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Critics' Opinion:
Readers' Opinion:
First Published:
Apr 1999, 300 pages
Paperback:
Feb 2000, 320 pages
A millennial comedy of manners about aliens and pundits . . . and how much they have in common.
In 1994, Christopher Buckley published one of the most acclaimed and successful comic novels of the decade, Thank You for Smoking. Now Buckley returns to the strange land of Washington, D.C., in Little Green Men, a millennial comedy of manners about aliens and pundits . . . and how much they have in common.
The reluctant hero of this hilarious novel is John Oliver Banion, a stuffy Washington talk-show host, whose privileged life is thrown into upheaval when aliens abduct him from his exclusive country-club golf course.
But were his gray-skinned captors aliens . . . or something far more sinister? After Banion is abducted again--this time in Palm Springs--he believes he has been chosen by the extraterrestrials to champion the most important cause of the millennium, and he embarks on a crusade, appearing before a convention of UFO believers and demanding that Congress and the White House seriously investigate UFOs. His friends and family suspect that Banion is having some kind of manic-depressive midlife crisis and urge him to seek therapy before his credibility as a pillar of the punditocracy is ruined.
So John Oliver Banion must choose: keep his establishment status or become the leader of millions of impassioned and somewhat scruffy new friends who want to expose the government's secret alien agenda.
Little Green Men proves once and for all that the truth is out there. Way out there. And it reaffirms Christopher Buckley's status as the funniest humanoid writer in the universe.
"Ten seconds."
John O. Banion stared unblinkingly into the TV camera's cyclops eye, keeping his famous cool under the baking glare of the Videssence lights. It pleased him that he was more at ease than the person seated opposite him, who as it happened was the most powerful man in the world.
"Five seconds." The technician counted down with an outstretched hand. With his huge headset, he could have been a crewman on an aircraft carrier signaling for the launch of an F-14.
"Three, two . . ."
The theme music was cued, a variation on a Handel trumpet voluntary with echoes of Aaron Copland. The TV critic for The Washington Post had called it "Fanfare for the Self-Important Man." Still, nothing like a few bars of brass to get the Establishment's hemoglobin pumping on Sunday mornings as it sipped its third cup of coffee and scanned the newspapers for mentions of itself.
"Sunday . . ."
A satisfying opener, implying, as it did ownership of the entire day, and the Sabbath at ...
Joseph Heller
Little Green Men is a delicious, ingenious treat. Christopher Buckley is an author of many talents, with a range of abilities that includes a penetrating comic intelligence and a deft flair for storytelling that makes this novel a truly joyous page-turner.
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At times, our own light goes out, and is rekindled by a spark from another person.
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