Frank was an unabashed optimist …
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“I don’t think that it’s helpful to get into a Twitter shouting match with a 32-year-old dictator."
This unpredictable madman, sitting on nuclear weapons, is an existential threat to America.
He’s a tin-horn despot with a monstrous ego, joke hair, and the maturity of a toddler.
Kim Jong Un, too.
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Trump to Castro: "My Twitter posts aren’t supposed to be ‘helpful’. They’re supposed to give Me the win.
And you might want to learn some Spanish before I send you home to the land of your ancestors, Fidel" 
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The Sixth Extinction already depressed me enough.
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I remember when the book was published and just read the Wiki summary…ill-fated and ignorant humans introduced invasive species that harmed the unintended new environments.
I think we all see examples of this in our localities.
Post Trump even these will have three arms.
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Trump is convinced that he is never wrong
and genuinely lacks the intellectual capacity to recognize when his actions are lees than optimal.
and he has surrounded himself with enough sycophants so he can selectively hear the smack of lips pursed against his ass - and can turn a deaf ear to what he does not want to hear. There might be 3-4 brave intelligent minds in the cabinet who might join together and pronounce Trump unfit - but the truly unfortunate truth is that there are 5-6 ardent dim-witted / opportunistic tools in the cabinet who will believe that it is to their advantage to retain this vapid witless blowhard in office
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Wuz wrong with that? 
First time Blunt’s got something right in years.
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Until now I thought we had lived through the MAD threat.
Alas, Babylon.
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Or at least seen its likelihood recede to where it wasn’t near the top of the list. I guess everything old is new again, the hemline of hyperaggressive species-destroying insanity has risen once more, but relax, Mattis’ll take care of it, NOBODY IS THAT CRAZY etc. etc. etc. Oh, and what ever happened to “Give him a chance”? That one came and went real fast back in the winter.
And speaking of that crazy thing. I can’t help remembering the warnings that it wouldn’t be a crazy person going YAHOOOOOO it would be posturing and brinksmanship that led to an oopsie mistake like anybody could make because what am I Mr. Perfect? Like in the Cuban Missile Crisis, or in '83 when the missiles almost flew again, you know, the times we were lucky.
Sorry. Really honestly trying not to think about this. Serenity prayer and all that.
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Wouldn’t it be nice if we had a president who could be useful in developing strategy and responses in this kind of contretemps, instead of a president everyone thinks is so emotionally unstable and intellectually bereft that his participation can only make the situation worse?
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Just submitted an interlibrary loan request. Thx.
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Hope you like it. It’s one of those funny well-loved sleeper novels by a guy who was never a superstar but pulled it all together once to create a hell of a good book.
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Great, great book-but I read it 30 years ago while in the throes of a deep depression and it almost did me in. And yes, I realize P.G. Wodehouse might have been a better reading choice at the time.
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Looks like there’s a sequel too - Saint Leibowitz and the Wild Horse Woman. Not in common circulation, though. My local library didn’t have it. Looking forward to it.
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Why of course they will. Remember…a lot of folks have a memory span of about 20 minutes…a day max. We could go from a shouting duel to launching missiles with the war over and done on a Tuesday and it would be very old news by Thursday. We would have moved on to trump’s next tweeter rant by Wednesday.
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If you find it, please give a heads up if it’s good.
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Will do.
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I would not recommend it in that situation. 
Except maybe you’d agree it’s not a book that says OMG nuclear war is bad and should be avoided and would suck. It’s more a haunting meditation on the interplay between humanity’s aspirations and its destructive follies. Jonathan Schell’s “The Fate of the Earth” was the former type book and I barely got through it and never picked it up again. I’m already against nuclear war. But Canticle, that’s one of those things that’s a pleasure to read and think about—disturbing, but still a pleasure.
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I always enjoy well-written dystopian novels about the foibles and resilience of the human spirit. In a weird way, I find it optimistic.
Among my most favorite dystopian novelists is Margaret Atwood, crowned by the MaddAddam series. Darkly hilarious, but entirely predictable how people will behave when technology goes bad.
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Ever read The Good Soldier Schweik? Might be your kind of thing. Very funny. Nice window into life in Austria-Hungary during the war too. I’ve always had a fondness for the Czechs. Have to go there some time.