traces the FBI's secret involvement with three iconic figures at Berkeley during the 1960s: the ambitious neophyte politician Ronald Reagan, the fierce but fragile radical Mario Savio, and the liberal University of California president Clark Kerr.For The Daily Beast, Rosenfeld named his five favorite books on the surveillance state. One title on the list:
Super Sad True Love StoryRead about another book on the list.
by Gary Shteyngart
This chilling, satirical novel set in a not-too-distant future New York City follows the doomed romance between Lenny Abramov, who works for Post-Human Services selling Indeterminate Life Extension to High Net Worth Individuals, and Eunice Park, the beautiful younger woman who has just graduated with a degree in Images. Smartphones havemorphed into “apparats” with RateMe Plus that automatically transmit health, financial, and sexual-interest data to everyone’s else’s device; women wear transparent Onionskin jeans; Credit Poles along sidewalks flash passersby’s credit ratings and declare “America Celebrates Its Spenders”; corporate consolidation...; and the omnipresent American Restoration Authority demands that everyone deny the existence of its blatant security measures and imply their consent. Shteyngart exaggerates aspects of our current lives just enough to reveal our headlong rush to a world in which everyone has blithely accepted consumer technology, constant surveillance, and the loss of privacy.
Super Sad True Love Story appears on Charlie Jane Anders's lists of ten great science fiction novels, published since 2000, that raise huge, important questions and ten satirical novels that could teach you to survive the future, and Nicholas Carr's list of five notable books on the impact of the Information Age.
--Marshal Zeringue
Posts
