to have to follow those up. I will read anything he puts out, but I found that I just didn't care for this as much. No big laughs, and the characters weren't as well fleshed out. He is still better than most, but read Mess and Thank You and you will thank me.