- Hardcover: 128 pages
- Publisher: Knopf (Aug 10 2004)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 1400044006
- ISBN-13: 978-1400044009
- Product Dimensions: 19.3 x 13 x 1.8 cm
- Shipping Weight: 227 g
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: #1,073,993 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
|
||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||
| ||||||||||||||||||
Product Details |
Product Description
From Booklist
Jay and Ben are old friends who haven't seen each other in a few years. A former teacher who has fallen on hard times, Jay is very, very upset about the war in Iraq. He has expressed his objections by marching in an antiwar demonstration in the nation's capital, but the protest has had no effect. Now Jay has asked Ben, a writer currently working on a book about the cold war, to bring a tape recorder to a Washington, D.C., hotel room because Jay wants to talk about his decision to assassinate the president. Nervous and incredulous, Ben anxiously debates with his keyed-up buddy. He is also deeply distressed by the atrocities in Iraq and the immoral covert actions of Bush and Cheney and their cohorts, but he knows that murder is not the answer. Once again the chimerical and fearless Baker has written a work of provocative and razor-sharp fiction, this time crafting a nail-biting duet for two voices under duress that incisively charts the emotional turmoil generated by the horrors and conundrums of war, terrorism, dirty politics, and repression. Place this beside Barry Lopez's searing short-story collection Resistance [BKL My 1 04] and Philip Roth's towering novel The Plot against America [BKL Ag 04], and you have a triptych of lacerating works of the imagination that insightfully and cathartically confront the urgent issues of the day. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Review
"Compelling . . . a passionate cry from the heart." --USA Today
“A ripped-from-the-headlines docudrama for the printed page, a timely and tense screed for a divided country hurtling toward who knows where.” --Associated Press
"Checkpoint is about limits - of presidential power, of law, of discourse, of rationality, and of language itself." --Boston Phoenix
"Sly, slender but important . . . Baker excels at writing about those facets of the human experience we prefer to hide." --David Kipen, San Francisco Chronicle
"This novel could be a kind of record of our times. . . . Its goal is to take [the] internal combustion process of hatred and anger and make it visible--which Baker does brilliantly." --Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
"Baker's new novel checks its inhibitions at the door . . . entertaining, edgy and unpredictable." --Las Vegas City Life
“If one of our supreme chroniclers of mild manners can be roused to such patriotic indignation, democracy yet has a fighting chance.” --LA Weekly
"On the whole, Baker improves upon Samuel Beckett's [Godot]. Baker's jokes will make people, rather than theatre majors, laugh." --P. J. O'Rourke, Los Angeles Times
"An astonishing, uncomfortable conversation. Baker has a real ear for the cadence and wryness of the modern intelligentsia." --Portland Oregonian
“Checkpoint is like a hornet: It’s small, quiet, with a sinister aspect to its midday peregrinations, and it has a stinger: conscience.” --Toronto Globe and Mail
"High humor, ghastly seriousness." Kirkus (starred review)
“A ripped-from-the-headlines docudrama for the printed page, a timely and tense screed for a divided country hurtling toward who knows where.” --Associated Press
"Checkpoint is about limits - of presidential power, of law, of discourse, of rationality, and of language itself." --Boston Phoenix
"Sly, slender but important . . . Baker excels at writing about those facets of the human experience we prefer to hide." --David Kipen, San Francisco Chronicle
"This novel could be a kind of record of our times. . . . Its goal is to take [the] internal combustion process of hatred and anger and make it visible--which Baker does brilliantly." --Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
"Baker's new novel checks its inhibitions at the door . . . entertaining, edgy and unpredictable." --Las Vegas City Life
“If one of our supreme chroniclers of mild manners can be roused to such patriotic indignation, democracy yet has a fighting chance.” --LA Weekly
"On the whole, Baker improves upon Samuel Beckett's [Godot]. Baker's jokes will make people, rather than theatre majors, laugh." --P. J. O'Rourke, Los Angeles Times
"An astonishing, uncomfortable conversation. Baker has a real ear for the cadence and wryness of the modern intelligentsia." --Portland Oregonian
“Checkpoint is like a hornet: It’s small, quiet, with a sinister aspect to its midday peregrinations, and it has a stinger: conscience.” --Toronto Globe and Mail
"High humor, ghastly seriousness." Kirkus (starred review)
Inside This Book
(Learn More)
Browse and search another edition of this book.
Browse and search another edition of this book.
Tag this product(What's this?)Think of a tag as a keyword or label you consider is strongly related to this product.
