The X President
A Novel
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4.5 • 2 Ratings
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- $5.99
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- $5.99
Publisher Description
A masterful blend of political satire and edgy social commentary, here is a wildly entertaining trip through recent American history and into the impending future. An incisive look at how we love and hate our political leaders, and how they love and hate us back, The X President touches the very heart of what it means to be president—and what a president means to America.
It is the year 2055 and America is entangled in a devastating world war—and losing badly. As the threat of homeland invasion grows stronger, the United States is desperate to change the tide, anyway it can.
Enter Sal Hayden, official biographer of a former president known as BC, now 109 years old and all but forgotten. Charismatic, controversial, and always willing to feel another person’s pain, BC’s political career, like his personal life, is marked by both uncanny triumphs and key blunders—some of which may have doomed the U.S. to defeat. Recording his story has not always been easy, but it has been straightforward. That is, until the day Sal is asked to rewrite it—and not just on the page. For Sal will be granted a biographer’s most fantastic dream, one that will thrust her into the greatest moral dilemma of her life—and the world’s most daring, dangerous, and spectacular spin job. . . .
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In Baruth's (The Dream of the White Village; The Millennium Shows) imaginative novel, the year is 2055, and Bill Clinton still hearty at 109 and referred to here as BC has screwed everything up. As a result of two independent and reasonable actions in BC's presidency expanding NATO and encouraging the (fictitious) Anti-Tobacco accord, which pushed Big Tobacco into foreign markets the world has been thrust into the brutal, endless Cigarette Wars. Terrorist bombings are a matter of course, as is constant and invasive government surveillance; everywhere there's a sense of impending doom. BC, whose life has been prolonged by biotechnology, has not been treated kindly by history, and so he recruits loner Sal Hayden to write his definitive biography. Enter "James" (for Carville), "George" (for Stephanopoulos) and "Virginia," code-named members of the National Security Council, who have a much grander plan for historical revisionism. Kidnapping Sal, the group travels to 1963 and then to 1995, beginning a series of maneuvers to rewrite history. The mission is not without its snags, Sal's occasionally abrasive personality being one, and the weirdness of it all a teenaged BC ("yBC") being seduced by an NSC operative and slowly being manipulated into changing the future BC's decisions makes for page-turning reading. Baruth's facility for leaking and withholding information helps sustain interest, although the story is almost too neat at times. A disappointingly vague ending mars this interesting blend of satire and sci-fi.
