Critics' Opinion:
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Published Jan 2012
320 pages
Genre: Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Speculative, Alt. History
Publication Information
He is the perfect presidential candidate. Conservatives love his hard-hitting Republican résumé. Liberals love his passion for peaceful diplomacy. The media can't get enough of his larger-than-life personality. Regular folks can identify with his larger-than-life physique. 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 U.S. president a hundred years ago. So what on earth is he doing alive and well and considering a running mate in 2012?
Jason Heller's extraordinary debut novel presents the Vonnegut-esque satire of a presidential Rip Van Winkle amid 21st-century media madness. It's the ultimate what-if scenario for the 2012 election season!
Paperback original
BookBrowse Review
"It is such an excellent and promising premise. Through unknown magical means, President William Howard Taft, who disappeared in 1912 on the day his successor was inaugurated, comes back to life and stumbles onto the White House lawn. He is thoroughly disgusted with politics, having been betrayed by his friend Teddy Roosevelt and roundly defeated by Wilson in his bid for a second term. But the Republicans need a strong candidate to oppose the current Democratic president, a popular and youthful black man. Against his will, Taft gets drafted to run, with his great-granddaugher Rachel, a U.S. representative, as his running mate.
I love the idea of dipping back into history for a solution to today's trouble, and Taft 2012, a kind of counterfactual of the present moment, holds much comic potential alongside its political analysis. But I'm sorry to report the book falls far short. Heller spends more time documenting Taft's unoriginal befuddlement at the modern world - cell phones, television cameras, molecular gastronomy - than he does noting the differences between the political landscapes of 1912 and 2012. He offers a shallow reading of the Progressive Era and an even more cartoonish version of today's moment as dominated by shadowy, nefarious industrialists who pull the strings behind the scenes. And there isn't a laugh in sight, unless we're meant to chuckle at the fact that Taft thinks of food before the state of the union at every moment. There's even - ugh - a love interest, his star-struck biographer. What should have been a quick and pleasurable read was, instead, a swift disappointment." - Amy Reading
Other Reviews
"Starred Review. Heller, a contributor to The A.V. Club, makes a stellar debut with his satirical alternate history." - Publishers Weekly
"This timely book will attract political junkies and readers who enjoy comic novels." - Library Journal
"Heller tells his imaginative story with tweets and TV transcripts as well as conventional expository prose, adding to the amusement of a cross-generational look at politics." - Booklist
This information about Taft 2012 was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Jason Heller is an American culture journalist whose work appears in The A.V. Club, Village Voice Media, Alternative Press, Tor.com, Weird Tales, and Quirk's 2011 release The Captain Jack Sparrow Handbook. Taft 2012 is his first novel. He lives in Denver. You can visit him online at www.jasonmheller.blogspot.com.
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