ONE SECOND AFTER DISCUSSION

Keeping in mind that this blog is a work-in-progress, and that we are still working out all the wrinkles, here is our post discussing our most recent book, ONE SECOND AFTER, by William Forstchen. 

Also, please note the poll on the right of the blog to allow you to vote on this book from a scale of   1-10 stars. Please participate in the poll by giving your star rating for the book. The poll closes on the the date of our next book club meeting, at which time we will post a new poll on that book. 

Summary: This book takes place in the present time, in a small North Carolina town in the Appalachian mountains (FYI, if you live in that particular region of the country, it is pronounced "App-uh-la-chun", not "App-uh-lay-shun"). But anyway, a quasi-local, retired military officer, widowed father of two girls lives in Black Mountain, NC and teaches history at the local college there. One day the entire town loses all forms of energy. Cars, appliances, phones don't work and electricity is all gone. They don't realize it until later, but the United States has been attacked by a nuclear bomb detonated several miles above Kansas. The resulting explosion caused an "electro-magnetic pulse" (EMP) which rendered all devices in the country completely inactive. The book goes on to describe how individuals in this small community react to this catastrophe in an effort to survive as individuals and as a community. How do the people of Black Mountain deal with the absence of food, law, medicine and protection??? Spoiler Alert: its not all rainbows and lollipops... 

Since that summary was probably way too wordy, I'll try to be brief from here on out. I think most of the group agreed that this book was indeed quite thought provoking by giving this disaster possibility. The U.S. definitely has people who hate us and would love to attack us with such a far reaching EMP. The author presented the idea that our country is not only very unprepared for such an attack, but also highly at risk to one. Personally, I don't think we are at such a high risk as the author, but I could agree we are not prepared for this type of attack. But I think when the nation's geniuses get together and figure out what we're most vulnerable to, this probably doesn't rank very high. I would guess its a very low probability event, with a very high destruction rate. There are probably many other threats with higher probabilities. 

So now some issues we had with the book. Maybe not everyone feels the same but it seemed to me like a general consensus, but we shall see if any comments come in cursing the low down dirty name of Baron and putting a thousand hexes on his grandchildren. One issue was the main character's role in the book. It seemed like his values and ethics were selectively utilized. For example, there were times in the book where he stopped some inhumane actions from happening because he didn't want himself and his community to become "less American" or primal or whatever fancy professor stuff he was spouting about. But he did some stuff that people might consider primal, inhumane or what we might refer to as "bad". But whatever. Another example is how he (or anyone else really) were deemed to be decision-makers on certain things (like food rations). Brief aside: so he pressured the pharmacist to give him a stash of insulin for his 12-year old diabetic daughter (which meant some other diabetics would die quite soon). But a parent probably won't judge him too much for that, except that he told the police chief to confiscate all the food and medicine in the town and ration it out equally. No exceptions... not until later at least. If that doesn't seem hypocritical enough for you, then how about this: two young men got caught stealing medicines from the nursing home to get high. The local authorities, who had declared martial law, decided that the two men needed to be shot and killed. (Caught me off guard for sure). So the main character (John) got nominated to shoot the guys for stealing medicine. But Hark! What's this? Wait just a second! That's strikingly similar to what  John did for his daughter. And of course, prior to shooting those dudes, John gave an eloquent speech about being noble, maintaining order, and above all, staying American.... Here's what I heard: "Blah, blah, blah, I'm a stinking hypocrite for saying one thing and doing the opposite, Go Me!" I'm not buying it. 

Another issue we discussed was the timeline of events. Some of us thought that maybe the timeline of the people's downfall into chaos and anarchy was a little too fast. People started losing "humanity" pretty quickly after the EMP. 

Sorry for the too long post. On the whole, I don't want to trash the book as crap, but there were some issues we/I had with it. But overall, there were some exciting parts and it kept my attention throughout. I did get attached to some of the characters and the writing was pretty good.

Please feel free to leave comments on your thoughts. And book club members have access to create their own posts so I encourage them to do that as well.

And vote on this book too!