2023 Archives

A novel written 136 years ago is as brilliant and compulsively readable as it was when Grover Cleveland was president... In this Sunday excerpt space, in addition to publishing chapters of my own books, I occasionally slip in a review of someone else’s book. This one is particularly well worth reading! Ralph Nader told me about this novel, first published in 1888, and how it was one of the major inspirations for the Progressive movement of the late 19th century. It positively inspired Bernie Sanders’ hero Eugene Debs, for example, Nader told me. At the time, I was also reading Dan Brown’s book, ”The Lost Symbol,” an excellent novel in the classic, formula-adventure-fiction of this century that’s so much fun to read. But once I started reading Bellamy’s book, I had to suspend Brown’s: Bellamy’s book totally captured me, even though it was written more than 100 years ago. The plot device of Bellamy’s novel is that the hero is “Mesmerized” — hypnotized — and the trance is so deep that he wakes up in the year 2000, his bodily functions having been so dramatically slowed that he’s still a young man in his twenties and in fine physical health (albeit a bit hungry and weak).