Alas, Everyone

A few days ago I came across a book I hadn't read for several decades, so I decided to give it another whirl. After all, any book you don't remember is a new book.

The novel was Alas, Babylon by Pat Frank, published in 1959 by J.B. Lippincott of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Although it is easy for us to look back almost sixty years later and snicker at how dated the writing is, the fact remains that it was one of the first novels to deal with the possibility of nuclear warfare and what that entails. Since then, numerous "end-of-life-as-we-know-it" books have hit the market, but with the recent posturing by Trump and Putin, the whole idea of nuclear holocaust has gotten closer to reality.

Maybe a good Christmas gift to the American president-elect and the Russian president-in-perpetuity would be a copy of Alas, Babylon, just to give them an idea of how important de-escalation is to the continuation of human civilization on planet Earth.