Books Set in the North America: United States

ExUs, by Josephus IV (2014)

 

This is a cautionary tale of what could happen.  The book was written in 2014, but the events happened in the “future”, which was shortly after 2017.  The United States Congress enacted the Victims Law of 2017, which ostensibly gave an advantage to minorities.  Its impact, however, largely targeted Jews.  As more and more restrictions were placed on American Jews, they found themselves without jobs, property and the ability to travel.  Technology had advanced so that a mere pinprick could determine one’s ethnic status.  People who never knew they were Jewish but had one Jewish grandparent were suddenly ostracized.

 

The novel is narrated by a young computer hacker.  He was offered a job sponsored by the NSA that was designed to build security walls within that agency.  He was given high clearance, so was also able to view extensive files, where he realized that the government was backing an Exodus of Jews from the United States.

 

This is a very fast read, but has a lot of food for thought.

 

Read: January 27, 2021

 

4 Stars

 

Books Set in North America, Europe and Asia

Edge of Eternity, by Ken Follett (2014)

This novel is the third book in Ken Follett’s The Century Trilogy.  The first two books are Fall of Giants and Winter of the World.  The trilogy follows the generations of 5 families, whose lives are all intertwined, spanning from the early years of the 1900s through the century.  The first book, Fall of Giants, focused on the Russian Revolution and World War II. Winter of the World focused on World War II.  This final book covered a host of social issues beginning with the Cuban missile crisis, the erection of the Berlin Wall and the American Civil Rights marches and ending with the election of Barack Obama.

We meet the later generations of the families from the first two books in the series in this novel.  We experience the Cold War through the eyes of the Franck family who lived in Berlin until almost overnight it became East Berlin.  Families were split – some members free to travel about in the West while other members stuck under the regime of the Stasi in East Berlin.  The novel takes us through to the fall of Communism of the1950s to its collapse in the late 1980s.

The twin sibling in the Russian Dvorkin are close but are on opposite sides of the political structure.  Dmitri gets a job as an aide to Khrushchev, while his sister, Tanya, writes for TASS, but sneaks the dissident writings of a political prisoner to the free world for publication (reminiscent of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn).

We experience the Civil Rights Freedom rides through the idealized eyes of young George Jakes, a young man with a black mother and white political father.  He later becomes an aide to Bobby Kennedy and watches the progression of the enactment of Civil Rights laws.

We move on to the music and drug scene in San Francisco in the mid-1960s.  We experience Vietnam through the experiences of a young naturalized citizen.  The characters in the families grow from idealized young people out to change the world into harden by life with some of their dreams realized, while others are left behind.  Nixon becomes President, then we see the cause of his downfall.

The original families depicted in the first book are the same throughout the series, one need not have read the first two books to appreciate this one.  This novel is cram filled with historical events and facts.  It is well researched and provides on of the best explanation of the Bay of Pigs and Cuban missile crisis that I have read.

The book is long (nearly 1100 pages), but it is a page-turner.  It kept my attention even though I knew the outcome of the historical events described in the book.  I greatly enjoyed this novel and felt I got to know most of the characters in the families living through these momentous events.

Read:  March 24, 2020

5 Stars

The Century Trilogy:

     Fall of Giants; Book I (Read: August 3, 2011)

     Winter of the World; Book II (Read: March 17, 2015)

     Edge of Eternity; Book III (Read: March 24, 2020)