Tags will help all customers organize and find favorite items. |
Customer Reviews
|
There are no customer reviews yet on Amazon.ca
|
||||||||||||||||||||
|
Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta)
Amazon.com:
3.0 out of 5 stars (46 customer reviews)
17 of 20 people found the following review helpful
4.0 out of 5 stars
ASSASSINATING ASSES, AND OTHER SUBPLOTS, Oct 10 2004
By Shashank Tripathi - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: Checkpoint (Hardcover)
First off, some reviewers on this site fault Baker for trifling the otherwise formalized cottage industry of Bush-slandering with something as puffy as an assassination. Anyone who has read the novel until its denouement will know that this is simply incorrect. The script never equates legitimate anger at the duplicity and dishonesty of the Bush administration with assassination, the whole "plot" of our crazed protagonist is meant to come across as silly as our second character so laboriously keeps grinding at.That cleared, this scamming little novella may not sport the sparkling prose of a typical Baker tome but it offers a delectable flavour in its own right.
The text is in its entirety a dinner-table conversation between two friends, one a fanatic opponent of Bush's invasion of Iraq and thus contemplating killing the president with a giant rolling ball (and other contraptions like it, let's not dwell on trivia that're to be savoured in Baker's customary bizzare prose), and the other a wiser, more balanced sort attempting to dissuade his friend with murderous tendencies.
With this scaffolding, Baker presents not only some very interesting trivia such as an updated version of Napalm being allegedly employed in Iraq despite all claims to the contrary (apparently because the formula is technically different; more lethal now) but also some very opinionated insights into the heart of the matter.
Barring the somewhat twisted inference that our assassin-wannabe draws from his indignations, or the odd out-of-place rant on evils of abortion and such, this is quite a clever little conversation that shouldn't take more than a couple of hours to devour from cover to cover.
I'd recommend it in a blink.
16 of 19 people found the following review helpful
4.0 out of 5 stars
Makes Your Blood Boil, Sep 21 2004
By Lukas Jackson - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: Checkpoint (Hardcover)
I suppose it's a sign of the times that I feel strange checking this book out of the library, what with the Patriot Act, and now writing a review on Amazon.com. Hell, if the F.B.I. kept a file on Ernest Hemingway, they certainly have one on Nicholson Baker after this brave book.The novel is written as a transcript of a taped conversation between two friends, Ben and Jay. The book's a quick read at just a little over 100 pages and can be devoured in a few hours. The intense conversation captures Jay's rage at Bush and his bloody crusades in Iraq, and while Ben empathizes, he is the voice of reason trying to keep Jay under control. Jay rails about the mutilated Iraqi children, Bush and friends' shameless self-enrichment while others suffer, etc. Ben, who appears to be more interested in history than the present, tries to get Jay interested in photography, and tells him that he has to concentrate on the beautiful trees, not the metaphorical gnats swarming around him.
If you're at the library or bookstore, do yourself a favor and breeze through this book. Anyone should be able to feel an echo or twinge of Jay's rage when he depicts the gross aggression and hypocrisy of this Administration. While the reader probably won't agree with the entirety of what Jay says, the dialogue is powerful and affecting.
This book will be even more grimly relevant if Dubya manages somehow to win the upcoming election. The neocons are itching for more war and the silver-spoon simian is happy to appease them. We are a few small steps from reinstatement of the draft and other morbid reminders of Vietnam. If this happens, I am sure the streets will be filled with Jays.
8 of 9 people found the following review helpful
4.0 out of 5 stars
Not a political book, Aug 27 2005
By P. Vogel "Peter Vogel" - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: Checkpoint (Hardcover)
I think that people who try to take the political content of this book seriously are missing the point. The point of the book, like any good novel, is not in scoring political points but exploring the lives of the people involved in the novel. Because the political point of view of the two protagonists is contemporary, it's hard not to react to the political statements being made. Not surprisingly, then, many reviewers have considered the book as a political tract and have commented on how valid the political analysis is (maybe it helps to be Canadian).But that's not the point: The point is seeing two people living in the United States in 2002/2003. While the protagonists do, occasionaly, make points that real political commentators make, they also make absolutely loony points. Like a David Mamet or Harold Pinter play, the pleasure in this book is the dialog (the book is all dialog), the characters, and their relationship.
When reading this book it might be worthwhile to take the long view: Assume that the protagonists are living in the time of Louis XIV and are considering assissinating the king. In that frame of mind, you wouldn't care about the politics and would only interested in the people. On that basis, I enjoyed the book. What is impressive to me is how much the author reveals about the characters and their values through the incidentals of the character's conversation. We see two people who really have given up on any hope of influencing their country's direction (or even the direction of their own lives) and who can not tell the difference between fact and supposition. They have come to the point where the only difference they believe that they can make in the public sphere is through some spasmodic dramatic action.
Listmania!
Look for similar items by category
Look for similar items by subject
Feedback
Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?
|
