![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
valarltdThe Snake Oil Wars or Scherezade Ginsberg Strikes Again by Parke Godwin
This book is dedicated
"To those lucid and courageous minds who gave you the Inquisition, the Salem witch trials, Falwell, Robertson and the God-inspired Rule of the Righteous. To those intrepid souls who fight with unflagging zeal to remove from libraries dangerous books they have not read and from theaters those spiritually toxic films they have not seen, believing that thought is a controlled substance and secular thinking hazardous to mental health."
Godwin is a brilliantly funny writer, and has a scarily vast sense of history.
In this post-life romp, lobbyist Lance Candor--Christian Reconstructionist who died saving the President from an assassination--hurls a bomb, upsetting both George Kaufmann and George Gershwin, and making Wagner roll his eyes. The resulting explosion has fallout throughout both post-life energy pools: Top Side and Below Stairs. Major historical figures of politics and religion and art wander through with only their own concerns, "personalities death had rendered more permanent than improved."
In the end, Marcus Aurelius sits on the bench as the whole face of Reconstructionism is brought forth and exposed in all its ugliness.
And anything that includes a 60's radical hippie chick coming on to a blue fertility goddess can't be all bad.
The prequel, Waiting for the Galactic Bus is also worth reading. It's set mostly Belowstairs, just as the sequel is set Topside.
I really should dig my copies out for a reread.
This book is dedicated
"To those lucid and courageous minds who gave you the Inquisition, the Salem witch trials, Falwell, Robertson and the God-inspired Rule of the Righteous. To those intrepid souls who fight with unflagging zeal to remove from libraries dangerous books they have not read and from theaters those spiritually toxic films they have not seen, believing that thought is a controlled substance and secular thinking hazardous to mental health."
Godwin is a brilliantly funny writer, and has a scarily vast sense of history.
In this post-life romp, lobbyist Lance Candor--Christian Reconstructionist who died saving the President from an assassination--hurls a bomb, upsetting both George Kaufmann and George Gershwin, and making Wagner roll his eyes. The resulting explosion has fallout throughout both post-life energy pools: Top Side and Below Stairs. Major historical figures of politics and religion and art wander through with only their own concerns, "personalities death had rendered more permanent than improved."
In the end, Marcus Aurelius sits on the bench as the whole face of Reconstructionism is brought forth and exposed in all its ugliness.
And anything that includes a 60's radical hippie chick coming on to a blue fertility goddess can't be all bad.
The prequel, Waiting for the Galactic Bus is also worth reading. It's set mostly Belowstairs, just as the sequel is set Topside.
I really should dig my copies out for a reread.
