Volume 56, Number 17 · November 5, 2009
The Way Forward
By Diane Johnson
The Year of the Flood
by Margaret Atwood
Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, 434 pp., $26.95
Sarah Palin, the former governor of Alaska, announced on her Facebook page that she didn't want the lives of her elderly parents or her Down syndrome infant to be judged before Barack Obama's 'death panel.' It may be that Palin has been reading the works of Margaret Atwood, the distinguished Canadian writer, northerners alike in their mistrust of the Lower Forty-Eight. Palin's conception of health care reform might come from any of Atwood's chilling dystopias, most recently The Year of the Flood, a continuation of her 2003 novel Oryx and Crake, a postapocalyptic tale about the end days of a totalitarian, corporation-run America, collapsing after a laboratory-engineered virus has begun to kill almost everyone on earth.
Review, 3542 words
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