Nevermore: Life at the Bottom, Notes on a Foreign Country, St. Louie Drag, Confederados, Best Day Ever, Flashforward

Reported by Kristin

Nevermore kicked off with Life at the Bottom: The Worldview that Makes the Underclass by Theodore Dalrymple.  A prolific author, British psychiatrist Dalrymple examined patients in a slum hospital and drew conclusions that their ailments were perhaps caused by having no direction and responsibility for their own lives.  Our reader highly recommended the book, while noting that Dalrymple was not afraid to call out people and urge them to take charge of their own lives.

Next, Notes on a Foreign Country: An American Abroad in a Post-American World by Suzy Hansen was called insightful.  Journalist Hansen chose to move from New York City to Istanbul, Turkey in order to explore the Middle East.  Our reader noted that the United States involvement in the rest of the world is widespread with the government’s desire to stabilize or de-stabilize other governments.

Turning to fiction, another reader enjoyed St. Louie Slow Drag, a mystery by Jo Allison.  The series (which begins with The Good Old Summertime) is set in 1910 St. Louis, where Julia Nye works for the city police as a typist.  Suddenly she finds herself amid music and murder when she goes to a ragtime club in an African-American neighborhood.  Our reader said that once she got to the middle part, she almost couldn’t put it down.

The Confederados: Old South Immigrants in Brazil, edited by Cyrus B. Dawsey and James M. Dawsey is a collection of essays by respected scholars which cover the experiences of southern Confederates who left the United States after the Civil War and relocated to South America.  Many went to Brazil, and their descendants live there today.  Our reader was impressed by the narrative sections which told stories in the exiles’ own words.

Next up, Best Day Ever by Kaira Rouda shows the dark side of a marriage as a couple spends what is supposed to be a relaxing day out at their lake house.  Tension builds as the day goes on, and Mia begins to wonder exactly what Paul has planned for her.  Our reader said that this novel is about how perception varies, depending on who you are.  Also worthy of admiration, noted the Nevermore member, was that the book was written by a young female author who was able to clearly express the male point of view.

Lastly, Flashforward by Robert J. Sawyer portrays what might happen if all of humanity was exposed to a brief glimpse of the future, but then had to resume their everyday lives.  With the foresight of a very different future, people began making choices that they might otherwise not have made.  Our reader found this to be a very satisfying audiobook, as the miles slipped away.

Flashforward by Robert J. Sawyer

Reviewed by Kristin

Scientists Lloyd Simcoe and Theo Procopides hoped to prove the existence of the never-before-recorded Higgs Boson, a subatomic particle, using the Large Hadron Collider at CERN.  Using the largest blast of energy in history, the physicists press the button to begin the experiment and then—nothing.

Two minutes and seventeen minutes of nothing, to be precise.

At that exact moment, at 17:00 in Switzerland, every single person in the world blacked out for just over two minutes.  People fell down staircases; automobiles crashed; planes fell out of the sky.  Some people saw only emptiness, but most saw a vision in which they seemed to be observing themselves at some point in the future.  When the smoke cleared and notes were compared, the theory developed that the visions were of a time about twenty years in the future.  Somehow, something had caused the entire human consciousness to jump into the future, then back to the current day.  No one could definitively prove how that happened, but Lloyd and Theo had a strong suspicion that their experiment caused the time jump.

This phenomenon threw the entire world’s population into chaos.  Some people thought that those with no visions would be dead at that point in the future.  Those who found themselves in bed with an unknown person suddenly questioned their current relationships, or began to seek out the new person in their “destiny.”

Could the “flashforward” be recreated?  Should it be?  Could everyone on earth be warned in advance so that no one was in any danger of hurting themselves if they lost awareness again?

While listening to this book in the car during my daily commute I quickly became immersed in the predicament of the CERN scientists.  Who had the right to decide if the experiment should be repeated?  What unforeseen consequences might happen?  Did people have free will to change the future?  The fast moving story carried me along as Lloyd, Theo, Michiko, Doreen, Dimitrios, (and everyone else in the world) discovered their destinies.

I didn’t understand much of the particle physics, (don’t tell my physics professor husband!) but the good thing is that you don’t have to be a genius in order to understand this book.  If you can be satisfied that the scientists at CERN were planning to smash tiny little things together in a 27-kilometer underground circular tunnel in order to prove that some other tiny little things were hidden in there too, then you’ll be fine with the science in the book.  The author moves the story forward with strong characters and such a ridiculous premise—that we might be able to be temporarily propelled into the future—that I was intrigued.

Another interesting point is that this book was published in 1999, and the date of the “flashforward” was April 21, 2009, a date well in the future at that point.  The collective consciousness of the human race was jumped to 2030, a time that seemed much more futuristic in 1999 than it does now in 2017.  Ah, time passes.  It passes in the real world as well as in Sawyer’s fictional world.  What will our future hold?  Short of a time jump phenomenon, I guess we’ll just have to wait to find out.