Taft 2012
A Novel
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
HE'S BACK.
AND HE'S THE BIGGEST THING IN POLITICS.
He is the perfect presidential candidate. Conservatives love his hard-hitting Republican résumé. Liberals love his peaceful, progressive practicality. The media can’t get enough of his larger-than-life personality. And all the American people love that he’s an honest, hard-working man who tells it like it is.
There’s just one problem. He is William Howard Taft . . . and he was already president a hundred years ago. So what on earth is he doing alive and well and considering a running mate in 2012?
A most extraordinary satire, Jason Heller’s debut novel follows the strange new life of a presidential Rip Van Winkle: a man who never even wanted the White House in the first place, yet finds himself hurtling toward it once more—this time, through the media-fueled madness of 21st-century America.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Heller, a contributor to The A.V. Club, makes a stellar debut with his satirical alternate history. The premise is audacious: President William Howard Taft disappears on the day his successor, Woodrow Wilson, is to be inaugurated in 1913, and he inexplicably shows up on the White House lawn almost a century later. After scientists and scholars confirm his identity, he begins the daunting process of understanding a radically different America, which, for all its technological advances, desperately needs direction. This surprisingly poig-nant novel will find an eager audience in the months leading up to the 2012 presidential election, but it deserves a longer shelf life. Heller's numerous historical insights and observations regarding Taft as president, husband, American, and human being will have more than a few readers wishing Taft really could be a third-party candidate in 2012, to be a rational voice in the "din of all this twenty-first century madness."
